A New, Powerful Advantage: Marketing & Sales Automation for Security Dealers and Systems Integrators

It’s a new year, and our team is especially excited about helping dealers and integrators Ignite their RMR in 2017.

One of the many inbound lead generation methods available to our clients this year is marketing and sales automation. In this multi part series, we’ll be discussing some of the specific marketing automation strategies that we are implementing to empower your sales team to close more sales and shorten the sales cycle. In this post, we’ll be talking about a powerful application of marketing automation: site tracking.

What Is Site Tracking?

Site Tracking ties your contact’s behavior on your website so our marketing and your sales processes can react and adapt in real-time to the behavior of individual contacts.

The purpose of site tracking with marketing automation is simple: Get the right message to the right contact at the right time.

We begin by collecting page view data on each visitor to your website. This data is anonymous (and inaccessible) until a visitor is identified by opting-in to your list, then all page views that have been collected up to that point are automatically attached to their contact record and subsequent page views are tracked and reported in real-time.

With a time stamped history of each web page a contact visited on your site, you’ll know:

– when they visited

– how many times

– the paths they’ve taken

Each of your contacts becomes a rich case study when Site Tracking page view data is combined with all the other data that our marketing automation platform provides — Location History, Event Tracking, Activities History, the contact’s social network profiles, and any tags or notes you’ve applied.

Isn’t this the same as Google Analytics?

Google Analytics and similar services report statistics on anonymous groups of visitors while Site Tracking with Ignite RMR lets you see exactly what a specific contact has (or hasn’t) done on your website. Statistics are a great way to identify trends in large volumes of data, and are popular for good reasons, but individual case studies are an underrated resource for creating detailed profiles, forming hypotheses, and examining exceptions to rules. The two approaches to data analysis complement each other giving you a more complete picture of who your target market is and how people are interacting with your website.

Know exactly what your contacts want from you.

You can make two extremely valuable assumptions about a contact based on their page views:

1.) What they are interested in

The links a contact chooses to click tell you what they are looking for and what content on your website is most important to them.

2.) The amount of interest they have

Repeat page views and, especially, repeat visits to pages indicate increased interest in that content. Someone who has viewed a product page five times during three visits to your site is probably more interested than someone who has viewed it once.

It is good “to know,” better “to do…”

Beyond just “good to know,” this data is actionable. Site Tracking becomes even more useful when this behavioral data is used to trigger Automations. Our marketing automation platform can “see” what a visitor is doing and perform actions based on that behavior opening up all kinds of possibilities for marketing automation and creating a truly personalized experience.

Site Tracking Applications for New Prospects

Here are a few things that we can do to generate new leads with site tracking:  

  • Email a discount code to a contact who has visited a product page two or more times.
  • Check in with a contact who has viewed a product six times (but not yet purchased) to find out if they have any questions or issues — helping you identify barriers to purchase while providing excellent service.
  • Increase a lead’s score 1 point for each page view and 2 points per visit. When their score reaches 20 points, Ignite RMR creates and assigns a task to notify your salesperson it would be a good time to give the contact a call.
  • Send a contact a personalized “thank you” note two hours after they reach the confirmation page of your website’s “tell-a-friend” feature.
  • If someone is referred to your site from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you could begin an automation that invites them to follow you on your social media accounts.
  • Tag visitors to a specific web page detailing a free webinar you are holding and then begin a sequence of follow-up emails to give them more information as it draws nearer, remind them when it is live, and ask for feedback when it is over. By redirecting attendees to the webinar through a page on your site you can tag them as such (you could also apply this tag using “Clicks a link in email”).

 

Site Tracking For Your Existing Subscribers

Your existing customers are just as important as new leads. Ignite RMR can:

  • Send a contact a short “Do you have any questions/How can I help you?” message if they repeatedly visit your FAQ and product documentation pages after a purchase.
  • Trigger a “new customer” Automation following a purchase that increases customer satisfaction by delivering a timed sequence of messages including product-use tips, asks for a review of the product after they’ve had it a week, gives them a discount toward future purchases, and suggests other products they may be interested in.

Give your contacts more of what they want.

In addition to reacting to what is happening on your website in real-time, we can use your contact’s page view history to further segment your lists. For instance, you might have a sale on a product that would not appeal to everyone on your list. With Site Tracking data you can send an email to only those contacts that have viewed the product (or that category of product). Or, you could send additional content on the same topic a visitor has indicated interest in while browsing your site.

This kind of segmentation helps keep your list as responsive as possible and contributes to a strong, positive relationship.

Your contacts will come to expect that a message from your company will contain relevant content that appeals to them — increasing your open and interaction rates while reducing unsubscribes.

