This post comes to us from one of our friends at ExactTarget, Joel Book.
Having observed how email has become the backbone of successful one-to-one marketing solutions, I have 3 guidelines that will help you use personalization for more effective B-to-B email.
1. Remember that People buy from People.
With all due respect to brand marketers, creative directors, and copywriters, it’s important to remember that nothing is more important in selling than the customer’s relationship with the person with whom she is doing business. That person may be a dealer, an agent, or a field sales representative.
When you send email, send it on behalf of the “relationship owner” and include that person’s photo and contact information so it’s easy for the customer to contact him. This type of personalization dramatically improves email marketing campaign performance.
2. Serve. Don’t Sell.
Customers don’t want to be sold. But they do want to be helped in making their buying decision. That’s why using email to deliver information and offers that aid the customer’s decision-making process is the best way to support – and accelerate – the buying process.
Once a person has been attracted to your web site, use email to engage with and move the prospect through the consideration and evaluation stages . . . all the way to purchase. Serve your subscribers well, and they will reward you with their business. In fact, Forrester Research reports that “those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.”
3. Put the Customer in Control.
One of the smartest things you can do to maximize email marketing performance is to personalize email content to the subscriber’s needs. When a new subscriber opts in to receive email from you, invite her to go to your preference center where she can check off her needs and topics of interest relevant to the products or services you offer. Then, use the Dynamic Content feature in ExactTarget to deliver content that’s relevant and timely. This is the essence of ExactTarget’s Subscribers Rule mantra.
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Colby Cavanaugh at ExactTarget for this post.
What is ExactTarget?
ExactTarget gives B2B marketers the ability to harness the power of one-to-one communications to nurture leads, engage prospects and improve customer relationships. ExactTarget supports the backbone of your B2B marketing strategy with:
The ability to automate emails, processes and programs—from lead nurturing campaigns to welcome emails—with ease.
A single management console that triggers mission-critical messages across emerging digital communication channels, including SMS, Voice, and Email.
Robust integration capabilities that offer an opportunity to improve customer value management and seamless integrate your business systems, no matter how many disparate data sources you may have.
A scalable architecture to ensure your time-sensitive emails are delivered. Whether you’re processing hundreds of transactions an hour or millions a day, our system is designed to scale as your demand dictates.
Precision targeting tools to reinforce local relationships and dynamically turn your emails into powerful marketing messages that your customers want to receive.
A powerfully reliable data center that takes the worry out of your data storage and availability, no matter how much data you have.
Use what you know about your prospects and customers to improve customer relationships and increase conversion.
Industry leading research shows that integrating sales and marketing technologies can help organizations deliver more relevant communications—and improve their return on marketing investment by delivering the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. ExactTarget offers a variety of tools to help you integrate your critical business systems and allow for seamless, pain-free Marketing Automation. From customer relationship management (CRM) tools (e.g. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM) to web analytics applications (e.g. Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics), we’ve partnered with the leaders and done the difficult integration work so you don’t have to.
Get the support and expertise you need to be successful.
ExactTarget provides our clients with the email marketing support they need to solve complex marketing challenges. Our team combines both marketing and technological expertise with a proven approach to understanding our client’s objectives to help you develop the best possible email marketing strategy.
Serve your subscribers well and be rewarded with their business.
At ExactTarget, we believe it is the duty of every Email Service Provider (ESP) to help marketers deliver permission-based email and digital one-to-one communications to their customers, prospects, and partners. To better convey what we feel is our best-in-class approach, we have developed our SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy which consists of three simple tenets:
Serve the individual
Honor each individual’s unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency, and channel
Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives
We not only embrace the reality that subscribers own the inbox, but we also work diligently to develop products that provide consumers control over the manner and frequency by which companies communicate with them. By helping clients pursue more strategic segmentation and personalization efforts, we help them better deliver on the true promise of one-to-one communications—the right message, to the right person, at the right time, through the right channel.
