Ardath Albee

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse yesterday. Matt Quinlan, VP of Field Operations joined us to give me a preview of FreeView - a fully-functional marketing automation platform designed to meet the needs of SMB marketers. [Hint: FREE is the key word.]

The folks at LoopFuse [watch the 5 min demo] believe that marketing automation is the future of digital. They want to help B2B small-to-mid-size companies adopt the technology they need to compete effectively with eMarketing programs. What they've done that I think is very unique is to create a Free Forever model.

The Free Forever model includes the tools a marketer needs to score leads, create and execute lead nurturing programs (lead flows in LoopFuse ease), send leads to sales via CRM transfer (and take them back), create alerts, rules and even harness pre-existing lead capture forms.

Yes, there's a catch. FreeView is limited to 2,500 prospects, 5,000 emails per month and 100,000 page views. But, the really cool part is that you can have it forever. No more trying to prove value and ROI during a paltry 30-day trial. Marketers can actually create a nurturing program for a target audience and run it across the entirety of the complex buying process—tweaking and refining as they go to build the business case for expanding the program.

There are a couple of really useful things I should mention:

• Salesforce.com integration is about a 3 click process. But even better, marketers can choose to import leads during that process and have them all transferred into the FreeView system so they can be up and running fast.


• No charge per seat. You want to expand visibility into nurturing progress to your salespeople? No problem. 


• Build extensive behavioral dossiers on companies, not just individual prospects. I've been preaching for a while that marketers need to reach beyond decision makers. Now you can do so easily by monitoring your reach inside companies, as well as their activities as a group, or drill down to the individual level.


• Scoring overview. In addition to summarizing all activity for a lead and ranking explicit demographic information, marketers also see how many times each activity is performed during the course of building the score. This insight can be really useful for evaluating interest levels for content formats, topics, etc.


• Gain access to the system about 120 seconds after creating your account.

LoopFuse FreeView is definitely worthy of consideration for SMB marketers. The company has spent a lot of time creating a system that is intuitive and arming marketers with instructive how-to videos within the system to ensure they have what they need to get up and running fast. If you've been trying to figure out how to prove the value of marketing automation to build the business case for implementing it in your company, this may be the perfect opportunity.

As you know, there's just no way to brilliantly execute a primarily digital marketing process without the technology to support it. Now, there's no excuse left about why you don't have it.