Putting it to use…

One useful application of Site Tracking data is an Automation that tags your contacts if they view important pages of your website multiple times.

For example, we can apply different tags based on the number of visits. If a contact visits a page about smart home lighting two to five times we could tag them as “Interested in Smart Lighting.” If they go on to visit six or more times we could remove that tag and retag them as “Very Interested in Smart Lighting.”

We can then use these tags to:

  1. Send precisely targeted messages about Smart Lighting and Z-Wave related products.

When sending out campaigns we send messages to only those contacts who are tagged as interested in those products.

  1. Customize emails with Conditional Content

We can tailor a message to display the products they find most appealing. For instance, if you are having a promotional sales we could mention specific products they’ve demonstrated interest in:

“We are having a 20% off sale this month. This is your chance to save on Smart Home services like:”

– “Smart Lighting”

– “Smart Thermostats”

– “Smart Locks”

  1. Gain additional analytical insights

By running reports on contacts with these tags you can know which products each of your lists is most interested in. These numbers will be different than those of your analytics service (unless you’ve configured your analytics to segment based on your lists of subscribers) which will report page view numbers biased by which products are doing well in the search engines, or linked to most often, and so will not necessarily reflect the interests of your contacts.

  1. Begin other automations

By using “Tag is added” as the trigger to begin a new automation, we can pick up where this one leaves off. We could begin a series of follow-up messages that treats the contact slightly different depending on how they are tagged or move the contact into another one of your sales processes.

Marketing & sales automation is complicated art and science. Our expert team here at Ignite RMR have invested hundreds of hours of research, training, and client implementation to make this new technology work for our clients: security dealers and systems integrators. For a free demo and consultation, please contact us today. We’ll discuss your growth goals and how our marketing automation strategies can help your sales team thrive in 2017.

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How Dealers Can Improve Retention With Sales Force Automation

Sales reps for security & integration companies have a lot of tasks to juggle and entering data into a CRM is usually the second to last on the list of to-dos. The last on the list is usually creating tasks for follow up so that managers have visibility into sales pipelines.

With a growing audience and leads are pouring in, your sales team may be having a hard time keeping up. While it’s a great problem to have, you also don’t want to short-change the amount of follow-up and guidance your sales team is able to provide to interested prospects.

Thankfully, Ignite RMR provides marketing automation and CRM tools & services that can help automate part of the sales process.

Our sales automation services allow your reps to spend more time with prospects who are ready to buy by freeing up the time previously spent chasing cold leads. Leads that aren’t ready to buy aren’t ignored – instead, they’re carefully nurtured.

Sales and marketing automation ensure that teams work together, and no leads or customers fall through the cracks.

What is Sales Force Automation?

Sales automation sometimes shortened to SFA (sales force automation), is an integrated service that automates frequent sales processes and tasks such as tracking customer interactions, as well as analyzing sales performance and forecasts.

Sales force automation services provided by Ignite RMR come with a web accessible and mobile app database, an email application, tracking software, and sales email templates.

Some SFA features can include:

  • Salesperson tasks and goals tracking
  • Customer contact records
  • Appointment scheduling and tracking
  • Lead scoring and assignment
  • Workflow management

While previously you may have needed separate applications for sales automation and customer relationship management, Ignite RMR offers an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform that includes a variety of sales automation tools.

Getting Started With Sales Force Automation

Despite being supported by an inbound marketing team that specializes in the security industry, like most aspects of successful Sales and Marketing, you need to take a step back and ensure you have a solid plan for how you want to sales force automation to enable your business.

Ignite RMR marketing automation services can enhance your strategies and bring greater efficiency and reliability to your sales teams execution, but you should be sure to know your sales process first.

During our initial marketing assessments, we will help you answer questions like:

  • How will you want to automatically assign leads to your reps?  Round robin? Based on geography? etc.
  • What sales tasks do you want to create based on demonstrated prospect interest?  Send a follow-email? Alert a sales team member?
  • How would you like to increase (or decrease) lead scores based on initial interest from your prospects (website interactions, sales emails, etc.)?

Once you’ve got an idea of what you’d like to accomplish, we can begin the process of setting up your sales force automations.

Setting Up Your Sales and Marketing Automations

For this example, let’s assume that you’d like to automate the sales process once a lead visits your website and signs up to receive additional information about your offerings.

What should the automated workflow (aka your “automation”) accomplish?

