Although Mautic is still young, we’re amazed at the community that we’ve been surrounded by. As we seek to foster this growth, we thought we’d share some key themes for how to develop a vibrant, connected community.

Change Your Language

When we set out to develop Mautic, we started with an idea. We wanted to change the way people looked at marketing. We wanted to level the playing field for every business and help them connect with their audience in a meaningful way. But we knew it was going to take a special group of people who felt as connected to the vision as we did. This is true of any brand. But it had to begin by changing our language. How often do we talk about “converting leads”? Whether we like it or not, we are conditioned as marketers to consider our buyers as potential leads, instead of individuals who are part of a community. It may be semantics, but if your brand wants to build a true community, you will see them and describe them differently. It will also change the way you interact with them.

Would you rather be considered a lead or a guest? Disney has built a culture and a brand that seeks to interact with people in a different way. It permeates their brand and the language they use everyday. In the book Built To Last, Jim Collins describes the terminology that Disney uses to build the voice of the Disney brand.

• Employees are “cast members.”
• Customers are “guests.”
• A crowd is an “audience.”
• A work shift is a “performance.”
• A job is a “part.”
• A job description is a “script.”
• A uniform is a “costume.”
• The personnel department is “casting.”
• Being on duty is “onstage.”
• Being off duty is “backstage.”

These simple changes to their language reinforces the message they seek to communicate. It also greatly impacts the customer or “guest” experience. If you’re like Disney and your central message is “making people happy”, you will not call your guests, potential leads.

Make Community Sticky

In their book Made to Stick, the Heath brothers reveal the key elements to making ideas stick. These core tenets are vital to not only growing ideas, but communities as well. They are: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories.

• Simple: If your mother doesn’t understand your core message, start again. Your central value statement should be simple and easy to interpret.
• Unexpected: How do you get someone’s attention? You must be willing to do something that is out of the norm. How about giving away powerful software for free?
• Concrete: No business speak here. Your message must not mince words. You must say exactly what you mean, and mean exactly what you say.
• Credible: Does your message backup your value? How can people determine this? Are there reliable sources? Can your community test your product or service?
• Emotional: This often makes people in business feel uncomfortable. Research shows us again and again that we are driven by emotion or feelings. Don’t be afraid to get real.
• Stories: Who in your community uses your product or service? What are they using it for? Is it changing their life in some way? These stories will serve to further connect and fuel your community.

Mautic is filled with individuals who have gravitated to these principles. Leaders like Takuro Hishikawa in Japan, Rodrigo Demetrio in Brasil and even more in Europe, Thailand, the US and around the world. These individuals jump in and help others by equipping them with translated documentation. They gather their network to share common ideas and solutions. They take their free time to assist those who are trying to setup and troubleshoot. This is community.

Everyone who has contributed to Mautic has engaged and participated because they believe in one or more of these “sticky” principles. It connects them at a level that is deeper than simply intrinsic value. It’s a feeling.

Feelings and Idea Flow

In addition to the key elements above, when a community is developed, it must not remain stagnant. There is a flow that naturally comes from collaborating with others as we move toward the realization of a common ideal. In the book Social Physics, Alex Pentland highlights this with the concept of idea flow;

“Synchronization and uniformity of idea flow within a group is critical: When an overwhelming majority seem ready to adopt a new idea, this convinces even the skeptics to go along. A surprising finding is that when people are working together doing the same thing in synchrony with others— e.g., rowing together, dancing together — our bodies release endorphins, natural opiates that give a pleasant high as a reward for working together.”

It feels good to be part of a team that works together to realize a vision. This is not simply research. This is a physiological fact. When you feel connected to a community that is aligned around a common goal, your body engages. It gives you that sense of accomplishment, a sense that provides feedback in the form of emotional satisfaction.

The Right Kind of Community

We’ve highlighted some key elements to developing your community online. But we must be careful to grow the right kind of community. It is not simply a “group of people that share a similar characteristic”. This is more about facts and figures than principles and ideals. True community is a “feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.” This definition is what makes our communities sticky. Promoting this concept and designing an idea flow by helping each other achieve our goals, is what will truly connect us.