Interested in learning more?
To learn more about ExactTarget, we invite you to visit www.exacttarget.com. You can also get tips, best practices and other marketing insight from our blog and featured whitepapers.
Engagement Systems is one of the newer players in the marketing automation space. We let them “speak for themselves” earlier this week, but I wanted to dive further to check out some of their content. So far they only have a few whitepapers and case studies, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their content. Their whitepaper, Influence the Buying Process with Automated Marketing, is a quick read packed with great tips. The whitepaper promises 10 tactics for improving revenue and ROI now. After the explantion of each tactic they offer a take-away (great idea for your next whitepaper or eBook). Here are the take-aways from the whitepaper:
Don’t let prospects fall through the cracks. Protect your marketing investment and maximize resources through better lead qualification and lead nurturing.
Unify sales and marketing in the pursuit of common goals.
Continue generating leads, but put greater emphasis on nurturing activities as well as retention and winback strategies to maximize customer lifetime revenue.
Make sure that you have all the materials in place to be the resource for information to support your buyer.
Map out the buying process and help prospects and customers navigate their way to a buying decision.
Automate the sales and marketing process by setting event and behavior triggers that utilize intelligent marketing automation to autoexecute marketing touches.
Deploy one-to-one communications for more meaningful dialogue with prospects and customers to shorten the buying process.
Commit to an ongoing learning process; employ a valuable exchange of information to align your product and service offerings with the changing needs and interests of each individual buyer.
Deploy multiple means of outreach to ensure that your message is received, and to move the customer towards a purchase position relative to their individual needs and interests.
Establish ongoing contact with customers to preserve satisfaction, increase up-selling and cross-selling, and decrease customer defections.
Be sure to read the entire whitepaper for the full story. It is definitely worth the read.
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Rob Hampton at Engagement Systems for this post.
What is Engagement Systems?
Engagement Systems helps companies leverage their CRM investment and maximize sales and marketing resources to grow sales revenue and improve ROI with an automated marketing campaign system. The web-enabled software works with existing CRM systems to access prospect and customer information and make that data actionable to more efficiently capture and nurture leads, retain customers and win-back defecting clients.
From single communications to multi-step, multi-channel campaigns – utilizing email, direct mail, pURLS and landing pages – each personalized communication is automatically created, delivered, tracked and reported within the CRM record; eliminating time-consuming manual processes and ensuring consistent, relevant, timely communications that move prospects through the buying process and build valuable relationships with existing customers.
What Makes Engagement Systems Different?
True Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Communications
Engagement Systems is the only CRM integration that truly automates the execution, delivery and tracking of multi-channel communications via direct mail, email, and personalized web pages (Personalized URLS) from within a single application. Eliminates the need to coordinate multiple vendors.
1:1 Personalized Marketing
Both single communications and multi-touch campaigns can be executed to one contact at a time or to a segmented group of contacts. There are no minimum orders.
Trigger Automation
Engagement Systems automated campaigns are governed by a set of business rules that create automatic triggers to initiate and manage what communications are sent and when. The configuration and integration is completely handled by Engagement Systems; there is no manual intervention on the client’s part to create, set up or kick off communications. This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources or IT involvement.
Customer Lifecycle Optimization
Engagement Systems addresses the entire prospect and customer life cycle with custom-developed campaigns and programs for lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer reactivation, up-selling and cross-selling.
Integrated Reporting
All automated communications are written back to and tracked through the CRM system. Clients have the option for custom reporting and metrics or can use the tools inherent within their CRM system. Because of Engagement Systems’ complete integration, all data resides in a single location.
Value-Added Services
Engagement Systems makes it easy to adopt and use the system by providing a combination of optional marketing services that delivers an end-to-end solution. Unlike other systems, Engagement Systems is virtually hands free for both sales and marketing, requiring no one to upload or manage artwork or to initiate campaigns. This makes implementation pain free, quick to deploy and low-maintenance to sustain.