  • It should automatically send a thank you email, acknowledging the prospect’s form submission and interest
  • It should tag the lead with information about the submission (site page, demonstrated interest, etc.) within the CRM so that your sales team can easily segment this contact and understand where they come from
  • It should assign active leads to your sales rep for personal follow-up
  • It should send a follow-up email to the prospect and alert their assigned sales team member if a link is clicked
  • It should increase the lead’s score based on the email open and click activity

Now that we have laid out exactly what processes we want to be automated, it’s time to create our automation.

Creating the Automation

Using our marketing automation services, Ignite RMR constructs actions and triggers to create a new sales force automation workflow. Here is an example of how this could be set this up in our system:

illustration-source-automation

When a lead submits their information through a contact form, we apply a “requested more information” tag and send an email for more information. From here, the automation wait until a link is clicked in the email. If no link is clicked within 3 days, the automation will send a follow up email on day 4.

If the lead opens and clicks a link in the initial email, it will alert your sales team, increase the prospects lead score, and send a follow up email. From here, the sales team could make a determination of how hot the lead is and schedule additional follow-ups.

Now you have assurance that all of these “we should…” tactics in your plan will happen automatically.

Automation After the Sale

It’s easy to see how sales force automation benefits your team during initial sales stages, but what about the engagement and retention stages for new & existing customers/ subscribers?

illustration-source-automation-follow-up

Benefits of using sales force automation for customers:

Instead of having your sales team or customer success team create tasks to check in with customers, Ignite RMR will create a workflow via marketing automation that automatically does this for them.

One popular schedule includes creating automated check-ins at 30, 60, 90 days and beyond to make sure customers are happy and gather feedback. Much like during the initial sales process, automating these steps will help your sales team feel less overwhelmed while still keeping your customers happy.

Other ways to use automation after the initial sale

There are a variety of ways that clients of Ignite RMR can use automation to increase the productivity of their sales force.

  • Use lead scoring to build a segment of purchasers who have bought more than one product or become repeat customers.
  • Send automated emails to customers to cross-sell and/or upsell them based on information in their CRM profile.
  • Use CRM tags to mark customers who have cancelled or paused their account with your billing department. Send automated emails to these customers to ask them why they decided to cancel and what could your business do to improve for the future.

The ultimate goal of sales force automation is to increase productivity of your sales team and make sure no leads or customers fall through the cracks.

Ignite RMR is a leading provider of inbound marketing & sales force automation services for dealers and integrators nationwide. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation and demo of our inbound marketing platform.

 

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How Integrators Can Identify Hot Prospects & Close Sales Faster

For integrators who rely on sales of gross margin projects, staying top-of-mind with decisions makers can more than a little challenging. It’s difficult to tell when these prospects are engaged and when they are ready to buy. Often, this can lead to frustrating sales meetings, or worse – lost opportunities. 

Fortunately, Ignite RMR is one of the few security marketing companies in the nation who can offer a solution: Lead Scoring.

A good lead scoring model can help you prioritize leads by:

  1. how likely they are to purchase,
  2. purchase size, and
  3. purchase timeframe

… so your sales team is always focused on the hottest, biggest prospects. This works well for both residential and commercial sales teams.

You can also use a lead scoring system to:

Identify and target leads that need nurturing — Lower scoring leads may need additional nurturing to increase their interest and engagement. With our marketing automation, you can segment your leads with a range of scores and drop them into nurturing campaigns built specifically to develop them into sales-ready leads.

Test assumptions about your target market and sales process — How well do you understand the characteristics of your customers and the pattern of behavior that leads to a purchase? You can think of your lead scoring as a predictive model and continue to refine and improve it over time. If it’s accurate, you can use the leads in your pipeline to forecast your revenue.

Identify your “raving fans” and “net promoters” — Lead scoring tools can be used to track the engagement of your customers over time, so you identify extremely satisfied, highly-engaged fans of your alarm company. These customers are often ready to recommend you when the opportunity presents itself, and you can encourage that with automated campaigns. These champions of your company deserve a little special treatment.

Standardize how leads are discussed and evaluated — By giving marketing and sales a common language for discussing the quality and quantity of leads, they’ll naturally align themselves. Marketing will have a numerical value of how important each lead factor is, and they can alter their inbound marketing to target specific factors to generate more leads that match specific criteria.

Further refine your marketing messages — You may find that your best leads respond to slightly different marketing. By segmenting those contacts that are the best match for your business, you can test different approaches that might not work for less interested leads. You may be able to contact these leads more often or be more aggressive with your calls to action.

Ignite RMR now supports lead scoring on our Dealer Marketing Premium plan. Lead scoring solves an important problem… it keeps your security sales team focused on only your best opportunities, so they aren’t wasting time on dead end leads. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation.

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