'Net Features : campaigner

Managing the Sales Process Digitally

Michael Garrity — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:55:00 GMT

Being a sales rep can be difficult, especially in today’s increasingly competitive business landscape. Luckily, companies continue to come out with useful business automation solutions that can take care of specific aspects of the sales process and provide sales teams with new insights that can be leveraged for improved results.

That’s why CampaignerCRM has just released a new product sales process management solution, known as CampaignerSPM, which can help formalize and track the steps that sales representatives are expected to follow in the sales cycle. It also provides advanced reporting and other integrated features that offer up some dazzling insights and identify key industry trends that can bring in more leads and successful sales.

Basically, CampaignerSPM gives companies and their sales teams real-time stats and information about the success of their sales campaigns, and then allows them to create repeatable, predictable and, most importantly, scalable sales processes that give sales representatives unique benchmarks by which they can navigate through the processes and measure their achievements. This includes different selling cycle phases, the activities in each phase and the tools needed to complete those activities. Moreover, multiple processes can be used for different products, services, markets and customers.

Campaigner says that this type of visibility into each phase of the sales cycle should provide sales managers with the information needed to make “better decisions” and more effectively manage their resources.

“A sales process allows organizations of all sizes to produce more revenue and get better results,” said the General Manager of Campaigner, EJ McGowan. “Campaigner SPM allows users to customize an automated process based on their best practices that ensures they are targeting the right prospects, qualifying leads and presenting the right features and benefits at the right time in the sales process.”

Among the features included in the CampaignerSPM solution are a customizable and user-friendly platform for easy adoption of CRM, the ability to “clone” best practices for a more consistent sales process, options for sending email campaigns directly from the CRM and a customer communication portal.

CampaignerSPM is available right now with a 25,000 email-per-user limit, unlimited contracts and no seat limitations. All of this costs $59.99 per month for each user.

The Five Myths of Lead Generation

Administrator — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:30:00 GMT

By Jeffrey Cody, Senior Marketing Manager, Campaigner®

Myths, folk tales and urban legends make for entertaining storytelling, and can even teach a lesson or two. But when it comes to the real business of lead generation, myths and misperceptions can cost you money and customers.

Myths about lead generation can lead to faulty practices and missed opportunities. Below we bust five of the most common myths about lead generation. Use our tips to debunk bad practices and craft strategies that will deliver the happy ending of leads that convert to customers.

Myth #1 - It’s all about cost per lead

Many marketing departments focus on achieving a certain number of leads at a certain cost per lead. Lead efforts should instead be focused on cost per acquisition, cost per upselling the customer, and cost per lifetime value of a customer, all worked backward into the lead generation effort. It’s easy to build a campaign that will create thousands of leads for a nickel per lead but you run the risk of none of them ever converting. You can lose thousands of nickels, frustrate your sales team and not get anything out of the program.

For example, if you have a model that says you think your best close rate is $50 per lead to get a program done, you might find an opportunity where $1,000 per lead closing at 80 percent and is worth 50x per customer. Instead of a hyper-focus on cost per lead of the campaign consider a comprehensive formula that measures the true return of your efforts.

Myth #2: Lead scoring revolves around lead source

In recent years, the emergence of marketing automation tools have led sales teams to believe that they can create millions of leads and score them initially based on “lead source.” Using these tools, sales & marketing teams score leads and then realize that they no longer like the lead source. They then change the scoring, raising or lowering the base lead source score, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The right way of measuring a lead should be around explicit and implicit information provided by the lead at initial sign-up. You should focus less about the source, but rather on job title, industry, the number of sales reps, or budgets. After all, if you didn’t think the source was worthy, you wouldn’t have started there to begin with. You can then follow those attributes all the way through the sales process and build a lead scoring profile. For example, you may find that CEO leads come in and close or it may be deals of a certain sales size that have a high close rate.

