After 15 years of generating leads for a number of businesses and websites I can tell you that it is still a pain in the ass to setup the multitude of systems needed to generate, capture and manage leads on your website, then you need still need a set of tools to market to them on a regular basis.
In the case of Startup88.com we have
- a popup from Sumome.com (which is pretty good) however it doesnt connect to our newsletter system so new subscribers need to be manually loaded
- A newsletter system by Mail Poet, which is convenient as it easily generates new newsletters from multiple wordpress posts but has some bugs that make us nervous occasionally. The alternative is to connect to an external email system such as Mailchimp but its not clear that we can easily create a newsletter with our new wordpress posts. (we dont like the auto send on wordpress, we prefer to send 1-2 emails a week not 20)
- We manage social media using Buffer App (which we are big fans of) for sharing and scheduling updates and occasionally Hootsuite and Socialbro for big twitter pushes.
- Add this for Social Media sharing.
Even with all of this we don’t have a CRM system, no ability to generate custom landing pages or manage social media from the site.
To do this we would have had to implement some form of connector from WordPress & Mail Poet to another external CRM system such as Basecamp, Salesforce or Sugar or something else which would have almost certainly required an middleware such as Zappier.
With 15 years of experience doing this and well about average technical ability, I still have a system which I think is clunky and in my opinion the problem hasn’t been solved properly.
It looks like inBoundio which launched just last week and has over a 1000 users already might be most of the way to solving this problem by implementing
- CRM
- Landing Page Generation
- Email generation and drip feed autoresponder
- Social Media marketing
- Email list management
I still think its missing a few things, it doesn’t appear to have a popup email capture form and its not clear how well it manages WordPress post selection and emailing but I think these are pretty easily resolved and I am going to give it a shot managing Startup88.com email subscriber list.