Archive for the ‘Lead Nurturing’ Category

4Cs of B2B Marketing: Campaign, Customer, Channel, Content

Monday, November 1st, 2010

When I originally had the idea to write this post,  I decided to focus on our new marketing automation platform release and how the menu system had changed. I soon realized that the real story was not product-specific, but the underlying reason for the change; To align a menu system with how business-leaders today think about online marketing and sales.

the 4Cs of B2B marketing

So how is it that today’s B2B Marketing professionals think? Enter the 4Cs:

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The Loopfuse Exchange: Sales & Marketing Best Practices

Monday, October 4th, 2010

With the highly successful launch of our Loopfuse Freeview offering in June and our innovative Partnership program in August, we have had several requests to share information amongst our community.  So today, I would like to informally introduce the Loopfuse Exchange.  The goal for the Loopfuse Exchange is to share the best practices from some of the best sales and marketing professionals in the business who give their companies a competitive edge.  The Loopfuse Exchange will be the place to visit for the most up to date sales and marketing best practices, and central to the Exchange will be a series of articles on various marketing functions — contributed by Loopfuse customers, partners and friends — that will help new and experienced marketers alike increase their effectiveness generating market awareness and demand. Topics will include Website construction and design, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Lead Nurturing and Scoring, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay per click (PPC) advertising, Social Media and Networking, E-mail marketing, Event marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Reporting and more.

Later this afternoon, we will have our first guest blog post for the Loopfuse Exchange by one of our partners, Greg Malpass of Traction Sales and Marketing.  Stay tuned for more exciting information on the Loopfuse Exchange.

Webinar: CRM Integration – Exploring the flexibility of options available

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Thursday, September 30th, 2010 2:00PM EST

Join us for the second installment of our new webinar series “Light the
Fuse.” This series is intended to provide you, the LoopFuse user, valuable
tips and tricks on how to use LoopFuse OneView to grow your business.

Learn about the different options available when integrating your CRM with
LoopFuse from Tom Elrod, co-founder of LoopFuse. He will walk you through
the CRM integration process, start to finish, and give you tips along the
way on how to use LoopFuse more effectively.

How will this help grow my business?

By integrating your sales and marketing tools together you have taken the
first step in closing the loop between marketing and sales. You can give
your sales team visibility into the hottest leads by providing lead
activity and scoring right in your CRM.

You will learn how to:

  • Configure your CRM and the different options available
  • Create the CRM interaction rules best suited for your business
  • Send real-time activity inserts to your CRM
  • Set up lead nurturing flows to specify what lead information is synchronized with your CRM

Click here to register for the webinar.

Get Fused!

Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide to Lead Nurturing

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Lead Nurturing is the corner-stone of today’s marketing automation and automated email marketing processes. With it, marketers are able to lower their costs of new customer acquisition, build interest and awareness for their product and services, and help retain existing customers; all in an automated fashion requiring little effort from marketing staff.

Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should research and accumulate knowledge on successful lead nurturing programs, and more importantly, what types of lead nurturing programs they plan to implement. Of all features found today in marketing automation systems, it is important to note that with lead nurturing you should choose the system that is right for you and not simply buy the prettiest, cheapest, or what-the-consultant-tells-you. Implementing a Lead Nurturing program is a serious undertaking that seldom get right the first time. A system that can grow with you and can produce measurable and refinable results will suit you best in the long-run.

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Nurturing your prospects with automated leadflows

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Marketing automation tools are very cool. Instead of purchasing 4 or 5 different products to run your marketing programs you only need one – that is pretty powerful. What is even cooler is that LoopFuse is giving someone all this functionality for FREE. I know, where am I going with this – I am supposed to be showing you different use cases, right. I am just setting up the scenario. With the announcement of FreeView we are getting a huge influx of signups. As a software vendor, giving away something for free definitely drives the traffic – we knew this from our previous offering of a free trial. With such a high volume of leads coming in – we needed to build a leadflow that would nurture these leads throughout the “getting started” process.
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Webinar: “Search and Rescue” for your lead database: How to find lost leads and turn them into opportunities

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Live Webinar: Wednesday August 4th, 2010, 11am PDT/ 2pm EDT

Where did all our webinar leads go? Did any of the 250 whitepaper downloads turn into sales opportunities? Did we get our money’s worth when we paid $40 per lead in a lead gen program? This 45-minute webinar will teach you how to save those leads and turn them into revenue for your company.