Cost Effectiveness
Engagement Systems’ automated direct mail, email and Personalized URL production systems streamline the creation, execution and delivery processes, making multi-channel marketing campaigns cheaper and faster to execute. All aimed at increasing your sales, profitability and ROMI. This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources, consulting, IT and training expenses. Additionally, there are no expensive recurring seat charges.
Gotta say, when Amy asked if I’d read this whitepaper from Silverpop I was instantly intrigued. Maybe it’s the fact that sitting as the Sales/Marketing Ops person I have sat directly under that bus a few times (as we all have regardless of which side you come from), or maybe it’s the tongue in cheek humor scattered throughout the copy but for once I was entertained and informed by a whitepaper!
While the whitepaper is peppered with humor it also touches on a few key items that cause the friction between marketing and some steps for resolving those items.
Problem: Sales is frustrated when marketing hands off weak leads.
Solution: The key to this isn’t exactly what it sounds like, instead of placing blame, get on the same page about what constitutes a lead, get sales and marketing on the same page so that everyone knows what a lead is and execute on passing leads over accordingly. Unfortunately, if we’re all speaking different languages in terms of what a lead (contact, prospect, etc.) is then it’s just a distraction.
Problem: Marketing sees Sales as only griping about Marketing (therefore causing the split between them)
Solution: Sales needs to talk to marketing – if the leads being sent over are good 1/3 of the time, tell marketing what was wrong with the other 2/3’s. Don’t keep marketing in the dark, let them know how leads are progressing through the pipeline and what leads progress better (therefore better helping to define what kind of leads Marketing should focus on getting to Sales). Don’t take all the credit – yes you guys close the sale but materials, programs, webinars, the website, events all of those things were put together by marketing to help you close that deal – give them a little credit too!
These are just a few of the items mentioned by Silverpop, but they are enough to get the wheels turning for you. I highly recommend taking a little time to read the entire whitepaper, it’s insightful and truly reaches the heart of the problem, aligning Marketing and Sales is all about communication.
I’ll close with my favorite quote from the whitepaper:
Sales asks: How many marketers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Sales answers: 15.
One to ignore the request from sales for more light,
One to develop a creative brief on why light is important,
Seven to shoot the YouTube video about screwing in light bulbs,
One to evaluate the amount of light offered by competitors and draft a competitive analysis,
Two to create the product slick,
One to determine competitive pricing for the service and set the cost well above that,
One to buy a 150-watt bulb for a 60-watt lamp,
And one to put just the right “spin” on the process.
Sorry – gotta love a whitepaper with a personality
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Adam Needles (Twitter: @abneedles) — Silverpop’s Director of Field Marketing and B2B marketing evangelist — for this post.
What is Silverpop Engage B2B?
There are many challenges facing B2B marketers today, but they are almost all traceable to one inflection point — a fundamental, Internet-age shift in power that has taken place. Today, the B2B ‘buying unit’ has immense information-based resources at its disposal. Couple this with a corporate accountability and transparency mindset, and the result is a B2B buyer that is now calling the shots … not the B2B vendor.
The implication is a new B2B marketing dynamic that demands responding to customer ‘pull’ over a traditional marketing ‘push’ mentality. MarketingSherpa has published data indicating that for every sales-ready lead that comes into a B2B vendor, there are 5-6X more leads that are longer-term and must be patiently nurtured until they are ready to purchase.
Buyers increasingly set the ground rules on when and where they will engage. Buyers also increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education, not sales people … whom they engage as an almost final stage in their process. This means B2B marketers must focus heavily on ‘getting found,’ nurturing prospects and managing pre-sales buyer dialogue.
And yet the impetus for B2B marketers to proactively generate leads, drive sales and support customer lifetime value has never been stronger. Enter marketing automation.
How We’re Different
The drivers above explain the rapid growth in the marketing automation marketplace. But what makes one vendor different from another?