This translates directly to how we market and sell. When we recognize that sales creates customers and that community creates advocacy, it changes the way we interact. We will make efforts to connect with them using a different language, on a higher level and with a common purpose.

This approach works. Over the last year and a half Mautic has seen tremendous growth. We have used these principles to grow a simple idea into 10,000 communicators who have used Mautic and a community of over 4,500 individuals who consistently interact with and share the vision of a marketing solution that thinks differently.

As you seek to reach your audience and develop your brand, what are other principles you’ve discovered to help your community grow? Share them in the comments below!

It begins with some self-awareness. Marketing holds the organizational mantle on creativity. They pride themselves on having all the right tools for assessing and understanding the customer need. They focus group test. They A/B test. Then after all the data has been gathered, they develop the most engaging campaigns ever. Sales is no different. They are one of the key pillars for organizational success. They stand in that magical circle called the “Moment of Truth”, and close deals. They brush up on their emotional intelligence skills. They develop deep client knowledge and wield it at the perfect time to bring the sale across the line.

This still happens today. Many organizations still rely on traditional marketing and sales teams to reach customers and deliver sales. But are they focused on the right metrics? The customer is more informed than ever before. The tables have been turned. The customer is now in the driver’s seat. Marketing and sales need to better understand the customer journey in a digital sense. Investing in new social and digital tools are not bad. But if sales and marketing don’t work together, they will never accomplish what they can together. And it begins by adding value.

At the Intersection of Value

Consider the graphic below. It has two lines. The gray line is representative of the customer journey. It has a beginning and a perceived end, which we’ll discover is not really an end at all. The black curved line is your business. As we move from left to right, the goal is to maximize the moments where these two lines intersect. Segments of the journey are indicated by brackets. They are Discovery, Research, Moments of Truth, and Customer Engagement. As these buyer touch-points occur, it’s our job to create and provide as much value as we can. It is in these moments where buyers form their thoughts about your brand. You must help them meet their need by providing value at every point along the way.

Marketing and sales have a unique opportunity to work together to deliver value at every stage of the customer journey. They first need to align on the major segments of that journey. After this is agreed upon, they must align on the value that is delivered at each one of those stages.

Creating Value at Every Stage

We’ve talked about the marketing/sales funnel and how it’s broken. We are in agreement that this is not where we have been before. So how do we know what value we should create at each buying stage? I’m so glad you asked. Let’s look at four typical stages along this customer journey.

• Discovery: The first area we need to tackle is when the buyer learns they have a need. Understanding this stage is a challenge. Start by asking your existing customers about what caused the need. What were they doing when they first discovered they needed your product/service? Where were they? This causal effect will assist you in determining the right content/value approach you should take. It will also help you understand what sites and channels are used when they discover it.
• Research: We all do it. The data doesn’t lie. Research shows that we are going online to find answers to all manner and kinds of questions. And your customers are doing it too. This has never been more true even in the car buying experience.
  

  Today, half of all car shoppers with mobile devices use their smartphones while at the dealership. The top action people perform with their phones while on the lot, not surprisingly, is confirming that they are getting a good price on a vehicle. Searches for Kelley Blue Book and competing dealers occur more often when at the dealership. – Think with Google

  These answers are the key to developing the value we seek to create. Learn as much as you can about where your customers are coming from. What sites do they visit when researching? Are they visiting your website? What content are they viewing? Is it valuable to the research they are doing?

• Moments of Truth: The buyer has become aware of the need. They’ve researched all the solutions. They will now enter the zone that we affectionately call the “Moment of Truth”. It is in this space where your potential customer will make a decision to buy. Our job is to engage the buyer with the reassurance of their buying decision. Sure we will have an amazing call-to-action. The button will be the perfect color and be in the perfect spot. But where is the value? When buyers make a decision, we must create the most value-filled buying experience possible. Is it easy to buy a product on your site? What does your follow up look like?
• Customer Engagement: Now that the buyer has become a customer, the value changes again. It now becomes a matter of user experience and engagement. When was the last time you used your own product? What questions popped up? Was it easy to find the answers? What if the answers were sent before you had the question? It is important that your customer sees the value in a long-term relationship.

