Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Automation’

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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Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide to Email Deliverability

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Email Deliverability is a hot-topic today as marketers seek to fine-tune their outbound messaging and engage customers with mass email campaigns and lead nurturing programs. Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should know the basics of email deliverability, as it will have a direct impact on the success or failure of their marketing programs and ROI.

The list below is composed of technology and usability items that we believe are a base-line for achieving increased deliverablity rates from your email marketing campaigns.

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7 Must-Follow Marketing Automation Blogs

Monday, September 13th, 2010

For the benefit of our readers, we have assembled a list of our most-read blogs that provide marketing automation best practice advice, tips, tricks, and industry news. We normally follow these blogs actively and believe them to be the most important and up-to-date group of expert bloggers covering  the field of marketing automation:

  • LeadSloth : Covers all aspects of marketing automation (including best practice advice, tips, tricks, webinars, and news) with the most up-to-the-minute and non-biased reporting in the space. Follow LeadSloth on Twitter for the most up-to-date events announced in the marketing automation space: @leadsloth
  • Customer Experience Matrix : Managed by David Raab, this blog’s focus is mostly centered around industry news within marketing automation and complementary spaces like web analytics, email marketing, and SEO. David has covered the industry for a long time and is possibly the most knowledgeable (and objective) blogger in the field.
  • Marketing Consiglierie : Allinio’s corporate blog is filled with marketing events/conference news, and general best practice help and advice for those starting out. Allinio is a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations maximize their marketing automation investments.
  • Marketing Interactions : Ardath Albee does a great job of providing nuggets of wisdom in every blog post. Aside from marketing automation topics, this blog covers social marketing, sales process, email marketing and content-writing.
  • Digital Body Language : Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua, is a visionary in the space of demand generation and marketing automation. Ths blog updates very frequently with great advice for all levels of marketing automation users.
  • The Funnelholic : Covering online marketing, b2b marketing, b2b sales, lead nurturing and general marketing automation trends and events. Insightful and regularly updated.
  • DemandGen Report : You may have to wade through the vendor-sponsored content, which is often hard to distinguish from the regular editorials, but this site provides well-written and informative articles, covering industry news from all the vendors in the space.
Marketing Consigli

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!

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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Tracking the Effectiveness of your Banner Ads

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

I 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.

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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.

Who is following your digital footprints?

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

There is a natural trade-off that each of us makes everyday between convenience and privacy. You can drive through the toll booth and sit in line with everyone else waiting to deposit your anonymous quarters or you can drive through the SpeedPass lane at 80 MPH and have your wireless toll tag charge your credit card. For pragmatists, this decision is easy. But consider for a moment all of the information that has been generated about you and with whom that information may be shared.

Who (or more precisely which vehicle) was driving on which highway at what toll booth traveling in a given direction at an exact point in time. If the trip passes through multiple toll booths then a driver’s route, progress, and even his/her speed can be calculated. Applying analytical processes to all of the historical data for an individual allows us to generate a profile of the driver. For example, based on the time of day that the driver passes through certain tolls, educated guesses can be made about the location of his/her work. And remember, this data can be combined with the existing demographic data already on file to improve the accuracy of these guesses. For example, the driver’s home address is already on file for billing purposes. Using this home address services like Zillow.com can determine the cost of the home and therefore the driver’s likely household income. If that the driver goes through the airport toll road towards the airport on average twice a week and returns the next day and you might begin to suspect that this person works in sales or is an executive and travels extensively for short overnight trips to visit clients. With every data point collected this profile becomes more and more accurate; correcting false assumptions over time.

Of course, this kind of profiling can be used for many purposes, some mutually beneficial, some downright creepy. For example, the toll plaza could flash traffic warnings to you when you pass through based on your historical driving route. City planners could use the data to justify the installation of so-called “Lexus Lanes” based on segmentation of the income level of drivers on a particular highway. Or an unscrupulous individual could use this information to target homes for burglary when it appears the owner is out of town (remember the airport toll road). The possibilities are endless.

Online marketers are using a similar approach to profile their prospects in order to better measure level of interest and to segment and qualify prospects before handing them over to their sales department. Marketers who leverage this technology effectively can provide a more targeted and relevant evaluation and purchasing experience to prospects who truly show interest in their offerings and avoid annoying those who are “just browsing”.

Let’s review the kinds of information that marketers can collect online to build this profile:

Behavioral
The moment a visitor lands on my website, his/her browser is “tagged” with a unique ID that allows me to recognize him/her upon return visits to my site (or even across multiple websites depending on the situation). Now every click the visitor ever makes on my website(s) can be associated with his/her anonmyous profile.

Implicit
In addition to click stream data, the visitor’s web-browser shares certain information about his/her environment including his/her operating system, browser type, screen size (iPad anyone?), and IP-address.

Here is what YOUR browser is telling us about you: