What B2B Marketers Need to Know About Customer Retention

Although you wouldn't know it after a particularly poor customer service interaction (we've all been there), most organizations really are invested in keeping customers happy. It costs about 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to generate new business from an existing customer. Additionally, happy customers are the ones who will refer you new business -- a less costly method of lead generation, not to mention an easier close for your sales organization. In fact, in a Loyalty360 survey, three quarters of respondents reported that 20% of their new sales come from current customers.

But when you think about customer loyalty, it seems hard to apply many of the tried and true programs to B2B organizations. Punch cards, points, rewards programs -- customer loyalty seems like a game only B2C marketers can play in. But really, customer loyalty is alive and well with B2B marketers; they simply must move away from the mindset that they should design specific customer loyalty programs, to a broader customer retention mindset.

Challenges to B2B Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is no simple feat -- consider these common challenges that B2B marketers often face when trying to reduce churn.

• Higher Price Point - Many B2B organizations are selling a product or service at a high price point, which means in a tight economy where budgets are always under close scrutiny, your business' product/service could be the next expense to get cut.
• Longer Buying Cycle - If you get cut from a customer's budget, you can't quickly recover with the longer sales cycles typical of many B2B organizations.
• Employee Turnover - The employee(s) at your customer's organization that manage your product or relationship could leave. If they are the only one(s) who know(s) how to use your product, or they were acting as an evangelist of your product or service within their organization, the value you provide could be quickly lost.

It seems the role of the B2B marketer looking to improve customer loyalty is to consider pleasing not the individuals at a company, but the business as a whole. How do you create a company, website, product, or service that makes an organization stick with you forever?

Customer Retention Metrics to Watch

We would be remiss to send you off on a mission to improve customer retention without telling you how you can measure your effectiveness. Here are some metrics you can watch to determine if your attempts at improving customer loyalty are actually working.

Customer Retention Rate - This metric tells you how long your customers stay with you. Start by establishing this as a baseline metric so you know whether your efforts are improving your retention rate over time. How you calculate this number will depend on your business model -- CRM Trends provides a great breakdown of how to go about determining this number for your business if you haven't done so already; click here and scroll to the section titled 'Retention Rate' for its formula and explanation.

There is such a thing as negative churn, too, which is actually a good thing, despite the name's implications. Negative churn is when a current customer upgrades or buys additional services from you, and it can offset any other churn you see from customers leaving.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) - This is a customer loyalty metric that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a company's customer relationships. On a scale of 0-10, customers respond to the question "How likely is it that you would recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague?" Their answers get them placed into one of three categories: Promoters (those who give a response of 9-10), Passives (those who give a response of 7-8), or Detractors (those who give a response of 0-6).

'Promoters' can be interpreted as customers who are your loyal enthusiasts, will keep buying from you, and will refer others. 'Passives' are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings. 'Detractors' are unhappy customers who could cause damage to your brand.

You can calculate your NPS score by taking the percentage of customers who are 'Promoters' and subtracting the percentage who are 'Detractors.'

These are just two recommendations for basic metrics you can watch to establish a benchmark for how loyal your customers are, and how your efforts to improve customer loyalty affect your retention rates. There are certainly more sophisticated metrics to consider depending on the structure of your business -- lifetime customer value, for example. Loyalty360.org has also provided some other metrics by which B2B companies are measuring the effectiveness of their customer retention efforts, some of which you may find helpful for your business, too.

What B2B Marketers Can Do to Promote Customer Loyalty

Now that you have some metrics in place to determine success, let's examine how you can turn organizations into loyal customers of yours. There are 5 components to consider when fostering and improving B2B customer loyalty: orientation, ongoing education, communication, community building, and pricing.

1. Orientation

If your customers are actively using your product or service in the most advantageous ways from the very beginning, it's more likely they will stay with you for the long haul. Consider the moment after purchase the honeymoon phase of your relationship -- they are excited about your company and how it will help their organization. Use that momentum to ensure they actually use your product or service, and use it in the way that will make them the most successful. Active use that drives results is the first step to making your company a fixture in their organization.