You will learn how to:

•    Create workflows so no lead is left behind
•    Improve your data quality by segmentation and nurturing
•    Nurture your leads with relevant information
•    Convert qualified prospects into paying customers

Join us and get useful tips on how to help save your drowning leads and bring them to the surface so you can start generating revenue NOW! Jep Castelein of LeadSloth, a long-time marketer and thought leader in the area of lead management and marketing automation, will demonstrate the simplicity by which you can automatically start to better nurture and qualify your leads today.

RECORDING AVAILABLE: if you can’t make it, you can still register so you’ll receive the recording afterwards

Click here to register for the webinar.

Freemium and OpenSource Funnels

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

In my last blogpost titled “Why Free? Why Now?” I provided some background on the impetus and the reasoning behind LoopFuse’s move to provide a free marketing automation offering. It has been only three weeks since our launch of FreeView, but the response has already been overwhelming. One of the most interesting changes that comes with a move into a freemium model is the shape of the funnel. Over the past several years I’ve studied the funnels of dozens of companies and I’ve noticed that those companies based on freemium models (including opensource) show some very distinctive and interesting patterns.

The Mouth of the Funnel

The first distinctive feature of a freemium-based funnel is obviously that the funnel’s mouth becomes extremely large. Providing anything of significant value for free will attract a large number of people. The number of people attracted is directly related to the amount of value provided for free and inversely related to the “friction” in obtaining that value. For example, when Ben and Jerry’s offers a free ice-cream cone a line will form. But as the line grows the “friction” to obtain the free ice-cream becomes a disincentive for people who realize that waiting an hour in line for a $3 cone may not be worth the effort. However, if the free item were an iPhone instead of an ice-cream cone then the length of the line would naturally extend much farther as people weighed the value of their time against the inconvenience.


Freemium companies must not only ensure that their free offering provides significant value, but also that the “friction” required to obtain that value is minimized. For example what information must the prospect divulge about him/herself and/or his/her organization to access the free offering? What setup and configuration tasks must be completed? How aggressive is the push to migrate from the free offering to the paid upgrade? The value of the free offering minus the total friction required to obtain that value will directly drive the relative size of the earliest stages of the funnel.   Of course, in order for people to consider a free offering they must be aware of it. While word-of-mouth is a key component of the freemium marketing strategy, there is still a very important role for traditional marketing to drive awareness.

Behavior-Driven Funnel Definition

The second distinctive feature of a freemium-based funnel is the segmentation of the funnel based on behavior. Traditionally the progression of a lead through the segments of the funnel has been based on external indicators such as registration, download of collateral, participation in webinars, product trial download, contacting sales for assistance, etc.  However, due to the volume of leads being managed inside the funnel, a freemium model must provide a hyper-efficient means of measuring the progression of a lead towards purchase and must maintain a level of accuracy in that measurement to ensure that we are not overwhelming the sales team with unqualified leads. Therefore, the segments of the funnel may need to become more specialized based on data being collected directly from the usage statistics of the free offering. For example, in our own funnel, LoopFuse knows exactly how many users, leads, forms, lists, nurturing programs, reports, and campaigns are in use by every single FreeView user. These statistics are key criteria for the promotion of a lead inside of our own funnel segments. This type of integration is usually much easier with SaaS freemium models than with pure opensource models because the usage statistics are more readily available.

The Patient Sales Model

The third distinctive feature of a freemium-based funnel is the lack of momentum in the early stages of the funnel. In a former life I worked at an opensource company and we used to discuss the concept of the “patient sales model”. The concept was based on our observations that it often took YEARS before a free user was ready to purchase a premium upgrade. A user would download the software, become familiar with it’s capabilities and limitations, and it would become part of his/her default toolkit. At some point in the future he/she would pull out that software and would run into a limitation that could only be overcome by upgrading into a premium version. At this point the value proposition is clear to the purchaser, the friction of adoption is zero, and the prospect is usually ready to pay for the value they are receiving. However, there is no magic formula that will predict when this circumstance will present itself. Freemium models front-load the funnel with lots of users on the basis that eventually they will run into this situation.  Also, traditional metrics such as days-to-close can become misleading in freemium models unless you start the clock at the point of opportunity creation rather than lead creation.

While the LoopFuse freemium offering (FreeView) is only a few weeks old, we can already see the momentum impact at the front of the funnel. We have already revised our internal funnel segmentation to better utilize the FreeView behavioral data to more accurately identify those prospects who are gaining the most value and are therefore more likely to pay. I am fascinated by the funnels of freemium and opensource companies and look forward to watching the evolution of our own funnel and the subtle patterns and idiosynchrasies we identify along the way. For a great in depth article on the “Fundamentals of a Volume Market Engine” I highly recommend reading Fred Holahan’s article on OpenSource Business Resource.