At Silverpop, we believe assessing how one marketing automation vendor is different from another comes down to understanding their approach to helping marketers address this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing as described above.
Our approach is simple.
Total Focus on B2B marketing. First, we have a marketing automation solution built, from the ground up, around the unique needs and issues of B2B marketers. This is our focus, and it’s how we rationalize everything we do to extend, expand and innovate its features and capabilities.
Orchestrating buyer-centric marketing; powering sales and marketing collaboration. Second, our products and services are designed to address the major external and internal issues facing B2B marketers today. What are these issues? At an external/marketplace level, it is being more buyer-centric than ever before (given the environment described above). At an internal/organizational level, it is better aligning and collaborating with the sales organization.
B2B marketing is different. Sure some of the trends cited above — especially the shift in buyer power — are common to both B2B and B2C. But B2B marketing is still different. How?
In B2C marketing — especially with ‘fast moving consumer goods’ — scale matters. Thus, a top-down strategy is taken … where mistakes in customer communication may be made at the individual consumer level, but that is assumed to be okay as long as it is a small percentage of total interactions.
But in B2B marketing — especially with high price points and low unit volumes — relationships really do matter. One mistake made upstream in the lead-cultivation phase can have disastrous effects downstream. Thus, a ‘bottoms-up strategy’ in marketing is more appropriate.
The challenge of modern B2B marketing, thus, lies in building that granular and continuous ‘one-to-one’ relationship with a prospect, pre-sales, while also scaling overall activity to ensure a sufficient volume of leads to meet revenue targets.
This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is built around the entire lifecycle of developing and nurturing B2B buyer leads upstream through converting leads to customers and maintaining those customers downstream.
CRM integration: The system has pre-built integration with industry-leading CRM suites, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Netsuite and Salesforce, and the system can integrate with any other CRM suite via standards-based Web application programming interfaces (APIs).
Industry-leading B2B marketer education: Successful marketing automation begins with successful B2B marketing strategies. That is why Silverpop spends significant time and resources on marketer education. The keystone of this effort is the company’s recently-launched B2B Marketing University series.
Service and support: An intelligent technology platform, alone, is not sufficient to ensure the success of a marketing automation deployment. That’s why service and support is a hallmark of Silverpop’s offering and one of the top reasons why customers select Silverpop Engage B2B.
Orchestrating Buyer-centric Marketing
I highlighted the critical issue in B2B marketing of having a bottoms-up strategy and of driving one-to-one dialogue with prospects. This leads to a subsequent operational challenge: It takes a tremendous scale of raw leads to filter down to a single buyer. Research from SiriusDecisions indicates that an average B2B organization yields 2-3 sales conversions for every 1000 raw/upstream leads. Given this, how do you effectively market on a ‘mass’ one-to-one level — building a repeatable lead management strategy that gives each and every lead individual and tailored attention and personalization and that responds to their pull?
Laura Ramos with Forrester touched on this in a recent blog post on sales-marketing alignment: “As any rep can tell marketing, no two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use. ”
This is why at the core of Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is a smart, powerful, yet easy-to-use campaign management interface for building and managing buyer-centric marketing.
Dynamic campaign management: The campaign management interface allows you to build complex, dynamic campaigns that deliver marketing communication actions in response to the ‘pull’ of buyers. For instance, did your prospect recently visit your Website, download a white paper or dial your call center? By identifying actions and dynamic responses, Silverpop enables B2B marketers to manage complex, buyer-centric campaigns.
Campaign GUI: A key differentiator of the campaign management interface is something we call our ‘campaign GUI’ — a graphical environment that allows marketers to drag and drop campaign planning elements, that operates a lot like video-editing software and that is highly intuitive.
The major ‘internal’/organizational challenge marketers face lies in better syncing up with their sales teams — an issue closely related to being buyer-centric and of critical importance as sales people are tapped by buyers later and later in their buying process. This requires B2B marketers to better understand and empathize with their sales team colleagues. It also requires systems that can promote transparency and collaboration.