These principles should extend beyond the honeymoon phase, too. If you have current customers who are inactive, wake them up! Don't abandon customers, whether new or old, after the point of sale and leave them to figure out how to use your products or services. They're new to this stuff...you're a pro! Share your knowledge so they can become pros, too.

2. Ongoing Education

Which brings us to the importance of education. Be the company that continually provides value and shows you're invested in their success. When you're first orienting customers, there's probably plenty of functionality about your product or features of your service from which they would benefit -- but it's too early to overwhelm them with everything. Education should come in stages. It not only makes adoption more likely when information comes in bite size chunks, but it also makes you look like the gift (or company) that keeps on giving.

Create content that highlights new and underused features of your product or service, or educates them about their industry. Videos, webinars, workshops, customer-centric blog content, and use-cases are particularly effective content formats for this type of information.

3. Communication

Effective education goes hand in hand with great, open communication. In fact, communication is one of the most important components to customer loyalty, and also one of the hardest to successfully execute. Remember, you're not communicating with one customer -- it's an entire organization of people that you must continually impress. That means you need to communicate with not just your point of contact, but also the influencers, decision makers, and other employees involved in executing your solution -- with not all of whom you'll necessarily have a personal relationship.

Keep communication channels open, and provide multiple places for people to talk with one another and provide feedback to you. The more opportunities for dialogue, the more likely you'll hear from employees of all levels -- especially those C-suite decision makers you likely aren't actively engaging with on a consistent basis. In fact, MarketingProfs reported that after Oracle began actively engaging with decision makers of a particular client, its customer retention rate was more than 20% greater.

Provide forums and customer-focused social media accounts, and send out email surveys to solicit feedback, and make sure employees are actively moderating and following up on these discussions so your brand's presence is felt.

Open communication of this sort not only helps strengthen the ongoing education process as customers learn from one another, but it also gives you the critical feedback you need to improve your product and service offerings, and your sales and marketing processes. Marketers need to understand customer preferences and buying habits so they can continue to deliver value in their pre- and post-sale marketing content. You'll also begin to identify patterns around the types of customers who stick around the longest so you can better target them in your lead generation efforts and prioritize them in the sales process.

4. Community Building

The dialogue that comes with this open communication between your organization and your customers will build a community that's crucial to illicit feelings of loyalty from your customers. Active members of your community will be more active users of your product or service. Encourage activity on forums and social media sites, host local, in-person events, and hold workshops that let customers discuss how they're leveraging your product or service in their company. When customers have ownership over others' success with your product, they become far more invested in your company, and are less likely to churn.

It's important to build a strong community with your employees, too. They are on the front lines with your customers every day, and as such, customer culture will inevitably overlap with employee culture. If your employees show enthusiasm for your products and services, those feelings will extend to your customers.

5. Pricing

To say pricing is a complicated beast is an understatement. But if your organization is facing a pricing change, it's crucial to execute it with tact to ensure you don't turn loyal customers into angry exes. All pricing changes should be approached with clear, frequent, and gracious communication. If you have the authority to do so, offer to grandfather in customers for a period of time on your old pricing structure. There will sometimes be penny pinchers, sure, but if you've effectively built the value of your product or service to their organization, you should find you've built enough value that those customers can't justify switching to a competitor that isn't tried-and-true like you.

Ultimately, none of this will help you retain customers if you don't already have an amazing product or service backed by amazing service. Continue to invest in acquiring top talent to manage the development of your product and service offerings, and hire amazing front-line employees that serve as the helpful and intelligent face of your business to customers.

As a B2B marketer or business owner, what are you doing to promote customer loyalty? Share your successes and recommendations in the comments!

Image credit: Tobyotter

 

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HubSpot/~3/UxfVpupxACM/What-B2B-Marketers-Need-to-Know-About-Customer-Retention.aspx

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Is Google Selling Investors Private Search Data?

This is an interesting play:

BBVA, Spain?s second-largest bank by assets, is teaming up with Google to use its search engine results to provide advanced forecasts of hotel and tourism demand in the country, part of a plan to market real-time economic indicators to its clients.