Listen and Verify

But it does not stop at providing value. This does not automatically get you the sale. As any marketer worth their credentials will attest, you must always be listening. Each one of these touch-points should be tracked. It will provide you with the data you need to “listen” and verify that it is the right value being provided at the right stage.

For sales and marketing to be successful, it must retool. But more importantly, they must align their focus on providing value to the customer at every stage of the buying journey.

Marketing automation tools are valuable in helping you learn more about your customer. But the value doesn’t stop there. It can be assist you in creating a value-based customer journey that equips the buyer at every stage.

Do you have a green thumb when it comes to marketing? Do you just barely touch something and it springs to life?

The idea of lead nurturing is a common topic in marketing chats and a frequent point of discussion whenever marketers and sales people get together. I used the term “green thumb” because that’s a very common gardening term that usually refers to someone who is naturally gifted (or at least appears to be) when it comes to nurturing plants or flowers in their gardens. They seem to be able to make something grow out of nothing and they can keep plants alive for a long time. That last point is especially tricky for me. For some reason keeping plants alive and growing is insanely difficult for me. Just ask anyone in the office and they’ll tell you – the ideal plant for me is a cactus.

I think just as with gardening there are some people who are just naturally gifted at nurturing and growing leads in business as well. And just as with having a green thumb in gardening I believe everyone can learn this ability and talent. What is lead nurturing you ask? Well, quite simply put lead nurturing is the process of growing and keeping alive a potential customer for your business until they become a customer. This process involves paying attention to their needs, watering them, and providing optimal conditions for their growth. It really is quite similar to gardening. Nurturing in its simplest form is simply the act of encouraging growth and life.

3 Steps to Amazing Lead Nurturing

If we can identify what lead nurturing is and how the lead generation process funnels directly into a lead nurturing process then we can begin to identify how to do lead nurturing right. The process shouldn’t be tricky or confusing. Don’t let the unknown words trick you into not doing amazing lead nurturing. Let’s get started.

1. Lead Nurturing Starts Early

When you’re growing a plant or a flower many times you will start with a seed. There’s not flower, there’s no root system, there’s really nothing more than a tiny seed. It doesn’t look anything like the beautiful flower you believe it will be in the future.

Now I want you to imagine with me that you’re in a garden with your friend. The two of you have gotten up on a cool spring morning and met in the flower bed behind your house to plant some beautiful tulips you’ve just gotten in. Now as you kneel in the dirt next to your friend you begin the process of digging the holes to place the flowers into. But your friend is not helping! In fact, he’s sitting there with a tulip bulb in his hand. As you watch him he turns it over slowly in his hand and then carelessly tosses it over his shoulder before selecting another from the bag. He does this again and again, until finally you stop him and ask what he’s doing throwing these great tulip bulbs away! What would you say if his response was that these weren’t tulips at all because they didn’t look anything like a tulip. They weren’t even green!

Obviously you’d be shocked and a bit confused that your friend didn’t understand the potential these tulip bulbs held to become stunningly beautiful tulips…when they bloomed. You would have to explain to him that these seeds would turn into beautiful flowers, over time and with the proper care. They might not look like something beautiful now, but with the right care and love they would eventually grow to become a beautiful tulip. Lead nurturing should be done the same way. Lead nurturing must start early, well before your lead actually even looks like a lead. You have to nurture them with attention, love, and care. You have to understand the potential each lead has to become a beautiful customer.

2. Lead Nurturing Is Consistent

Continuing with our story in the garden, the tulips you planted are continually in need of care. You will need to water them regularly, ensure they get proper sunlight, and maintain ideal temperatures. In short, you have to care for their survival with constant and consistent attention. The same happens when you are nurturing leads in your marketing. You have to consistently water (sending timely information), you have to make sure they get proper sunlight (providing relevant information), and maintain ideal temperatures (offer easy ways to respond). Did you get those? Let me highlight them again and provide a sentence or two more detail on each.

Send Timely Information: Don’t flood new leads with information immediately upon the first time you make contact with them. Just like when watering a plant, you want to send information consistently over time. Nurture leads daily, weekly, or monthly as appropriate for your particular market or industry.