Technology is the driver behind the shift in buyer/selling behaviors, but more so in terms of its impact on the buyer rather than the seller. Buying 2.0 amplifies the power technology has given buyers and further increases marketing’s role throughout the buying process beyond demand creation. Buyers seek out knowledge in their education phase independent of a campaign or cold call. Content, collaboration and knowledge drives marketing’s messaging impact into the opportunity. Pipeline acceleration initiatives and nurturing strategies further influence the buying dynamic. Measuring marketing’s contribution and improving its ability to target their initiatives puts marketing in the cross-hairs of sales productivity. Sales and marketing integration is a requirement for success in the next “new” economy.
This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform also focuses on improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams — so lead management and buyer dialogue is seamless.
Lead scoring and routing: A robust lead scoring and routing engine both creates a catalyst for improving sales and marketing agreement on what constitutes a ‘good customer prospect’ and also helps to manage roles and lead hand-off on an ongoing basis. Key features include the ability to score based on a variety of demographic (explicit), behavioral (implicit) and BANT (budget, authority, needs and timing) factors, as well as mechanisms for returning cold leads from sales back to marketing for nurturing.
Sales-team transparency: Another key feature is the ability of sales team members to view granular details of lead activity from their Salesforce account. This ensures that a sales team member has complete insight into the pre-sales dialogue that has occurred and can pick up and run with a lead with maximum insight.
Are You Ready for the Brave New World of B2B Marketing?
Responding to ‘buyer 2.0′ and leading in this new B2B marketing environment requires a blend of know-how and firepower. Silverpop is focused on both.
The Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform combines best practices with robust performance. And the Silverpop team is dedicated to delivering solutions that meet the unique needs of B2B marketers. We invite you to take a test drive of the system.
Thanks to Kevin Joyce at Market2Lead for his post earlier this week. In addition to learning about Market2Lead, we want to share with our readers one of their whitepapers, Increase Lead-to-Sales Ratios with Effective Lead Qualification and Scoring. In it Market2Lead’s CEO Geoff Rego walks through some key pieces to developing a robust Lead Scoring process. Some of the highlights:
Define ‘Qualified’ – this is something we’ve spoken about before on the B2B Lead (check out Amy’s post, What is a Lead? What is a Prospect?), it’s key to make sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what a qualified lead is, what a prospect is, etc.
Qualify your leads in stages – don’t assume that you can qualify all of your leads at once or one time, you should continuously be in the process of qualifying what is in your database as well as what is coming into your database. By the same token, make sure you’re also disqualifying things continuously too! (We’ve chatted about ways to disqualify)
Get help! If you can’t do this alone (which is pretty likely), use technology. There are numerous tools out there, both within Marketing Automation Systems and things you can build yourself within Sales Force Automation tools that can score your leads for you. It’s reasonable to assume you can qualify a few hundred (or even a few thousand) leads with good eyes and some manpower, it’s a bit overwhelming to assume you can qualify tens of thousands (or more) leads by yourself. Don’t let this task overwhelm you, look for software that can help.
Do this now! Don’t wait to implement lead scoring and qualification practices, it may not be perfect the first time around but getting the ball rolling is an important step. The faster you start, the more ‘gems’ you might find in your own data.
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Kevin Joyce (@nivenor1) at Market2Lead for this post.
Here is the story behind marketing automation, and Market2Lead:
Sales folks spend most of their time in proposal and negotiation stages. For the most part, they do not like cold-calling or prospecting. Also, a day of a sales person’s time can be quite expensive. To make sales folks more effective, we look for ways to give them only marketing-qualified, sales-ready leads. And if we do that by having marketing people do tele-prospecting on the phone, we would spend almost as much as using the sales folks. So we need automation to make it cost-effective. The further back you go in the sales cycle (left in the graphic below) the less expensive the touch has to be! The majority of CRMs simply don’t have the depth of functionality to take on this marketing role of nurturing. So we look for marketing automation to help us nurture and develop relationships with prospects, gathering more information about their needs and offering them relevant educational materials that support the value proposition. Then, at the right time, we hand the prospects off to Sales. Market2Lead excels at doing this.