The inverse is when you find a certain job title that doesn’t close well, takes a lot of the sales people’s time, isn’t a high-revenue deal, has a high rate of churn or has high support costs. You can use these profiles as a part of your lead scoring to help you improve your targeting to reach more of your best leads and to assess whether to continue certain types of campaigns.

Myth #3: Landing pages produce the most leads

In the past, marketing departments used single-page Web forms with minimal information to get more out of their lead generation efforts. Prospects would be driven to these pages and forced through a call-to-action gateway before they could access any other information. There are times when this is the right action, but often good prospects, who may be more qualified than the average lead you are capturing, are turned away because they are unable to find the extra information they are seeking.

This is common when prospects find your site via a search engine. The path is determined by the type of link they click – organic or paid. The organic link would have led to your website where they would have found the information, but the paid click leads them through this forced funnel. You should treat the same person who could randomly have picked either path with the same amount of respect, especially since people want more data before giving up personal information. Educated consumers often become your best customers, so make it easy for all prospects to access information about your solutions. When you provide equal access regardless of link type, you will have shorter sales cycles, fewer frustrated leads and a better reputation.

Myth #4: Drip campaigns are a necessity

Never run a drip campaign for the sake of checking it off on your campaign list. Every time you send an email out you are welcoming prospects to unsubscribe and if they unsubscribe you have lost the ability to ever communicate with them again. Worse, you could provoke them to cancel your services, increasing churn. It is essential to find a balance between having a drip program because you know you need one (and you know it can work) and risking that really critical information, such as a product enhancement or a special promotion, may not get delivered to them because they unsubscribed four emails back.

A good strategy for drip campaigns is to adopt a “less is more” approach or a triggers-based approach. In this way you maintain communication so that prospects remember you but minimize the risk of them unsubscribing or canceling your service.

Myth #5: The Marketing team is controlling the communications stream

To make the most of lead generation, you need to have a communications plan that includes sales and marketing. Let’s say you have a free trial on your website or sign-up form and it requires sales intervention to follow-up. The marketing team creates a drip email campaign to keep the lead engaged for days zero through 30 of the trial period. But your plan has a flaw.

Your 12-email, 30-day drip campaign is not the only way prospects are getting communication. No matter what, the prospect will be contacted by the sales team. You have a controlled process in place but without considering the dynamics of the entire process you risk frustrating or losing a prospect.

In conversations with a salesperson a shift may have occurred in the prospect’s need, but your drip marketing program doesn’t reflect that need. As a result, your messaging may annoy, misinform the prospect, or lengthen or kill a sales cycle. When it comes to planning lead nurturing communications, less can be more. Use your automated tools to personalize campaigns based on real time information. This will ensure targeted, relevant messaging that helps turn a lead into a customer.

Myths and legends make for good conversation but cannot provide a sustainable foundation for engaging your customers. Knowing the difference between fact and fiction and using that knowledge will enable you to build a solid and sustainable lead generation process that delivers results.

Why Good Leads Die Young

Administrator — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:15:00 GMT

By Rick Faulk & Seamas Egan, Campaigner

Leads are the fuel to your sales pipeline. You put considerable effort into developing inbound marketing activities so that your sales teams have a continuous flow of opportunity. Success however, does not come without challenges. Too many leads without an efficient system to manage them can clog your sales funnel. The result may be good leads growing cold while your teams work to clear the funnel.

Lead generation is only one part of the sales cycle. In reality, less than a quarter of inbound leads are sales ready. Yet, that small fraction can easily become lost in a sea of data. This inefficient process not only hurts sales numbers but increases tension between sales and marketing teams. Sales teams may complain about not having good leads to work with, while marketing points to the volume their efforts generate.

Lead Scoring - prioritizing sales-ready leads based on a pre-determined set of criteria - allows you to work your best leads first, rather than working from the bottom up. While organizations recognize the value of adding efficiency to the lead process, only 21 percent of B2B marketers have actually established a lead scoring program.

Lead development and management is a joint sales and marketing effort. To maximize leads and keep teams aligned, use the tips below.

Determine key criteria. What is a sales-ready lead? Did the lead visit your pricing page 2-3 times? Did they demo a product or download a whitepaper? Do they work in a certain industry or have a specific title? You will want to consider explicit data, such as title, industry and zip code, as well as implicit data such as their actions on your website, or their specific search string.
Fingerprint your customer. You can use your current customer base to help you identify the criteria. What did your existing customers do on your website? What implicit and explicit data do you know about them? For example, you may assign a higher score to leads that visit the pricing page rather than the ‘about us’ page.
Document your findings. Once you identify the criteria, put it in writing. Have a documented contract that clearly identifies the activities, behaviors and interests of sales-ready leads.
Assign a score. Now that you have your criteria, you can score your leads. Develop a scoring system (letter grade, points, or warm, hot, cold) that allows you to assign a value to each criterion. For example, you may determine that your ideal lead is a senior executive at a large company. Based on your current customer base, you may also know that the ideal customer visited at least three pages on your website, viewed the pricing page and downloaded your free whitepaper. Depending on what you learned through your assessment process, you may weigh each of these qualifications or activities more heavily than others.
No lead left behind. The next step is to develop a system for taking action on your lead intelligence. Using your criteria in conjunction with your CRM system will make it easy to develop repeatable sales processes to manage all of your leads. Your sales-ready leads can be prioritized to the sales team while other leads are channeled into nurturing programs.

Lead scoring allows you to be more efficient in your lead development and management. It not only allows you to close sales-ready leads, but prevents irritating those leads that are not quite ready to buy. Using lead scoring with your CRM system adds a systematic structure so that you can always apply best practices to your lead process.

About the Authors: With more than 30 years of experience in executive management, sales and marketing for some of the world's most successful SaaS and technology companies, Rick joins j2 Global® as its General Manager of Campaigner®, the sales and marketing brand of j2 Global, Inc.

Seamas Egan, corporate sales manager for Campaigner, has five years of SaaS sales experience working in SMB, corporate and enterprise sales.

Campaigner Hits the CRM Trail

Michael Garrity — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 17:48:00 GMT

Campaigner has long offered one of the more robust email marketing platforms for small- to medium-sized businesses, and after a while, the company began to notice that many of their customers were having trouble with their customer relationship management (CRM) services, particularly when it came to integrating their email marketing or other business-oriented solutions into the platform.

So the next logical step for Campaigner was to build its own CRM platform that would better address the concerns of its customers. The result is CampaignerCRM, an easy-to-use solution with a fully integrated suite of tools and email marketing functionality; but it’s also more than that, because Campaigner crafted the solution to help its customers sell more, meaning it’s not simply a CRM solution that just records information, but actually uses the data to help customers understand their return on investment (ROI) and make decisions that will improve their bottom line.

Still, the most notable aspect of CampaignerCRM is its backend technology integration with the company’s existing email marketing product to let customers draft, schedule and send email marketing campaigns. Before, customers would have to use two separate standalone products and attempt to make them work together, which could be difficult and frustrating. But CampaignerCRM allows users to trigger automated emails as either drip marketing campaigns or based on user actions from within the CRM.

Users can also use the service to extract customers’ names to build email lists that can be either simple (i.e. location based) or more complex (i.e. based on specific triggers, such as opens or ignores). CampaignerCRM customers can use more than 300 professional-grade templates or copy their own HTML to create their emails. Eventually, Campaigner hopes to have a completely seamless integration between its email marketing and CRM products.

Of course, no solution is complete without a variety of social media tools, and when more than 50 percent of Campaigner’s customers said they use social media to better understand their customers every week, the company knew that social was going to be a major part of its new CRM solution. This includes a new Like-to-lead tool with Facebook, which gives customers an HTML snippet that opens a pop-up box to get contact information from users who click the “Like” button on their Web properties, as well as deep integration with LinkedIn that allows users to pull and save information from a contact’s LinkedIn profile.

CampaignerCRM gives users a sales checklist feature that lets customers define their own sales processes to follow leads through different checkpoints to track their results. The ability to define these processes means that companies can replicate the practices of their best/most accomplished sales representatives to sell more (and larger) deals even faster. This can even happen on the go, as the CRM tool also comes with a mobile app that lets users update leads, contact information and more to ensure that they’re always dealing with accurate data.

These charts can be easily accessed from the CampaignerCRM dashboard, and leads can easily be found thanks to MyList, a dynamic query engine that allows customers to create customized lists for easy access. MyList is one of the software’s core product structures. It comes with a set of pre-made generic lists, but customers can create their own based on the lead types or opportunities they want to segment, and then edit its name and define its criteria. They can also easily export the lists to Microsoft Excel or a PDF document and send them to others through email or SFTP access. MyList reports can be one-time or scheduled as recurring reports run on a regular basis.

In addition to all of these helpful features, CampaignerCRM comes with visual reporting and charting functionality that helps managers anticipate trends and support salespeople, as well as Quicken and Quickbooks integration that allows users to record and close deals within the CRM and then have them automatically updated in the accounting software.

CampaignerCRM is generally available at $29.99 a month.

Emails Get a Social Life

Michael Garrity — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:30:00 GMT

We hear all the time about the impact that social media has had on the world of online marketing, but even as Facebook takes over the world, email remains one of the two most popular activities on the Web, and thus, still a necessary and beneficial channel for Internet marketers.

However, as of late, brands and marketers have been clamoring for a way to tie these two avenues together to help make email campaigns more social and increase their virality. Email marketing service Campaigner listened to these concerns and included new social sharing capabilities into its email marketing programs, in addition to other major enhancements.

“The synergies between email marketing and social media are evident, particularly as email marketers explore the value of enabling their messages to be easily shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter,” says Campaigner’s Product Manager, Paul Turnbull.

By adding a social sharing feature to its email platform, Campaigner is helping marketers take a holistic approach to sharing their message and helping develop their brand with new share-with-your-network (SWYN) functionality that allows subscribers to share the emails they receive with their friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ using sharable permalinks. It will come with easy-to-read analytics that let marketers see the reciprocal traffic that they get from social network shares that is independent of their regular email campaign activity, which helps determine which social channels generate the most traffic.

Marketing emails will now come adorned with a ‘sharebar’ across the top of the message that allows users to “Like” the email on Facebook (where it will be posted to the user’s personal page), share it on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn or send it in an email to one of their contacts. So, the next time a special promotion or insightful newsletter particularly affects a recipient, they can share it on the social Web to potentially hundreds of prospective subscribers, improving the discoverability and extending the reach of the email marketers, while also providing another way to build their subscriber lists.

And in order to better appease these subscribers, Campaigner has also included functionality for customized subscription management forms and messaging. This allows companies to customize how the subscribers access and manage their email preferences, edit contact information and opt-in or out of the mailing lists, or just the kind of campaigns they receive.

This ability is a “total change” from what was previously available, as Campaigner only offered marketers generic, mostly inflexible subscription forms. At the request of its customers, the company made it possible for marketers to easily brand their businesses at every step of the process by editing the subscription pages that let recipients choose to opt-in to other lists, change their email addresses or unsubscribe. They also have the option to make any mailing list either visible or hidden, a useful feature for separating males lists used entirely for internal contact groups from those that subscribers can opt into (or out of)

In addition to these two major enhancements, Campaigner also extended support to include the latest versions of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Web browsers and included multi-user support that allows administrators to add and manage other users within the primary account. Plus, the company improved its Smart Email Builder tool for creating new emails. It now offers greater text formatting and alignment controls, and has capabilities for inserting merged fields.

Finally, Marketers can now include Quicklinks into the body of their email messages, which are customized, frequently used hyperlinks (such as subscription management and social media links) stored to be more easily inserted into an email. Users can store up to 25 different self-defined links, including some offered by Campaigner (e.g. links to “Like” the brand on Facebook), or more unique ones, so long as the users know the necessary syntax to include them.

Campaigner Introduces Smart Email Builder

Linc Wonham — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:30:00 GMT

Email marketing firm Campaigner has launched a new tool for developing professional-looking email promotions and newsletters. Smart Email Builder aims to remove the need for a designer – or design experience – from the equation.

Businesses can choose from among the 700 professionally designed templates, themes and color schemes, and the newsletter is automatically built based on user preferences. Once the design is in place, Smart Email Builder will instantly format text on the computer screen as content is entered.

Once the format is chosen, Smart Email Builder offers fill-in-the blank templates, snap-to-fit image handling with slide resizing, simple insertion of easily trackable links, and drag-and-drop paragraphs and content boxes. If a business decides to change the look of the mailing, Smart Email Builder remembers the content entered and moves it to the new layout.

Visit Campaigner to learn more about using Smart Email Builder in your email marketing programs, or view a Smart Email Builder tutorial.

E-mail Alert: Campaigner Releases New, User-friendly Version for Business Owners

Linc Wonham — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:38:00 GMT

E-mail marketing service Campaigner has announced several new features to its existing set of tools designed to help smaller businesses effectively and efficiently meet their marketing needs. In addition to a new user interface and upgrades to numerous editing, formatting and list-management tools, the company—a division of Protus—is offering other incentives to attract new customers.

Campaigner is part of Protus’ Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) business communications range of services that also includes Internet fax service and virtual business phone service. Campaigner focuses on E-mail marketing services and provides its customers—mostly small to medium-sized businesses—alternatives to staffing their own marketing departments or hiring outside consulting firms.

“Small business owners often start a business because they’re good at something or have a passion for it,” said Steve Adams, vice president of marketing for Protus. “When they try to market that business, though, they may find the tools that are available assume a level of experience or expertise they don’t have. We asked our customers how we could make it easier for them to create effective sales-generating and loyalty-building campaigns. We then designed the new Campaigner to address those needs.”

Campaigner believes its new user interface to be much easier for its customers to utilize as they create and track their E-mail marketing campaigns. The redesigned E-mail editor now resembles a Microsoft Word interface, and the upgraded formatting functions include the ability to paste from Word more seamlessly than before. Users will now also be able to import their contacts directly from Microsoft Excel, and Campaigner has added an integrated image library, a new spell-check function, and an array of online help options and tutorials.

To promote the changes, Campaigner is offering new customers free templates that will include the customer’s business colors, logo, fonts and contact information, and a 30-day free trial for services. Small businesses can subscribe to the service for $10 per month.

Email Workflow Solutions @ Campaigner

Administrator — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:54:00 GMT

Email solutions provider Campaigner announced this week the launch of Workflows, a new feature of its CampaignerPro V2.0. The feature will enable marketers to develop and deliver emails to customers based on a specified time, date, event or action. Coupled with the solutions' existing segmentation and dynamic content features, CampaignerPro is certainly a solution to consider if your focus is on executive sophisticated and successful email campaigns. The list of clients using the offering is impressive to say the least. Companies such as LinkedIn, Nokia, and TransAmerica just to name a few are using Campaigner.

Workflows enables users to program automated emails with drag-and-drop tools that create a virtual flowchart for visualizing and mapping out elements of the campaign, including:

The event, action or specified time that initiates the sending of an email
Filters to include or exclude contacts
Timer delays for scheduling and initiating message delivery
Post-condition setting to assign value fields for tracking contacts

“The launch of Workflows helps marketers realize even higher response rates as it allows our customers to design more targeted, timely and relevant campaigns,” said Frank Tersigni, Campaigner’s CEO. “With the evolution of email marketing, relying solely on opt-in is not enough. Today’s marketers require enhanced direct customer relationships with improved marketing program performance and returns. Campaigner designed Workflows to help our customers reach this level of email marketing sophistication with easy-to-use tools and services.”