Provide Relevant Information: Don’t spam your leads with information that’s not relevant. You want to shed light on questions they have and provide answers to problems. You want to be sunshine and warmth for them in the sense of being an environment that encourages their growth and development. Continually.

Make Responses Easy: You want to be listening to your leads as you nurture them. You need to consistently provide ways for leads to become customers. This is the ideal temperature aspect of nurturing. If you provide a consistent way for leads to respond you give them an optimal “warm and fuzzy” feeling for growth and development.

3. Lead Nurturing Takes Time

The last thing to remember when nurturing leads is the important aspect that everything takes time. If you’ve ever planted anything before you know the results are not instant. You have to follow the process. You have to trust that the things you do day in and day out without seeing any immediate results are serving a purpose and doing something greater. You’ll see the results if you are consistent in following your processes. Your ongoing watering, providing relevant information, and making feedback easy should begin very early and must be consistent. You’ll see results over time. Now, some leads may be much faster to grow and bloom but most will take time.

Lead nurturing requires patient and persistent marketing.

I know one of my own biggest weaknesses is patience. I work all the time on being more patient and letting things unfold but it’s still a struggle I must face every day. Nurturing leads takes time. But let me be clear on this point about one thing. Just because this takes time does not mean passively waiting; instead we must do active waiting.

Lead Nurturing Software

Lead nurturing software like Mautic helps you accomplish these steps. No longer stress about being consistent or contacting each lead at the optimal time. With a strong lead nurturing platform you can automate the lead process and still personalize each point of contact with your potential customer. A lead management software system helps nurture leads by making you consistent in your approach. This is one of the greatest benefits to using a marketing automation and lead nurturing platform like Mautic. I know for myself, this struggling to be patient and consistent is one of my biggest problems and Mautic makes it easy to be both consistent in my lead contact and patient in my approach.

We must stay actively engaged in nurturing and growing a lead using the steps mentioned above. So don’t lose heart, don’t give up easy. Be consistent and be patient. And understand that nurturing your leads takes time. Water those leads and watch them bloom into an awesome customer!

Create Simple Forms

Your forms should be simple in nature. Don’t try to ask your user to fill out a 5 page form with a dozen fields on each page. Be smart about the information you want to collect and only ask for the pieces of info you really need. You may want to break it up into multiple forms if you have a lot of information you want. If you do this consider the possibility of sending the user to different forms at different times to keep the task from feeling overwhelming. Your lead forms should be quick and easy to fill out.

Create Beautiful Forms

You’ve heard that first impressions are important when meeting someone new. Well, this same philosophy holds true when talking about your website and your landing pages. Your landing pages are your first impression for your new site visitors. Your forms are the first interaction these visitors may have with you. You need to focus on keeping them simple, clean, and beautiful. Pay attention to your CSS and your use of images. Consider your site visitors when building your forms: Are they using a mobile device or a desktop? Are they on a fast internet connection or a cellular network? All of these things affect how beautiful your form is. Your website forms need to be optimized for speed, clarity, and readability.

Create Clear Form Button Names

There have been numerous studies and tests on form submissions based purely on the call-to-action button text. This text needs to be compelling but not pushy. You want to encourage the user to submit but not be in their face about it. The good news is you don’t have to panic about your button text. Sometimes the simplest wording is also the best. For example, “get” has proven to be highly effective for call-to-action buttons text. Keep your statements short and simple, don’t go over a dozen words (remember this is a button). If you’re interested in learning more here’s one article on button text and cta’s.

Pick Your Title Carefully

When you name your form (or title for your landing page) you want to use this opportunity to create a compelling story for your visitor. You should not be creating your forms and your landing pages just for a search engine. Remember that you’re working with people and human emotions and reactions. You want to target their interests and their behavior with your titles. Craft a title that speaks to people. This form title is the most read copy on your page and you should use your title to create an interest and a motivation to complete the form. What are you offering them as a result of their form submission? What is the value you are giving to them? Choose your words carefully and tell a story with your title. 