The bank and internet group will announce on Monday a scheme called the ?BBVA-Google tourism activity in Spain indicator?. The first pilot project has focused on measuring advance demand for hotel stays and tourism interest in Spain by using search engine data.

Private investors get to see that search data before anyone else does. If you have a retirement plan invested in stocks, then you are at an asymmetrical information disadvantage because Google is providing an in-depth look at that search data to competing investors who can trade on the information before it is public.

Is search traffic a big deal? Is there enough signal there to matter? Yes. And yes.

I read an investment report earlier today about a company where the hedge fund's rating & valuation was largely based on / justified by the SEO strategy of the underlying company & their current Google rankings...the report even had keyword ranking charts in it!

Was Google paid for giving BBVA access to the above data? Or was it thrown in as a freebie in exchange for getting over 100,000 BBVA workers to switch to the cloud & go Google on the enterprise software front?

If Google has over 90% search marketshare in many EU countries & is willing to leverage proprietary search data to win contracts in other fields, how does anyone compete against that data bundling?

Further, think of all the damage hedge funds & huge banks have done to societies the globe over this past decade & now Google is directly helping the bad guys.

That is Google's approach to their proprietary information: if you invest in their ecosystem and use their analytics tools you can't get your own analytics data (as they have to protect "user privacy"), but they will gladly sell that same data off to someone else.

If there is no public outrage at this "test" then the data units will start getting more granular. Rather than measuring categories Google may sell data on a per-site or per-company basis. Looking at how Google has consistently disintermediated "partners" everywhere else, if Google is feeling bold they may suggest that selling the data to others also permits Google to trade on the data as well.

What's far scarier than an angry search engineer looking at your large paid link buy or a rogue Google "contractor" hacking up your site? A Google hedge fund with a substantial short position on your stock. :D

Recall that Eric Schmidt has stated:

"One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market..." Eric Schmidt continues, "and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."

Based on Mr. Schmidt's above comment, is it reasonable that Google now profits off leveraging their data for securities analysis? What made the above clearly illegal & what is going on now above board? What's the difference between them? Perhaps a "contractor" layer?

At the same time Google runs sweeping ad campaigns reminding people how Google protects them online, while hosting banking data in the cloud & making themselves a juicier hacking target.

Google warns publishers against using paywalls because it is a poor user experience while wiping out competing lead aggreagtors with new guidelines that are likely impossible to comply with. Sites like Highbeam Research get smoked by algorithms like Panda & the Google works with the folks who already have the legislature in their pocket to get them more data. The lesson here from Google is to provide a clean front end user experience and then sell the data back out the other end.

Everything is fine. Keep shopping (on Google.com + your Android phone)...Google will ensure the data is monetized to its full potential.

Categories: 

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seobook/seobook/~3/U1uiUmGJzpc/illegal-beagle

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Premise 2.0: The Complete Digital Sales and Lead Generation Engine for WordPress

When anyone wants to quickly and easily create, test, and optimize landing pages with WordPress, our Premise software is the way to go. No doubt. And the one-time fee, bundled optimization education, copywriting advice (from within WordPress), and included custom graphics have made Premise the go-to WordPress plugin for thousands of online marketers and small [...]

Source: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/29368114/0/copyblogger~Premise-The-Complete-Digital-Sales-and-Lead-Generation-Engine-for-WordPress

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Scalable Link Outreach with Gmail and Boomerang

Sometimes it's the little things in life....Boomerang for Gmail (and Outlook) is an incredibly useful, lightweight, powerful link outreach app.

Link building has a special place in the SEO industry. Beyond being one of the harder skill-sets to master and acquire, link building is likely the most important element of an SEO campaign.

Link building can also be the most difficult job to:

• Scale internally and externally
• Train someone to do efficiently
• Outsource
• Hire someone for

How to hire link builders and how to train them are certainly worthy of their own (upcoming) blog posts but this post is going to sing the praises of a Gmail and Outlook plugin that is essential for my link building workflow.

Boomerang for Gmail (and Outlook)

Outside of the really cool name this plugin makes my workflow much more streamlined and efficient.

