Posted by Scott Mon, 18 Jun 2007 04:56:00 GMT
Say you want to send a postcard to each of your best customers and you have tagged them all with “green”.
Now, with one easy click, you can create a spreadsheet to ship to your postcard vendor.
As always, thanks for your support and keep those good ideas coming by email at comments [at] synapsoftware.com.
Posted by Scott Tue, 08 May 2007 15:32:00 GMT
Your lead management software, LeadsOnRails, is growing. We quadrupled our processing and storage power last night in a successful upgrade. This means more speed and performance for you!
Posted by Scott Tue, 08 May 2007 15:31:00 GMT
You can now use Textile formatting when entering comments in LeadsOnRails.
Textile is a formatting markup that lets you do things like bold, italics, and lists:
Common Tags
When typing in a Textile enabled field, you can use these commands or “tags” to format how the text will be displayed. For example, enclose Textile enabled text in astericks and it will be displayed as bold.
*bold* _italics_ # List item 1 # List item 2 # List item 3 * An item * Another * Another
Or Just Simply Type
Even without using textile tags, you will see a difference because line breaks you enter will show up when the content is displayed.
Posted by Scott Fri, 04 May 2007 20:30:00 GMT
We’ve recently made these small enhancements to LeadsOnRails.
Sorted Tag List – The tag list is now sorted alphabetically.
Tag Counts – The list now shows how many leads are tagged with each tag. That is the new number in parenthesis that you see next to each tag on the tag list.
Sorted Tag Dropdown – For our users with dozens of tags.
Improved pagination helpers – For example: instead of just Previous Page | Next Page, now have
Posted by Scott Sat, 28 Apr 2007 18:32:00 GMT
As LeadsOnRails continues to grow I keep a constant watch on the application’s log files to identify potential performance bottle-necks. I found one and have made a small configuration change today. (The technical detail is that we added an additional index to the database.) This change does not affect you as a user at all other than you should see a more responsive application.
Posted by Scott Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:41:00 GMT
“Make hay when the sun shines” is how the old saying goes. When things are going well is when you want to be working on keeping it that way. LeadsOnRails has been running smoothly, and we want to keep it that way. We know you count on LeadsOnRails every day, so we proudly make this system announcement.
We will be expanding the hardware on which the LeadsOnRails lead management software runs. Within a week we will have four (4!) times the total memory and RAM. This technical boost means LeadsOnRails will continue to operate smoothly even as your use of the toolset grows!
As always, “Thanks” for the continue support.
Posted by Scott Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:36:00 GMT
We are adding Textile formatting starting today with Track Descriptions. Textile is a formatting markup that lets you do things like bold, italics, and lists:
Common Tags
When typing in a Textile enabled field, you can use these commands or “tags” to format how the text will be displayed. For example, enclose Textile enabled text in astericks and it will be displayed as bold.
*bold* _italics_ # List item 1 # List item 2 # List item 3 * An item * Another * Another
Or Just Simply Type
Even without using textile tags, you will see a difference because line breaks you enter will show up when the content is displayed.
Watch for new formatting to be added to comments tomorrow.
Posted by Scott Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:24:00 GMT
We have at least one demo user that is looking at LeadsOnRails as a process workflow tool independent of lead management, per se. I think that is a great idea. LeadsOnrails Tracks and Steps are great for small business marketing teams that see the benefit of supporting a consistent marketing message. It turns out that the same capabilities provide value in other workflow situations.
If you are using LeadsOnRails for lead management, consider if there are other small business workflow management tasks that you could put into LeadsOnRails giving you a chance to move a step toward a single toolset for tracking your activity.
Posted by Scott Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:42:00 GMT
I received a note from Barry Hess at Scrawlers reminding me that I signed up for a Scrawlers account, but had yet not logged in. (Scrawlers “embraces constraints” through stories of 100 words or less). I promptly signed in and posted my first three lines to Scrawlers that afternoon.
That email was a good example of the importance of occasional updates to your leads: your new and trial users who sometimes sign up, take a quick look, make a mental note to come back later, and then just forget to. The timing, content, and delivery of these emails visits, postcards, or calls is at the heart of your lead management efforts.
Contact Managers vs. Lead Management Software
Barry’s was a simple email from his email client, I suspect. But what happens when he grows to hundreds and thousands of new users?
Maybe you are already there. That is where you start looking for small business lead management and contact management tools.
There are hundreds of tools available for online contact management and you could use one of those as your lead management software. But then you’d miss out on features that make for more effective lead management.
I’ve put together a quick list. The image at left is a preview of lead management software features.
Click here for a comparison of lead management software and contact management software.