Market2Lead offers marketing automation software and services that provide the automation and analytical insight to move more prospect relationships into customer relationships. The Market2Lead software assures that marketing programs are more effective in producing sales-ready leads, and that marketing investments have a measurably better ROI.
A marketing automation system must provide these benefits to be of value to Marketing:
Increased Marketing effectiveness
Deliver more sales ready-leads to sales teams
Nurture prospects so they move through the funnel faster
Measure the marketing influence on opportunities in the funnel
Provide marketing accountability and ROI
Ensure that Marketing only adds validated, standardized data into the CRM
The success of any marketing campaign is dependent first and foremost on the target list, then the quality of the offer and finally on the presentation of the offer. This is why at Market2Lead, we have a strong focus on helping organizations execute campaigns that are measurable, leverage cleaner, richer data and produce predictably great results. The goals for marketing organizations everywhere are to produce more sales-ready leads and to contribute in a measurable way to increasing revenues and profitability of their firms. This requires greater marketing effectiveness and accountability.
A New Level of Marketing Measurability
Marketing automation not only brings efficiencies through automation and effectiveness through better execution, it also brings to marketing a new level of measurability. Market2Lead brings the unprecedented ability to define business rules to connect marketing campaigns and programs to sales opportunities, so the precise impact of marketing on the business results can be measured. With the costs entered into the campaign definition, we can even show you your ROI and cost per lead. Market2Lead has full marketing data warehouse capability, in addition to operational reporting, so that custom dashboards can save you the time you’d otherwise spend to aggregate and present data.
Capture More Leads
Market2Lead’s sophisticated response management captures more leads in less time. Our web forms can be configured and deployed by marketing managers (rather than involving IT staff), and are dynamic, allowing you to do progressive profiling of prospects. Our forms also have field validation and standardization, so you can ensure a richer and cleaner marketing database. And since only a fraction of the marketing leads come through a company’s website, we offer sophisticated contact data integration capabilities to enable pooling of all offline and online data. These include a web services API, scheduled FTP imports, and an elegant import wizard that helps ensure the data integrity and completeness of your database.
Nurture Smarter
The best nurture campaigns take into account the entire behavioral history of each person and go about presenting the best possible next offer that is appropriate for that person. The Market2Lead system has the unique ability to automate arbitration of the most relevant offer for each individual.
The 5 Core Areas of Functionality in Marketing Automation
There are five areas of functionality that are essential in any good marketing automation system. All five are listed below, along with information on how Market2Lead excels at them all.
Contact Data Integration
CDI centralizes all of your online and offline marketing data in one database. Market2Lead provides:
Dynamic integration with the SFA system
Scheduled FTP and API for data integration
Response Management
The capture of validated, standardized data is key to effective campaigns. Market2Lead provides:
Dynamic forms with progressive profiling
Data format validation and address validation
Personalized microsites and PURLs
Lead Management
New leads and responses must be scored, sent to the appropriate queues and in some cases routed to the appropriate channel. Market2Lead provides:
Sophisticated scoring based on all prospect behavior, association with opportunities or accounts, and demographic data
Notifications that can be initiated to Sales, Marketing, and others based on new responses
Support of multiple queues, including SFA, tele-qualification, partners and reseller queues
Campaign Automation
Market2lead provides campaign automation that measurably increases the productivity of marketing:
System-arbitrated adaptive campaigns that determine the best next offer for each individual
Ability to copy all assets and deep copy of programs that include all program attributes
Sophisticated list segmentation that includes: opportunity, account data, and time-based selection
Marketing Business Intelligence
Market2lead provides a business intelligence platform that includes:
A historical data warehouse with custom reporting and dashboards
Reporting on Marketing’s influence on the sales pipeline
Web analytics and tracking of unknown visitors
Why Market2Lead?