I don't use Outlook so I'll be focusing on the Gmail plug-in here. The Outlook plugin has most of the functionality of the Gmail edition (minus the Send On options) and you can check out the Outlook version here.

The key benefits to using Boomerang (referencing the Gmail app going forward) are:

• Schedule emails to be sent at a later date/time
• Set reminders on emails so they pop back up at a specified time
• Set email reminders from your smartphone

Send Emails Later

You can install Boomerang for Gmail here. You can use this for Gmail and Google apps and you'll need to use Firefox or Chrome.

You'll manage Boomerang in two places; you can get to it in your Gmail toolbar:

From here you can access your scheduled messages to make any changes and access various help and how-to's.

The other area where you access Boomerang is in the email dialogue box. When you go to compose a new message or click to reply to one you'll see the Boomerang button and see all the options available for sending the message:

If you click on anything other than the specific time option at the bottom, the message is scheduled straight away.

If you need to access your Boomerang-ed messages, just go back to the top Gmail toolbar, click Boomerang, and click access Scheduled messages.

The other cool option when composing a new message is listed right below the subject line. From here you can have Boomerang return the message to your Inbox if no one replies or even if they do (marked as unread, starred, etc; these options can be changed in the "access scheduled messages" option on the top Gmail/Boomerang toolbar option):

You have the exact same option when replying to messages as well.

This is incredibly useful for a variety of link building actions such as:

• Tracking the effectiveness of email pitches
• Scheduling a bunch of pitches to line up with various promotions and outreach campaigns, in one shot
• Using in conjunction with Gmail's canned responses for scalable link outreach and management
• Never forget about a link prospect
• Make Gmail a self-contained link outreach system for staff members
• Avoid awkward time zone issues on email deliveries if you have staff outside your targeted market's location

Email Reminders

While the Send On features are the most useful for link outreach, the Reminder functions can be useful as well.

Boomerang has Gmail-like functionality in the way it auto-offers a solution. Here you can see I've got a Staples coupon that expires on January 16th. Boomerang is asking me if I'd like to return this to my inbox on that date:

Outside of that functionality you can click the Boomerang reminder icon in the toolbar to get the reminder options available to you:

So rather than setting something in your calendar or in your task management application, you can use Boomerang to re-populate the email when needed.

You can add a condition to this and say that you only want to be reminded of the message at the selected time "IF" no one responds, simply by checking that option above. Otherwise, it will come back whether someone responds or not.

You can also use your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android to set up a message for yourself to arrive in your inbox at a certain time with their mobile option.

Privacy Concerns

Letting an app access your data on mail.google.com shouldn't be taken lightly. Here is what they say about privacy:

Why does Boomerang for Gmail need access to my email account?

Like most other Gmail plugins, we need access to the full email data to be able to move and send messages. In our queries, we only store the headers of the message (subject, sender, time) so that we can uniquely ID the message you want to schedule. We don't store any message text.
Does it mean you have my Gmail password?

No, we don't have access to your Gmail password. You are authorizing through Google's official OpenID system.

Sign Up for Boomerang

You can get a full-featured pro account trial for free, for 30 days here. I am anxious for them to release the open/click tracking for even deeper link outreach analysis.

If you are looking for a more enterprise level solution, with team-wide tracking and monitoring, please check out our reviews of Buzzstream and Raven Tools.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seobook/seobook/~3/gtdSViacX2I/smarter-link-building-gmail-and-boomerang

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Kindle fire coupon codes ? Update for December 2011

Looking for the Kindle fire coupon codes to get the best deals and sales on the well-known Kindle fire tabletr? There are many reasons why the Amazon�Kindle fire has become increasingly popular these days. You might be taking into consideration the distinction between the Kindle and the Nook Color if you’re among those looking for [...]

Source: http://homemadechristmasgift.org/2011/11/kindle-fire-coupon-codes-update-for-december-2011/

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Last Chance to Join the AdSense Profits Course in 2012

In less than 24 hours the registrations to the AdSense Online Profits course will be closing. I am pretty sure I won't re-open it in 2012 (if at all), so this is the last chance you have to join the course this year.

