Marketing automation and fine tuning your sales funnel should be on every business owner’s radar.
Marketing automation isn’t just for e-commerce or digital product sites. If you have a contact form that you depend on for leads — that’s the start of your funnel. In today’s startup world, we have a metric ton of data at our disposal. There are common 3rd party sources like, Google Analytics or MixPanel. We’re able to track user actions and place triggers for events from the likes of the Stream WordPress plugin by X-Team.
So, what do we do with all of this data?
We can port it all to a single reporting platform like SumAll or create our own custom analytics reports like my friend Brian does.
If you’re like me, you find yourself asking the more straightforward question, “Where did this lead come from and what pages did they view on my site before contacting me?”
Welcome the latest plugin on the block, LeadIn.
I had the chance to meet the founders of this plugin at the local Boston WordPress meetup. They are located inside HubSpot (A proprietary marketing platform business) and part of their accelerator program for early startups.
Andrew and Nelson just released version 2 with a host of improvements and new features. I finally had the chance to check it out and it looks very promising.
LeadIn Plugin Review
I might be bias, but I’m over complex plugins, especially those for my marketing/sales needs.
I don’t want a million data points or complex actions/triggers to setup. I want purpose-built solutions. That said, I realize that adds complexity on the reporting end. When we start using a variety of tools, we have to look in a variety of places. This is why custom data reports can be complex and dashboarding platforms are a dime-a-dozen.
So far, Leadin looks to be doing a great job at giving me just enough and that’s the challenge they will face as it matures.
How to use LeadIn
Here’s a basic overview of how LeadIn will help you understand your visitors and gain valuable insights on how they found you.
A quick video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6mcaoNrBCM&feature=youtu.be
Here’s a fun edge case for LeadIn. In this video I show you the funnel someone took to cold e-mail me their product idea.
The Basic Notification
- Lead visits your site.
- Lead browses through pages to a contact form.
- Lead submits the form, including e-mail address, you are notified of their funnel.
In my test site above, you can see that I came in from a direct source, browsed some pages to the contact form and then submitted the form. I receive that for every “lead” into the system.
The notification serves as a great quick overview for this new lead. There’s also something very gratifying about getting this data in my inbox.
Time to tag!
Tagging
Tagging is a smart way to group your leads. For example, if you sold a product online and had a pre-sales question form. One lead would be, a lead, the other would be a customer. Perfect for organizing your follow ups and understanding which segments are converting well.
If you’re selling many products or have various funnel sources, tagging will help organize the various segments. You can create as many tags as you wish and assign your leads to multiple tags.
Now that the lead is captured, what’s next?
Visitor history
In my opinion, this is the bread and butter of the LeadIn plugin.
LeadIn provides a clean and intuitive way for us to explore the traffic of a returning visitor. Here’s a few examples of why this is important:
- Understanding how a visitor found your site. If you’re wondering which articles are ranking well in Google or if that guest blog post worked from months ago.
- Repeat customers might keep returning to the same product page or blog posts. Have they converted yet?
- Understand the usability of your site. Are your visitors finding relevant additional content after they hit your homepage?
That’s just a few of the reasons understanding traffic to your WordPress site can help.
Conclusion
There are a lot of tools out there and finding the right one isn’t easy.
LeadIn is still young and I expect some amazing things to come from this plugin. My only concern is that it’s under the umbrella of Hubspot, so, it should be interesting to see how it monetizes. Especially if any of the monetization comes with the cross-sell of users moving to the HubSpot system.
Aside from that, it’s still early days for LeadIn, even if it just hit version 2. Their “power ups” more commonly referred to as add-ons have a nifty corner pop-up that you can sync up to your Mailchimp. Albeit a bit confusing on how to set it up, it works like a charm once you have it there.
I’ll be using LeadIn moving forward to hone in on my marketing efforts for Slocum Themes and our up and coming Conductor plugin.
“LeadIn: Deep Dive Walkthrough and Setup” video is only available to Matt Report Pro members.
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