Archive for the ‘LoopFuse’ Category

WEBINAR: LoopFuse 101 for your Sales Team

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Thursday, November 11th, 2010 2:00PM EST

Join us for the next installment of our 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.

This webinar will focus on how sales team members can benefit from using LoopFuse. Tom Elrod, co-founder of LoopFuse, will walk you through the different features available as a sales user and how you can use them when following up on leads. He will give you tips along the way on how to use LoopFuse more effectively.

How will this help grow my business?

By getting both your sales and marketing teams involved with LoopFuse you can save time and resources sending information back and forth between the two departments. Visibility into your website traffic and visitors can be accessed by your sales team real-time with marketing dashboards. Individual sales representatives can set up alerts so they receive valuable information about their top prospects daily.

You will learn how to:

* Set up sales alerts so you can get real-time activity on your top prospects
* Utilize the marketing dashboards to view your target companies activity
* Implement the salesforce.com plug-in to view all your lead’s activity right in your CRM
* Use lead scores to manage which leads are the most qualified prospects

CLICK HERE to register.

Get Fused!

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.

5 Things to Think about Before Hitting the Send Button

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

There are a variety of different emails that I send out through LoopFuse OneView on a monthly basis. With a freemium offering of our product, the volume of inbound leads we receive has increased substantially making it more important to nurture these prospects through email marketing. I have emails that have been created and built into leadflows so that my existing database of users feel the LoopFuse love and we continue to educate them on the best practices within the product. In addition, there are prospects that we reach out to through email marketing to help educate them on marketing automation and the benefits of utilizing such a tool.

No matter what type of email I am crafting, I always run down a checklist of 5 things before I click the “Send” button. Because once that button has been pressed – there is no going back.

(more…)

LoopFuse Integration for Drupal 6.x released

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

We’ve had several requests for better LoopFuse integration with Drupal CMS version 6.x. LoopFuse has heard the call and has released an initial 6.x version of the “LoopFuse Integration” project.

The objective of a CMS is to make developing your website less complicated. Having to modify the themes and pages of a Drupal integration directly to accommodate the requirements of LoopFuse’s tracking beacon was essentially defeating the purpose of the CMS. With this module you simply add your CustomerID to the admin section and enable it. The tracking code is then automatically inserted in to the footer of your site, just above the Google Analytics code (if you use it).

We looked at the requirements that customers had asked for in a Drupal integration and decided to start from the ground up for version 6.x. Rather than re-invent the webform we’ve decided to integrate with the popular and actively maintained Webform plugin (http://drupal.org/project/webform). This allows you to take advantage of many Webform options while still being able to submit your information to OneView. Integrating with Webform will make migration to Drupal 7 easier as well.

We do plan to add some extra functionality in the near future to help support the capture of User registration. We hope you find the module to be useful and we welcome any suggested improvements the community may have. Get started with a FreeView account and see how LoopFuse can make Marketing Automation work for your Drupal site.

LoopFuse OneView 3.27 Released!

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Enhancements in this Release:

New Email Campaign User Interface

In this release, we have completely redesigned our Email Campaign user-interface, adding new features in the process. The entire user-interface was redesigned from the ground up, in an effort to improve usability, deliverability, minimize test cycles, and provide eye-popping real-time analytics on your awesome email creations.  Enhanced usability and testing capabilities makes it easier than ever for you to test your email content rendering as you are working on it. Real-time email campaign analytics means you no longer have to wait to measure results of your awesome creation.

Changes in this Release:

  • New Email Campaign Wizard: Our new Email Builder Wizard enables marketers and content creators to send and launch email campaigns quickly and easily with a 5-step process.
  • Live Testing: No need to use a “Test List” anymore for your email campaign testing. Simply type in an email address to send a test message to, and we’ll remember it every time you create a new campaign.
  • Enhanced Personalization: Personalize any field in the email headers (Subject, From Name, etc…) using contact information or CRM Lead Owner information.
  • Increased Deliverability: Simply flip a switch, and experience increased deliverability rates for your email campaign, using our new Auto-Authentication Feature.
  • Real-Time Email Campaign Analytics: Get immediate results from your email campaign launch with eye-popping charts and an increased level of detail down to a prospect’s activity across an email campaign.

Using a Prospect’s Latest Data in Email Personalization

This is a significant change in the way we handle email personalization. As of this release, LoopFuse OneView will use the latest contact information to personalize email content. In the past, LoopFuse used the contact information that was associated with a particular list member.

