Every agency or marketer is constantly looking for two things: to demonstrate ROI and to acquire new customers. The past year has intensified the need for these activities, looking to help clients overcome pandemic challenges while digitizing the sales pipeline.
When used correctly, marketing automation can make a sales process more efficient and scalable. By automating tasks that allow you to quickly aggregate, interpret and apply relevant data, you can free up time to focus on current customer campaigns. That’s why 42% of marketers use automation to acquire new customers.
Paid options like Google Ads pit you against others in high-risk keyword bids, draining your budget along the way. Automation, on the other hand, allows you to take control while reducing overall costs. To get the most out of marketing automation initiatives, you’ll need to think about how to actually improve your sales process.
One of the biggest benefits and detriments of marketing automation is how much you can personalize touch points with prospects. Approximately 98% of marketers say that automation helps improve their customer relationships. People want you to know what they care about and understand their pain points, but they don’t want their efforts to feel annoying. If you start showing up everywhere they go, or if you reference information they didn’t share directly, it can create a negative feeling about the agency or organization.
To maintain a balance, create dynamic lists based on triggers that are specified through automation. For example, perhaps someone asks your chatbot a question and enters their email to receive more information. When you receive emails over the next week with more details about the topic they asked about, you’ll know it’s because of that interaction.
Lead scoring is a vital part of an automation strategy; it allows you to quickly gauge lead engagement levels so you can deliver the right content to them. You should look to use automation tools to assign engagement metrics based on actions and triggers. If someone schedules a call with one of the salespeople, the customer should automatically receive a high lead score.
On the other hand, someone who has not opened or clicked on your last six emails should get a relatively low score. This will indicate that you should change tactics, pause your communications or remove him or her from the list. Prospects with low scores are not interested in what you are selling and even less interested in how you are selling it. If you keep sending emails, Google will criticize the organization for having a low open rate and start marking your messages as spam.
Visitors have short attention spans, so landing pages need to be clean, short and precise. After all, they exist for one reason: to convert your visitors into leads. You can use automation to determine which landing page to show visitors based on the pages they visited before and what their product or service of interest appears to be. People are hesitant to reveal their information, so it’s important to take advantage of potential conversion opportunities by hyper-targeting landing pages.
Once you refine the appearance and content of some landing pages, automation can be used to track contacts, send emails, deliver offers and segment leads. If someone enters their email to receive a free e-book on social media marketing, you can use automation to send a drip campaign with related calls to action. You don’t want to waste time with leads that ultimately won’t convert, so you can use automation to follow up while you focus on current customer campaigns.
Marketing automation encompasses many different applications, including automated lead nurturing campaigns and personalized touch points, among others. The key is to determine what makes the most sense for a company’s initiatives and follow these steps to establish a relationship and provide value to prospects throughout the sales process.