Useful Reminders Work
The Scrawlers reminder prompted a new active user. After we at Synap Software send emails updates to trial users we always see login activity to accounts that had been inactive for a bit. Our reminder emails typically have useful information about a lead management feature or a small tutorial on lead management. This information both informs and reminds trial users why they initially had an interest in our lead management product. [Note: We do not monitor our users’ detailed use of the system, but do monitor login activity and user counts to help provide better service and understand aggregate usage patterns.]
How to Set Up Trial-Users Reminders in LeadsOnRails
Whether selling online products, offline products, or services you should offer a free-trial or free version of your product or service. (See step 4 of this article.) Users of your free trial are your leads. Input each lead into LeadsOnRails for effective lead management.
Create a message template for each step in the trial process, right up to trial expired. Each message should have a userful bit of information about your customers’ industry as well as a reminder of how your product relates.
Then, when you have completed the message templates, set up a track like this. Put the appropriate amount of days between each step, depending on how long your free trial or free service runs until you expect to convert or upsell a customer. Maybe your lead management scenario is months, weeks or days. If you are a LeadsOnRails user, you’ve experienced the receiving side of this lead management process.
Put Trial Users On Track
Now, simply assign leads that are using your free trial to this track and your trial-user lead management process will be on automatic, helping you deliver the right message at the right time.
Do you use trail-user management, lead management, or contact management software to keep your trial- and new-users informed and reminded of your product? We’d love to hear any experiences of how it’s worked out.
LeadsOnRails.com continues to be focusses on turning leads into sales. Over the next month we expect LeadsOnRails to take some huge leaps in being a complete lead acquisition, lead nurturing, and lead management solutions. Our vision is for LeadsOnRails to help you with most of the steps discussed in the article 7 Steps to Improve Small Business Marketing Results. Stay tuned!
Posted by Scott Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:47:00 GMT
Today we release a lead measurement report as a part of new tools to help you will gain additional insight into indicators of your company’s marketing success.
By managing leads in LeadsOnRails lead management software, you are not only building a consistent marketing system, you are also capturing valuable information that will help you tune marketing and lead management efforts over time.
Starting with the very first release, LeadsOnRails has provided a “Pipeline Overview” that shows users the number of leads at each step of each track (a LeadsOnRails “track” is a treatment, or series of steps your lead goes through).
The Pipeline Overview is a great way to get visibility into where marketing and lead management efforts have bottlenecks. If you see a high number or leads stacking up on a given step, it is time to investigate that step and/or the person responsible for completing it.
New: Marketing Measure
While the Pipeline Overview helps you keep things moving, the new Marketing Measure helps you see what lead sources result in value and which ones do not.
Here is an example. (This is not real data.)
You can open the details behind this report by clicking the “see report details” link. Open the detailed report to see performance by source.
During its introduction, this report is found on your Dashboard. (Because not everyone will use it, it will soon become an item optionally moved to a new reports section).
How to Set It Up
Not all leads get captured into the new report. Only those assigned to both a source and a stage are included in the new measurement.
Source Here are some example sources.
If you want to use the new report you will first create some entries into the Source list. Click on Source in the Setup menu now. Source is important because it is where you specify your costs. If a lead source or offer results in high conversion rate, but also carries a high cost, that source may not be as effective as you first think.
Make sure to try to include all costs, including your time to make a call, write a blog entry, etc.
Fixed Cost
Some sources have fixed costs that are the same regardless of the number of leads generated from the source. Yellow Pages advertisement, booth at a show, etc. Enter the fixed cost component of this source or offer here.
Per Lead Cost
Some sources have a cost per lead, whether it is the cost to acquire the lead or the cost of each postcard sent out, for example. Enter this incremental cost here.
Enter source information into your account, save it and we are ready to look at stages.
Stage
You assign each stage a value. The represents the likelihood of conversion at that stage. This may be a guessing game at first, but as time goes on LeadsOnRails will gain a new feature that will actually be able to self-monitor the stage % value based on previous results.
Lead Value
Each lead record can be assigned an estimated value. What amount do you think the product or service the lead would purchase is worth? At each stage, this value is multiplied by the Stage value to give a present value. (e.g. If a lead has an estimated value of $1,000 and currently has a 50 likelihood, then its present value, for this purpose, is $500).
To enter a lead value, scroll down to the new ‘Opportunity’ section when entering or editing a lead. Look for this:
What Happened to the Old ‘Source’ Field?
For accurate reporting among your leads, the source field needed to become a dropdown list of choices. The lead field formerly known as ‘source’ has simply been renamed to ‘referred by’ and no data has been lost.
Try it Out
Create some source and stage entries in setup, and then assign some leads a source, stage and value. Don’t forget to make sure each lead has a value assigned or they will not show on the Marketing Measure report.
Do you find this useful? Do you have certain data you would like to see in the reports that are being developed now? Let us know.
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