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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Posts Tagged ‘LoopFuse’
Nurturing your prospects with automated leadflows
Friday, August 13th, 2010Tracking the Effectiveness of your Banner Ads
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010I am only a few months into my new job here at LoopFuse, heading up their marketing team, and it has been full steam ahead with the exciting announcement of FreeView, the first and only free marketing automation solution. Being a previous user and advocate of LoopFuse, I found it easy to jump in feet first and start developing new marketing programs utilizing our own tool to create and track their successes.
As I continue to ramp up the marketing efforts here I wanted to share my experiences with everyone. Personally, I relate better to a product when I understand how I can use it to make my job easier on a daily basis. I am a marketing user just like you and I am going to discuss real-life use cases for using marketing automation in this post and future posts.
One of my first projects was to manage the launch of our new website and the messaging around it. The homepage was getting a makeover and one of the biggest changes was the addition of some scrolling banners. We wanted to get our audience’s attention with graphics that popped and content that was simple and to the point. Today we have four rotating banners.
The Value in Free Marketing Automation
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010Last week marked a dramatic turning-point for us at LoopFuse and the general Marketing Automation sector, with the unveiling of our Free Marketing Automation offering, FreeView. The release of FreeView and a new low-cost, zero-risk pricing model, marks an almost year’s-worth of work in planning and infrastructure investment geared to accelerate the adoption of Marketing Automation.
The Value to Marketers
While most in the industry often reference a Forrester report claiming 5% penetration in the Marketing Automation sector, the unusual thing is that no one seems to wonder (publicly) why the rate of growth isn’t much higher given the value Marketing Automation provides.
So allow me to rain on the price-gouging parade. Many of our competitors would have you convinced that Marketing Automation is reserved for marketers with million-dollar budgets, dedicated staff to manage the tools, and a bus-load of expensive professional services representatives to “help” them manage it. “Oh, marketing automation is much too complex for you mere mortal marketers…”, the million-dollar-quota sales-rep claims. In many ways, our competitors are distorting the market by projecting their own enterprise-sales commission structure on to you. The model works for them, at the cost of the consumer (your arm, and your leg). In a market with single-digit penetration, and many competitors continuing to follow Eloqua in to the realm of pricing-out the masses, it is evident that many marketers are simply priced-out of the market. And so now the high price barrier to entry for marketers wanting to adopt marketing automation is lowered to ZERO.
The benefits to marketers under this innovative model are clear:
- Zero-Risk: Sign-up and use a full-featured marketing automation product for FREE. Forever.
- Easy-to-Use: A complete wizard-based user-interface will have you up-and-running in minutes, identifying high-quality leads, sending email campaigns, and tracking lead conversion rates.
- Help at your fingertips: Our comprehensive knowledge base and community site is backed by LoopFuse support staff and community members exchanging ideas and best-practice advice.
The value in “free, forever” to marketers is clear with a zero-risk, easy-to-use, supported, and proven product.
The Value to Partners
As individual marketers benefit from a free offering, so do our Partners. The benefits are actually much more clear to partners, as they are now able to fully-implement a customer for FREE and not have to worry about the product vendor affecting their pricing structure. To a Partner, the relationship becomes pure-profit, and not revenue-sharing, as our competitors would enforce.
Last week, the status-quo of distorting the market with overpriced products ended. Marketing Automation is now open to any and every marketer, to use it for Free Forever. No strings attached, no bait and switch, no credit cards required. Just Sign-up and you’re ready to go in minutes.
Thoughts on the announcement, by others:
- LoopFuse Offers Free Marketing Automation System: Another Step Towards Industry Consolidation
- LoopFuse Removes the Budget Barrier from Marketing Automation
- LoopFuse Ignites Freemium Strategy
- LoopFuse FreeView: Free Marketing Automation
What’s in Your Wallet?
Thursday, October 8th, 2009We re-launched the LoopFuse.com website a little while back with some new whizbang graphics, product details, case studies, etc. The web team did an amazing job (thank you!), but what I am particularly pleased with is the return of our pricing page.
Having been in the software business for the last 15 years, I’ve always been amazed at how few of the “enterprise” software companies provide pricing on their websites. Instead, you were forced to call a commissioned salesperson who would reveal only the price for a specific configuration you specify (as if their pricing structure were a matter of national security) which included a “one-time only discount” that expires at the end of this month! Feels more like a trip to a used-car lot than a serious business solicitation. This pricing model at one of my former employers was casually referred to as the Capital One model because the price you were quoted was based on the popular Capital One tagline “What’s in YOUR wallet?”
Why are some companies nervous about sharing their pricing information publicly? Because knowledge is power when it comes to price negotiation. The more someone knows about the prices paid by other similar (and dissimilar) customers, the chance of them overpaying drops dramatically. Some companies show highly inflated list prices, but with the full knowlege that due to deep discounting none of their customers will never pay full price (think used-car dealerships). These practices are left over from the days when information hiding was helpful in extracting every possible penny from a customer. However, the advent of communities, the social graph, and technologies such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have enabled prospects to quickly and easily connect with existing customers of any vendor.
So why do companies still use these ethically challenged tactics? The same reason that pawn shops and payday lenders still exist. To exploit an imbalance of power or knowledge with the customer for financial gain. So much time, effort, and money is wasted in corporate America today as a result of this game. Demand more from your vendors. Demand fair, transparent, public pricing, starting with your marketing automation provider. Too much to ask? We think not.