A/B Test Forms

Lastly, you should always A/B test your forms. This means creating two very similar versions of the same form and sending your users randomly to one of them. There is no perfect environment for A/B testing and there are some who would disagree with the value of creating these tests, however, while these tests may not provide immense value in fine-tuning a form they can be great help when massively overhauling a form design and layout. Don’t neglect the importance of reworking your forms based on user feedback, submissions, or interactions. Your lead forms should not be created once and then neglected or left alone. Always be looking for ways to improve your forms. Once you’ve found a lead form that works you should begin implementing small, incremental adjustments.

When you create your lead forms you want to keep this idea in mind: You are asking for trust from your user. You are asking them for information. You want them to give you something. When you do this you need to show them why they should feel safe to give you this information. You should make your landing pages, and your forms trustworthy and valuable. Give something to your visitors. Be open and honest. Your button text, your form title, and your form design all help make you more trustworthy. Now you’re ready to go and use these 5 tips to build amazing lead forms.

If you’re looking for more detail about lead management then be sure to check out this far more comprehensive step-by-step guide.

Transcript

These are the four roads that will lead to a better sales funnel. Not a comprehensive sales lead model but should get you started in the right direction.

1. The Right Technology

   • Know Your Needs: Before you can select the right technology you need to fully understand the problems you want this technology to solve.
   • Prepare to Scale: Don’t select the marketing software you will use based on your current situation. You expect to be successful; plan for the future.
   • Identify Your Costs: What you spend on the right technology is an investment in your future; identify what you will spend implementing marketing tech.

2. The Right Beginning

   • Sales Team: Sales teams and marketing teams must work together to create the best strategy for customer growth.
   • Marketing: Marketing begins when your business begins. There is no such thing as too early to begin marketing.
   • Audience: The identified target audience dictates a sales and marketing focus from the very beginning.

3. The Right Campaigns

   • Timing: Campaigns need to be bold in sharing the right information at the right times with your leads.
   • Repetition: Campaigns should always have a clear and distinct purpose or goal to be accomplished.
   • Purpose: Campaigns should be organized to execute at the ideal times.

4. The Right Reporting

   • Lead Tracking: Right reporting focuses on lead activity: such as time spent on page, pages visited, and social sharing.
   • Engagements: Reporting should include engagement activity between company and lead.
   • Conversions: Right reporting identifies which pages and forms provide the best conversions.

Need help with your lead management or other marketing help? Then Mautic is here for you! Just Download Mautic or Launch Your Demo.

How good is your lead management?

Lead management is one of the most well-known struggles in all of the marketing and sales world. How a business finds, nurtures, and generates leads is the topic of many conversations and a source of constant worry within a company. The process of managing these potential leads and converting them into customers takes time and much work. In this comprehensive article we are going to uncover what many businesses may be missing. We’ll begin by looking at the current tools that most businesses are using in their lead management.

Existing Tools Being Used

Examine each of these three tools and recognize how they are used. Identify which you are familiar with and see if the description below is how you also would use them. There is nothing inherently wrong with each of these tools and indeed many businesses find success with them. There is however, something missing.

The Timeless Contact Form

There are very few businesses who do not realize the importance of the internet. This is a great starting point and one which has become quite well-known today. One page which exists on almost every website is of course the infamous contact form. This form is used as a way for visitors to easily send a request for contact to the company. This is the equivalent of an old-school open door to a business’s brick-and-mortar store. Only it’s worse. This isn’t an open door to an entire store, but rather an open door to a sales person.

Unfortunately many seem to think this contact form is a fantastic piece of the lead management process. How many customers would be interested in knocking on a door to ask for a sales person? Not nearly as many as most companies would like. Still the contact form is one tool currently used for lead management by most businesses.

The Infamous Company Newsletter

This next current marketing tool is another vestige of old-school marketing. The newsletter is similar to the old mailers sent out by companies to all their existing customers. Today this mailer has turned from advertising to existing customers to attempting to advertise to new customers. This is due in part to statistics such as this:

70% of email readers open emails from a brand or company in search of a deal, discount, or coupon.
The Social Habit

These types of numbers are the reason why so many companies rely heavily on newsletters for generating new leads. But sending a generic newsletter is not the key of a strong lead management process. Indeed newsletters (emails) are a fantastic way of building a brand and keeping in contact with leads and customers alike, but newsletters alone are not a lead management process.

The Cutting Edge CRM

Those businesses working with customer relationship management tools are indeed the most advanced of these businesses using existing tools. These CRM tools let the business collect and organize their customers, manage data about their customers, and keep detailed records regarding each of these customers. The CRM works well for existing customers, and for manually entered leads.

A CRM can increase revenue by a whopping 41%!
Track Via

Many of these businesses do great things with sales teams focused around their CRM and they do well in their process. They do well, but perhaps they are still missing something. Perhaps even still they are lacking something. There is something missing from their lead management process.

The Lead Sales Funnel

Before we identify this missing piece of the sales lead management process let’s next look at the typical sales funnel and define each of the pieces of this process and the role it plays in the lead management process.

This sales funnel is a simplified version of everything implemented in a typical business marketing strategy. But even in this simplified form we can see the main aspects of this funnel. Let’s look at each stage in this funnel.

The Leads Stage

In this introductory stage you are simply looking to reach as many potential leads as possible. This is the widest of the stages and most broad form of marketing available to your business. You are seeking here to simply spread your name and your presence to your potential target market. This target market is every possible lead who may be interested in your products or services either now or at any point in the future.

The Prospect Stage

This is the very large and generic middle piece of the sales funnel. This is the prospect stage or the stage where you as a business must seek to engage new leads and persuade them to continue in the sale process. This is a smaller group of leads than the original general stage of all available target audience leads.

The Customers Stage

This is the desired outcome stage for all leads. The greater this stage of the funnel the better the business does. These are the leads who have been successfully converted from lead to a customer. This is the smallest of the stages and the most desired. This conversion is the stage where businesses tend to focus their time and attentions (obviously due to the direct relation to greater revenues).

Now that we have identified the three rather general stages of a sales funnel we must look at what is missing. What is the missing piece in a lead management funnel? Where do businesses fail to properly funnel their leads through the sales process?

Marketing Automation: The Missing Piece

Now let’s explore the missing piece of the lead management process. Marketing automation is a process which has been growing in popularity and usage. In fact, recently the statistic was shared,

“98% of all businesses are seeking to implement a dedicated marketing automation system.”
MediaPost

What an incredible percentage of businesses have recognized the power of marketing automation. This implies that the problem is not in failing to recognize the need for marketing automation but something else. Marketing automation, as stated earlier, is more than software. Marketing automation is a process. This is the missing piece of the lead management process. The implementation and execution of an automated marketing process is of utmost importance and requires a number of key steps. We will spend the next several sections looking at these steps and how to implement them.

New Visitors

The first area where marketing automation should be implemented involves new visitors. That’s right, the process of marketing automation begins even in the very top of the sales funnel (Leads/Target). Here is how marketing automation works with new visitors.

Contacting, Promoting & Marketing

The next part of the sales funnel where marketing automation helps involves contacting promoting, and marketing to leads and potential leads. Here we begin to filter down into the second stage of the lead funnel we’ve mentioned above (Prospects/Engage). This is the true power of marketing automation and the part of the funnel where marketing automation software and more importantly process is truly the missing piece for many. Here are a few ways this is executed.

Landing Pages

The landing pages are ways in which you can present relevant information to your leads as they visit your website. These dedicated landing pages are created for a specific purpose and with a specific call-to-action. We have written an article previously entitled, Landing Page Love, which gives details and examples of some great landing pages.

Forms

Remember when we spoke previously of the contact forms used by almost all businesses? These are in fact only one of the many types of forms which can be implemented and used by your marketing. These forms, rather than merely sending an email with the form submissions or collecting them in a single database, would serve to continue to fill-out the lead profiles for each of the visitors who submit the form. Dynamic forms that populate a lead profile are far, far more powerful than a mere submission-to-email form. These forms are also capable of building on top of each other and thus continue to build the lead’s profile as they fill out each form

Newsletters & Emails

The email and the newsletter is a powerful feature of marketing automation. Again, this involves much more than a stale monthly newsletter. As we now have established through the use of website tracking, landing pages, and forms to build a better lead profile we can now use that information to provide relevant information to each through the use of automated emails. More than just mail merge functionality however, marketing automation holds the power of multiple messages based on specific decisions and triggers

This is where marketing automation becomes dominant. This is the heart of the missing piece of the lead management process. This strategy involves multiple points of contact done at just the right time, and without direct involvement from your sales team.

Businesses who increase the number of times contacting a lead from 1 to 8 show a massive increase in contact ratios.
Ken Krogue

Integrate Everything

More than merely implementing a marketing automation tool the marketing automation process must be work closely with all the other aspects of your marketing strategy. As you should hopefully see, marketing automation processes should involve every stage of your sales funnel and work to provide a cohesive sales and marketing strategy. Being comprehensive means integrating marketing automation with the various other tools already in use in marketing. Here are a few ways marketing automation should be integrated:

1. With Your Website

Your marketing automation software and processes must integrate with your website. The reasons for this integration are many and can be seen in several ways above. Notice how the tracking pixel is integrated into the lead profile building process. Integrations with your website help make your marketing process a seamless experience for your leads.

2. With Your Forms

Again, as mentioned previously, integrating your marketing automation with your forms enables you to build robust lead profiles and continue the process of creating potential customers. Mautic helps in this regard through CMS-specific plugin which allow the dynamic insertion of forms directly within your website. These forms submit information directly back to the marketing automation platform.

3. With Your Email

Marketing automation must integrate deeply with your email marketing efforts. Integrating these two platforms has not been done often due to the silo that SaaS marketing automation tools employ. Mautic, as an open source platform, allows you to select the email marketing software of your choosing and integrate directly. This puts the power of your email within your marketing automation platform. This is a new level of integration and puts you firmly in control of your entire marketing process. Your lead management process begins to become complete.

4. With Your CRM

The final integration mentioned here is one which most marketing automation tools use and deem to be of high importance. A good marketing automation platform should integrate with your CRM. This is on the other end of the sales funnel. Marketing automation truly stretches the entire length of the funnel. At this end of the sales funnel and lead management process the marketing automation tool will finally integrate your now qualified leads with your CRM tool. Now, when your sales team opens their CRM dashboard they are greeted with a list of highly qualified “hot” leads ready to be personally contacted. You will notice this is the first time your sales team must directly contact potential leads. This marketing automation process must integrate with your CRM. Mautic allows you to integrate with any number of popular CRM systems and offers a powerful API for other integrations as well.

Marketing automation has historically had a problem with poor integrations* (VentureBeat) and as a result has found a somewhat difficult time being truly successful.

By the way, Mautic offers dozens of integrations and the open source nature of the code ensures that an unlimited number of additional integrations can (and will be) created.

Don’t Give Up

It is at this point that a word of caution and encouragement should be offered. Proper marketing automation, lead management, and sales funnel completions take time and energy. Very few businesses find overnight success as a result of their lead management process. Remember this statistic,

“79 percent of marketing leads never convert to sales”
HubSpot

“Once it’s up and running, a successful long-term content marketing plan will pay lifelong dividends . If you don’t see those immediately, don’t despair. Just focus on providing your followers with the most engaging content possible.” Forbes

So, don’t lose heart. Don’t give up. Keep providing strong, relevant content and information. Trust in the process of your sales funnel and your marketing automation and continue to pursue your target audience. As the article above states, remember this is a long-term commitment and not a short campaign.

Refine Your Strategies

Now, while you should not lose heart, and you should continue in your efforts you should also refine your lead management strategies. You should focus your sales funnel and you should constantly seek to improve your lead processes. There are a number of ways in which you can be sure your strategies are most effective.

1. Implementing A/B Testing

Marketing automation platforms, like Mautic, allow you to create multiple page versions for landing pages and emails. These A/B tests help you to determine which pages are most effective in converting leads. If you are new to A/B testing, here is a short MauticMinuteTM video to help explain the concept.

It is not a difficult job and one which will lead to wonderful improvements in your return should they be handled correctly. Don’t neglect this opportunity to maximize your return on investments and ultimately improve your lead management and sales funnel.

2. Continue Improving

Once you have identified ways to improve your content, your marketing, and your sales funnel you must do everything you can to continue improving them. Don’t simply identify improvements – implement them! Always be seeking improvements and make the most of your marketing automation process.

Reviewing the Funnel

You have now covered the sales funnel from the broadest aspects of your anonymous, targeted leads all the way to your highly qualified list of hot leads ready for personal contact. You have seen how the marketing automation process is the missing piece of your lead management and how to remedy this problem. The solution lies not in finding the software solution but in implementing the best processes involving every stage of your lead management sales funnel. Remember these key steps:

1. Marketing automation improves lead management at the highest level of the sales funnel.
2. Marketing automation offers ongoing contact and lead nurturing in the prospecting stage of the lead management process.
3. Marketing automation seamlessly integrates with CRM systems to migrate leads ready for direct, personal contact.

Implement these recommendations for your marketing automation process into your sales lead management and you’ll find the missing piece to your sales funnel.

If you’re looking for a marketing automation tool which can support and grow your B2B marketing efforts we recommend you take a quick look at Mautic, which provides cutting-edge features, an intuitive interface and a solid platform to help you turn suggested marketing tactics into actionable campaigns, informative landing pages, and ongoing email marketing.

The realization that the activities one performs in the solitude of their home or office are actually public, is somehow a shock to many individuals. This is an all too common response for many consumers, especially those working outside of a technical industry. It is easy to feel distant and anonymous behind the shield of the computer screen. One no longer needs to interact on a face-to-face level in order to make purchases or schedule services, but this does not mean that you are in a private space. Many are scared of the idea that they are somehow being snooped on and that utilizing public information is an invasion of privacy.

Global Network

The internet is a global network, a shared public space where anyone can see anyone, if you choose to look. Online activity is interpreted into motivational values and in essence, a digital interpretation of consumer body language. Online consumers explore the expanse of goods, services and investments by traversing the spectrum of commerce websites. In a retail situation, real time feedback has always been the marketer’s best analysis, that is, with the proper tools and insight to turn it into sales. The A/B testing of item placement, color, interact-ability , and so on, is clear and instantaneous. So how does an online merchant or marketer view this feedback or “body language”?

Real Life Example

Picture this scenario. A shopper stands in a store and browses the items on display. Anyone who has ever worked in face to face sales knows what their gestures suggest about their acceptance or disapproval of that product. The sales person watches the customer pickup, touch, feel, and examine the product to see if this meets their requirements. The question is, what factors are at play in the consumer’s decision making and how does one gauge that process online?

In short, the first often unconscious, question the observer asks is “do I need this”, or does this at least catch my attention, a strategy often implemented by corporations selling mundane products. However, upon seeing the prospective client react to their experience of interaction with their potential acquisition, the retailer is able to change and adapt to the customer’s desired experience and an ever fluctuating market. This merchant-consumer relationship is what drives business and creates satisfied customers. So how does one apply these concepts to an online business?

Maintain Relationship Integrity

The most effective tools for maintaining the integrity of this relationship are those which collate information on web activity into consumer profiles. Whether the profile is used for lead tracking, nurturing, automation, or even individual sales, understanding your customer is always the first step to getting your product in their hands.

Marketing automation has brought real-time feedback into the online market. Based on the profile, associated values for different actions, and campaigns built to reach the customers who might truly want your product, the A/B testing of the shopkeeper’s careful observation has come back into play. Whether a sale is face-to-face or digital, it is always the same on some level. Each party has something that the other wants, and the exchange of goods is an active agreement to stand behind your product or service with pride.

People Matter

The internet may be dehumanizing and disconnected, but the human brain has not changed, nor has its expectations of the consumer relationship. We all understand that in order to grow, improve and succeed, one must continuously adapt and test new strategies. Gauge the customer’s response, interact with them on a personal or emotional level, and most importantly, meet them where they are in their lives (interest, need vs. want, price, purpose, energy level, etc.) Always engage, always improve, and always remember that no matter how different technology makes the world seem, people are the heart of a business, and that will never change.

How are you reading your customer’s body language?