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Original Post: Last Chance to Join the AdSense Profits Course in 2012

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/last-chance-to-join-the-adsense-profits-course-in-2012/

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The Long Tail Strategy to Boost AdSense Earnings

One of the best strategies I know to boost your AdSense earnings it to research for long tail keywords. If you are not familiar with it you should check a guest post I wrote for Problogger that went live today.

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Original Post: The Long Tail Strategy to Boost AdSense Earnings

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/the-long-tail-strategy-to-boost-adsense-earnings/

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Buzzstream Review: How Does it Measure Up?

Buzzstream recently rolled out a beautiful UI update and I've been impressed with their offering for awhile now.

We like to review products which we ourselves use , as well as products that we feel are impressive. For me, Buzzstream fits both of those characteristics.

Buzzstream is a tool that I am fully adding to my toolset for 2012 and I think you should give it a shot as well.

What is Buzzstream?

Buzzstream has two products:

• Buzzstream for Link Building
• Buzzstream for Social Media

We will be focusing on the link building tool in this post. Buzzstream for Link Building focuses solely on link building functionality from soup (prospecting) to nuts (tracking, reporting, relationship management).

One of my favorite aspects of this tool is it's dedicated nature. It focuses on making link building more collaborative, more scalable, and more effective. It does all three quite well and reinforces the belief that sometimes a dedicated tool is the answer.

Why Buzzstream for Link Building?

Link building has come so far in recent years with respect to things like degree of difficulty, requirements of quality, as well as the need to track links and manage relationships.

Link building is such a key piece of an online marketing campaign (not just passing link juice but bringing in targeted, quality traffic and building up brand equity) to the point where I think having a robust tool for it makes a lot of sense; especially when you can use a tool like Buzzstream for it.

Here are some of the key features of Buzzstream that we'll be covering here:

• Link Prospecting
• Link Reporting and Tracking
• Contact Management
• IMAP Email Integration
• Buzzmarker - Link Bookmarking Tool

Buzzstream Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a good, high-level overview of your account's history and tasks.

You can filter the history by:

• Showing complete history (notes, emails, twitter, logged calls, blog comments)
• One of the above mentioned history fields
• Show for all projects or a specific project
• All items for/from a user or for/from a specific user

The filtering capabilities are solid and make project spot checks very easy. For a quick export of your history, in .csv format just click on the folder to the left of the task area (in the right column).

Here is what the dashboard looks like:

To the right of the history pane is the task pane as well as recently viewed link prospects. The task pane also offers some good filtering capabilities:

I like the clean, visual look of the dashboard as well as the quick and helpful filtering capabilities. If you are running multiple campaigns with multiple members involved then I think you'll quickly appreciate the way Buzzstream has structured their dashboard.

Link Prospecting

To begin your link prospecting search, you can go to the Websites link and jump right in.

Then click on the Prospects icon to start your research. Here, you will need to set up a profile and up to 20 keywords and keyphrases for the search. I usually name the search after the main keyword I'm looking for, so in this case we'll rock SEO Tools and I'll throw in a couple more specific keywords for the search function.

In addition to prospecting you can specifically search the following countries:

• USA
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Israel
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• South Africa
• Sweden
• Spain
• UK

You also have your choice between website results, news results, and blog results under the Search Type option.

Also, you can have this auto-run daily for new results (which is a great feature!) as well as have notifications sent to a specific person (you or a team member or contractor) when new results arrive.

If you no longer wish to receive results but want to save the search for later, just click the inactive button and reactivate when needed.

Another cool feature here is the blacklist feature. Dump in sites you wish to exclude from your searches on a per project or account-level basis. This is extremely helpful for streamlining new prospecting searches across your entire account. Block out competitors, your other properties, sites you know you'll never get a link from, etc).

Working With Link Prospects

When you open the profile again you are presented with the results.

