Lead nurturing and marketing automation go hand in hand. Deliver the information your prospects and customers want, when they want it, will increase the likelihood that they will purchase your products or services.
To be truly effective with your lead nurturing activities marketing automation tools are a must! In no particular order, here are our top ten reasons you should integrate them:
10 - Improve Trust and Communication
Building trust is an vital part of the lead nurturing process. People want to buy from companies they trust, companies they recognize as leaders in the community. When marketing automation tools are correctly implemented, numerous triggers can be set to continue communication, provide in depth knowledge on subject matter, and ultimately enhance the business/customer relationship.
9- Learn What They Like
Recognizing interests in particular products or services is key in understanding your customers. Through integration, you can easily view the number of visits to the same web page, time spent on that page, if different people from the same organization are visiting your site etc. This information can then be used to enter the prospect into an appropriate workflow designed to further educate them on their particular interest.
8- Understand What Attracts New Buyers
Multiple marketing downloads (ebooks, webinars, white papers) can indicate when a lead is ready to receive more product information. Therefore, review what activities prospects take prior to purchase. This lets you identify trends and topics that appeal to your prospects. Use these insights to improve your marketing programs and engage more prospects.
7-Lead Scoring
Implementing a methodology that recognizes when a lead is a MQL (marketing qualified lead) will save your sales staff an invaluable amount of time. By identifying which leads are most important, sales can focus their efforts there, resulting in more closed-won business. You can learn more about lead scoring basics in a previous post.
6- Remarketing Campaigns
You can create specific campaigns to remarket to leads who are stagnant or who have fell out of touch. Being able to identify these folks easily and creating materials specifically to address their issues, could be just what they need to get them moving down that sales funnel again.
5-Shorten the Sales Cycle
By having a system in place to rank leads, you can then shorten the sales cycle for qualifying leads. While some customers need to be nurtured slowly, others can be ready right away to make a decision. When these triggers are set off, they are then sent directly to sales, and can skip one or more levels within the sales funnel.
4-Manage Social Media Efforts
There are a variety of marketing automation tools that make planning and managing your social media efforts that much easier. Schedule posts in advance, be notified when someone engages with you, easily track which topics are resonating best with your audience. Do side-by-side comparisons of which social media platform is performing best - the analytical possibilities are endless!
3-Segment, Segment, Segment
Marketing Automation tools allow you to segment on a wide array of data points. By reviewing these data points, you can create really targeted campaigns that will speak directly to prospect concerns. Here's a resource to learn more about marketing segmentation.
2-Closed Loop Analytics
Consolidate marketing and sales information all in one place. Easily analyze your marketing efforts and sales successes with dashboards and automated reports. Pinpoint which email had the best response, which channel brought in the most leads, as well as identify what isn’t working, and use that information for future marketing campaigns. Consider implementing an end-to-end reporting strategy at your organization.
1- Improve ROI
By attracting more high quality leads and systematically nurturing leads down the sales funnel, conversion rates increase which has a positive impact on ROI. Put simply, marketing automation makes for a more efficient and effective sales funnel.
Is your business ready to integrate lead nurturing and marketing automation? If not, you should start to think about it. According to the Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016), nearly two thirds of companies surveyed (63%) expect to realize the benefits of their marketing automation system within six months of implementation. Measured Results Marketing can help you get there. Send us an email or call us at 571-606-3106.