What makes Market2Lead the best solution for so many firms?
The strongest response management capability
The best data integration capabilities
A strong focus on data quality and metrics
The best marketing business intelligence capabilities in the industry
The most powerful automated campaigns
Ability to support the needs of large corporations in many countries
Welcome back from summer vacation! The economy seems to be picking up, it’s event season and B2B marketers are being tasked with their biggest jobs yet – driving enough leads to make up for a slow first half of the year. With the help of a marketing automation tool, your job gets a lot easier. As marketing automation becomes more of a necessity to get the job done, B2B marketing teams are forced to evaluate their needs and choose a solution that best fits.
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks toMatthew Quinlan (@mattquinlan) at LoopFuse for this post.
What is LoopFuse?
Sophistication Made Simple
LoopFuse was founded on the principle that marketing automation should be powerful yet simple. In fact, it was the founders’ experience of implementing a marketing automation system at JBoss that led directly to the creation of LoopFuse OneView. Some marketing automation vendors achieve power and flexibility, but at the expense of usability. Others have a fantastic user interface, but a shallow feature-set. LoopFuse OneView strikes the delicate balance between sophistication and simplicity by hiding complexity with integrated contextual help, intuitive defaults, and wizard-driven configuration.
In addition to making LoopFuse OneView easy to implement and easy to use, we also make it easy to buy. Our complete pricing list is publicly available from our website so that our prospects know exactly how much LoopFuse will cost before engaging our sales team. (Refreshing, isn’t it?) Even better, there are absolutely no hidden fees. No setup fees. No support fees. No per-user fees. No API fees. You can even pay by credit card. Try LoopFuse OneView with zero risk by signing up for a fully functional free trial on our website. Your account is immediately provisioned without ever speaking to a LoopFuse salesperson.
Lead Management
Target, track, capture, score, segment, nurture, route, convert, close, and analyze your leads in a single tool that tightly integrates with your CRM. Start with anonymous web activity collection that provides the basis for web analytics such as most popular pages, best referrers, search terms, and most active companies (via IP address). Collect registration data and convert anonymous visitors into identified prospects. Continuously evaluate the quality of each prospect according to his/her profile and behavior and route qualified prospects to the CRM. Nurture unqualified prospects by providing a constant drip of highly relevant and timely information (via email) to engage the prospect until they are ready to buy. Arm the salesperson with all of the relevant information necessary to close the deal. Finally, analyze the effectiveness of each lead source to determine the best use of your marketing dollars.
Sales Enablement
LoopFuse will automatically create new leads/contacts/tasks in the CRM based on the LeadFlow you define. Existing leads/contacts in the CRM are continuously updated with information such as lead score updates, new registration form data, email campaign activity, and latest web activity. Within 1-2 clicks the salesperson has access to every piece of data ever collected about a prospect, including the prospect’s company & location (even if prospect left it blank), and all of the activity (anonymous included) associated with the prospect’s company. The prospect data is further enriched with one-click access to the prospect’s LinkedIn profile as well as data about the company from Hoovers, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, and Google. By adding a prospect to their watchlist, a salesperson can be immediately notified when the prospect visits the website. Calling a prospect while they are browsing your site ensures that you have their full attention.
Performance & Scalability
While much of our early success was concentrated within open-source companies, LoopFuse continues to add customers from traditional software companies, SAAS providers, media companies, etc. One of the advantages of having so many open-source customers early on was that it required us to build a highly scalable infrastructure to manage the millions of transactions (page views, emails, registrations, etc.) per day that result from our customers offering free software. This continues to be a strategic advantage for LoopFuse as we can easily scale to accommodate customers of any size.
Why LoopFuse?
Basic setup in less than 1 hour via configuration wizard
What is ExactTarget?
What is Silverpop Engage B2B?
What is 
What is LoopFuse?