The results come with default columns but you can click the Columns icon to play with tons and tons of additional, useful options

Click on that and get all these column options:

Buzzstream Data

• Website
• Assigned To
• About
• Most Recent Activity
• Primary Contact
• Job Title
• Tags
• Relationship Stage
• RSS Feed
• Links
• Type

Dates

• Date Added
• Date Added To Project
• Last Modified (any project)
• Last Modified (this project)
• Last Viewed (any project)
• Last Viewed (this project)
• Last Communication Date

Metrics

• Followers (twitter)
• Following (twitter)
• Updates (twitter)
• PageRank
• Compete (UV/mo)
• Inbound Links - SeoMoz
• MozRank
• Juice Passing Links
• Domain Age
• Overall Rating
• Domain Authority

Address

• Address Type
• Address Line1
• Address Line2
• City
  State
  Zip
• Country

Social Networks

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google Plus

Contact Info

• Preferred Contact Method
• Email
• Phone
• "Contact Us" URL
• Suggested Profile Info

Prospecting Metrics (for keywords in your search)

• Highest SERP Position
• Average SERP Position
• SERP Count - Top 10
• SERP Count - Top 20

Buzzstream does a good job here of giving you control over so many different options. The other nice thing here is you can add a bunch of metrics or customize whatever you want, do a quick export, and set everything back to normal if you don't want or need all these metrics every time.

Here's a snippet of what the results look like with no filtering:

From here you can do all sorts of filtering with just about all of the options I outlined above. You can also click on a specific link and manage it at any point:

From here you can do just about anything:

• Add a task, tag or note
• Assign it to someone
• Update the relationship stage
• Rate the link
• Put your own custom field in there
• Copy or move it to another project (love this feature)
• Remove it from the project
• Check the WhoIS information
• Approve it for the project
• Add to your block list

Also, you can see the Twitter, FB, email, and phone icons next to each link. Buzzstream will pull those in when available. You can also add a site yourself but clicking the Add Site button where you can add as much or as little info as you have or want:

What I like to do is update the search with all the SEO related metrics and then filter (not looking for addresses or anything at this point, just SEO metrics).

Here are the filtering options:

The options pretty much cover everything you can add as a metric to their prospect results page. You can also create a specific filter and save it for future use (a big time saver for ongoing prospect research).

Once you are done filtering out the junk you can begin to work the prospect list by:

• Assigning it to an employee or contractor or yourself :)
• Updating the contact history by adding notes about contact history
• Update the relationship stage

Once the link is secured you can simply add it to the tracking and reporting component by clicking on the link and selecting "approve".

There are so many filtering options and editing options, as mentioned above, that I really encourage you to get in there and play around with it. You can customize it to fit your specific link building needs (big or small) which is a really nice feature to have (a tool that can scale up or down with you and your business).

Link Reporting and Tracking

I went ahead and approved the link-assistant.com domain as being a link I recently secured. To work with approved links you just need to move on over to the Links tab:

Again, you have a ton of filtering options here:

Buzzstream, via the Column tab, gives you lots of helpful data on a per link basis to help with overall link management and reporting:

You can also import all your links by clicking the import tab (Buzzstream gives you a template to use for this right from the import dialog box)

From here the next logical step is to set up link tracking to automatically notify you of any changes to links you are tracking.

Link Tracking

Buzzstream offers automated and manual link tracking. Buzzstream will let you track the following link data types via their automated backlink checker (this runs every 2 weeks) and manual link checker:

• Newly verified links
• Links that have changed (anchor text, no-follow, and so on)
• Links that have been removed
• Previous linking pages that are 404's
• Cache Date

You can select who receives this report, and the manual report via email. Manual reports can be completed by going to the links tab and clicking on the Run Backlink Checker Icon:

The report is then delivered to the specified email address (can be changed in project settings) in short order (longer for bigger checks of course).

I would recommend targeting the more important links here. There is a lot of churn on the web and link tracking tools, that are cloud based, do have tracking limits (Buzzstream comes in at 500 links for the basic plan, 25,000 for their Plus, and 100,000 for their Premium Plan). They also have a solo plan for 1 user and up to 1,500 tracked links.

They offer custom plans as well.

Link Reporting

The link reporting is good and is one area where I think they can use some improvement (ability to spit out anchor text distribution reports, upload logos,
automated report emailing, etc).

