LoopFuse has updated its marketing automation application with functionality that includes new integration for Web form hosting through the popular Wufoo, as well as more support for global users and tighter integration between the inbound marketing features and the CRM app.
As always, the goal of the upgrades is to enhance the application’s usability, cofounder and CTO Tom Elrod told CRM Buyer.
“From the outset, we have focused on making the application simple to use,” he said.
The founders came from a background of using open source middleware JBoss and Eloqua’s marketing automation app.
“We liked that combination but found with so many leads coming through, we needed a way to shift through them more easily,” explained Elrod.
Hence LoopFuse was born, with its emphasis on inbound marketing, easy startup wizards, and tight integration with third-party apps.
Web Forms
LoopFuse chose the third-party app WuFoo to add Web form support to its feature lineup because of its customer base — and because employees at LoopFuse were already fans of the free service, Elrod said.
WuFoo, which provides a straightforward toolset to build and host Web forms, includes features such as field data validation, user prompts and customized HTML, which are easy for line of business users to implement and use.
“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for marketers to host events without having to go through IT,” Elrod said.
With the integration of WuFoo into LoopFuse, users can capture form submissions and still keep other functions, such as tracking page views, as separate data points.
CRM Links
LoopFuse also built on the search engine marketing feature set it added last year, extending the functionality to CRM. New integration points allow users to pass along such data as referring sites and search keywords to the CRM lead and contact records features.
Key to inbound marketing, Elrod said, is understanding where leads originate.
“It is important to understand what search keywords people are using and which ones are proving to be most effective for conversion,” he pointed out. “We wanted to make it possible to pass that information to the CRM app so they could better connect the dots.”
Global Support
Finally, LoopFuse added full support of the UTF-8 character set throughout its application, including lead capture, list import, email campaigns, CRM export and reporting.
It now can support more than 650 languages, which Elrod said is a testament to its ever-growing international customer base.