Special thanks to our customers for submitting these and other feature requests via the LoopFuse Community!

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.

The Value in Free Marketing Automation

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

End the Status Quo in Marketing Automation

Last 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:

Why Free? Why Now?

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Earlier today we announced the release of LoopFuse FreeView, a free version of our popular OneView marketing automation service. The decision to take LoopFuse freemium was made almost a year ago and we have spent much of that time preparing for this launch. After briefing some of the analysts, journalists, and bloggers who cover this space I realized that many of the questions they posed regarding our adoption of freemium may be of interest to others.

Why Now?

The timing of this move is based on several factors. Digital marketing is no longer a niche part of the overall marketing budget. It is quickly becoming the dominant channel for marketers to reach their prospects and their budgets are reflecting this trend. Zenith Optimedia reports in their Advertising Expenditure Forecasts that online advertising spend has doubled in the past 4 years and Forrester’s data indicates that it will likely double again in the next 4-5 years.

We have also witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of digital touchpoints over the past few years from traditional email marketing and website click tracking, to banner ads, SEO, paid search, online events, communities, and the onslaught of social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. By tracking every one of these touchpoints for each prospect we can create an extensive behavioral dossier that allows marketers to gauge and engage prospects more effectively before they are handed to sales.

If DIGITAL is the future of marketing then MARKETING AUTOMATION is the future of digital. However most analysts in the space estimate market penetration for marketing automation is between 5 and 10%, meaning that the space is still in its infancy. The most technically sophisticated marketing organizations (e.g. software companies) are, of course, the early adopters. These organizations pay a premium to gain a strategic advantage through the adoption of new technology and marketing automation vendors are likewise able to charge a fat premium to provide this advantage.

Unfortunately, many of these services require require 12 or 24 month subscription contracts, professional services implementation consultants, onsite training, and often a pricing model based on the size of your wallet. All of these factors create artificial barriers to adoption, especially for SMB companies. Organizations who do take the plunge face a daunting task of evaluating an overcrowded vendor list with minimal distinction and hope that they make the right decision.  The time is right for marketing automation to “tip” and become a tool for the 90-95% of B2B companies who have yet to adopt it.

Why Free?

As certain markets mature, a disruptive player sometimes steps in to challenge the accepted pricing model in the interest of mass market adoption. Sometimes it’s a free on-ramp that lowers the barriers to adoption. Other times it’s a massive price reduction in the market. Either way it provides the opportunity for a de-facto provider to emerge. Over the past decade we have seen several examples of this : PayPal did it to Western Union, opensource software did it to proprietary software, Skype did it to the telcos, AVG and Avast did to McAfee and Norton, and DimDim is doing it to Webex right now. A highly efficient sales, distribution, and support model can disrupt high-touch / high-margin industries by providing a cost effective alternative for the masses.

Freemium business strategies can be very challenging to organizations who are not well prepared.  For example, sales teams and processes must be able to adapt to the internal competition provided by the free offering.  Infrastructure and architecture must be designed to scale for massive volume. The user experience must be refined to enable mere mortals to be productive without week-long training courses. And dozens of other changes must be undertaken to support freemium. Balancing what is provided gratis against what is available to paying customers. Lucky for us, all of the members of LoopFuse’s executive team have experience in freemium and/or opensource (which is a flavor of freemium).

With the introduction of FreeView, LoopFuse provides an on-ramp that will allow SMB marketers in the B2B space to adopt marketing automation without the hassle and cost previously required.  Use it for free and prove to yourself that marketing automation can benefit your organization with zero risk.

The Most Interesting Marketer in the World

Friday, June 18th, 2010

While you have all heard of the most Interesting Man in the World…..

Introducing

the

most Interesting Marketer in the World:  http://bit.ly/b5OhIs; http://bit.ly/aWzGXc

OneView Plugin for WordPress

Friday, May 28th, 2010

As companies look for comprehensive CMS website solutions, a site powered by WordPress is an increasingly popular option. They find that WordPress sites are flexible and powerful enough to serve their business needs at the right cost.

With that in mind, LoopFuse is happy to announce that we have made the process of incorporating our tracking code in to your WordPress website very simple. The LoopFuse OneView plug-in for WordPress allows you to quickly instrument your website to take full advantage of OneView without having to edit the template directly. This makes instrumentation much faster and easier.

Simply enter your Customer ID in to your WordPress settings screen to enable the LoopFuse OneView tracking code on each page of your site. You’re now collecting data on visiting prospects and ready to use that information to help qualify Prospects and Leads.