How Marketing Automation Can Help You Increase Leads

Marketing automation represented on a tablet.

As you grow your business, juggling between providing good products, customer service, marketing, and other aspects of running a business is difficult. However, advancing technology, specifically marketing automation, can help startups and growing businesses in many ways. Marketing automation is an important technological development that businesses should leverage to streamline and monitor routine marketing tasks.
With the right automation tools, you can connect with prospects and customers through customized content, which helps to turn them into loyal customers. Below are just some of the ways businesses can leverage automation to increase leads.

1. Identify Sales-Ready Leads

Most businesses find it challenging to identify qualifying leads. It is often difficult for you to know when a lead is sales-ready. However, marketing automation platforms do this hard work through lead scoring. Lead scoring is a typical automation strategy that allocates points to leads based on several criteria. Usually, this is based on actions they take on your website. Actions may include downloading a PDF file, filling in an online form, or searching for specific products.

Lead scoring can also assign points using specific demographic data and suggest leads who tick several features of your ideal buyer. The best thing about lead scoring is that you can customize your selection criteria and scores that sales-ready leads should attain before you start targeting them. Lead scoring is beneficial to sales teams as they have more time and effort to spend on qualifying leads.

2. Personalize Your Website

Customers who visit your website will make purchase decisions based on their impression of your company. Therefore, having a custom website can give a better impression and increase conversion rates. You can use automation to gather data about your visitors, such as their locations, job titles, workplace, and browsing behavior. This then enables you to create a landing page and specific content personalized for each lead.

For instance, if your automation insight suggests that a prospect is interested in buying training shoes, you can use automation to customize their product page. Personalizing content on your site makes it easier to establish and build relationships with prospects. It also improves the overall customer experience and increases conversions.

3. Provides Accurate Information to Your Sales Teams

A good sales strategy should be based on sales-ready leads. This means that your sales team should send the right content to the right audience at the right time. Moreover, your marketing department should provide the right information to your sales team for them to send these targeted messages. This can be done with ease using marketing automation. Automation tools enable marketing teams to track interactions with prospects and provide accurate information to your sales team.

4. Keep Leads on the Loop

Triggered emails come in handy in keeping your leads in the loop by making it easy to maintain interactions. Especially with prospects who have already shown interest in your products. As the name suggests, triggered emails are automatic emails sent to prospects and customers after the lead interacts online. Using triggered emails saves your sales team a lot of time and effectively converts more leads into customers.

5. Automated Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing helps turn cold leads into hot and sales-ready leads. Now, not all leads can be sent through to the sales team immediately. Some need nurturing before the sales team can take over. Segmentation and lead nurturing enable your marketing team to send specific messages to your prospects without seeming pushy.

The Bottom Line

Marketing automation can highly benefit your business when you use it correctly. Apart from improving lead conversion and aiding in other stages of your customer’s journey, you can also use it to enhance your customer retention efforts.