To generate a report you click on the pie (mmmmm pie) icon on the Links page:

Once you click there you get 2 options:

Link Report - reporting on link opportunities and completed links

Spend Report - reporting on the cost of links that cost money

Here is the dialog box for the Links Report:

Export options are PDF, HTML, and XML for Word and Excel.

The Spend Report is clean and simple to read, here is the dialog box for that:

The reports are quick to generate and clean. I think if they add some more customization options it will be a homerun; it's still better than most reporting options out there.

Keeping Up with Contacts

You can store, add, and access key contacts and their contact information within the People tab

As with their other options there is a wide variety of filtering and column customization capability to help you slice, dice, and keep track of key contacts within a specific project (or through an entire account).

You can add in pertinent contact info like their name, numbers, associated websites, social network information, and so on. You can also keep a history of calls, notes, and emails (more on emails in a minute) right inside the contact's information center:

IMAP Email Integration for Conversation Tracking

This is one of my favorite features. You can configure Buzzstream to automatically populate contact history on your link outreach campaigns:

If you are managing a team, or just your own link campaign really, this is a great feature to have. In addition to the other contact management features I mentioned above, this feature adds another layer of helpful contact management. Having CRM functionality inside of a link building tool is quite helpful when we talk about things like scaling link building campaigns and managing teams

When you add your email account you can also send email from Buzzstream. You can select any number of "People" or contacts that you want and work through them one by one by creating an email template (see below) and quickly customizing it to the specific person you are targeting

Using canned responses in Gmail is similar but the difference here is the integration with Buzzstream and the ease of going right through a selected list of contacts (and having it saved in their contact history automatically).

Lots of people use BuzzStream as a database of all their prospects/partners and then slice and dice them for campaigns. So, for example, suppose you are trying to secure guest posts. You go to All Contacts (contacts for your whole account, not just one project) and select everything tagged "finance" that's a "guest post" type and that's linked to you in the past.

After that, you take those contacts of known finance guest post opportunities, copy them to a new project and then work that list. You cover a lot of this in your filter descriptions. Essentially, use the tagging and filtering system to build your own database for rinse and repeat solutions.

You can also track Twitter stuff (which can get out of hand quickly in terms of back and forth contact, real time) and works the same way as Buzzstream's IMAP integration.

For the Twitter tracking you can basically import a bunch of twitter lists into BuzzStream, start retweeting their content and then filter to find everyone you've retweeted three days ago (filter by: Communication History=tweet, contact modified=3 days ago).

Save this filter and you have a list of people to follow up with on a regular basis. You can then send a template-based email that refers to the retweet and use that as a quick in to perhaps securing a link opportunity.

The Buzzmarker

Buzzstreams' Buzzmarker gives you the ability to save a prospect's information from any browser. To set up the Buzzmarker you just go into your settings and drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar :D

Here is a snippet of the Buzzmarker dialog box:

Anytime you come across news stories, blog posts, and Twitter feeds that you want to store for future work inside of Buzzstream all you do is click on the Buzzmarker

The Buzzmarker pulls in lots of information and gives you options to do a variety of things like:

• Add a task for the clipping
• The ability to gather and note link information like acquistion method and link type, also checks to see if the site is linking to you already
• Add contact info and social media profiles
• Links through to contact info search in Google, Pipl, as well as Twitter and Linkedin Profile search via Google, Twellow, and Linkedin

Give Buzzstream a Shot

If you are looking for a strong link building tool which incorporates any of the features below, you should give Buzzstream a try:

• Built in Link Prospecting
• CRM Functionality
• Scalability
• Ease of Use
• Permission and Access Control for Teams
• Link Tracking and Reporting

Buzzstream is a quality link building and link management tool that is certainly worth trying out if you are engaged in link building activity. The reporting is stronger than most other options out there but I think they can do even better with it after seeing what they've done on the inside. If you do try them out let us know what you think in the comments!

Take it for spin, they have free trials available over at Buzzstream.Com.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seobook/seobook/~3/swwvoJ08Wi8/comprehensive-review-buzzstream

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