Do you use marketing automation? If not, is that because you do not feel there is a need? Or perhaps, you don’t think that you have the budget to afford a system? Consider this: according to Three Deep & Ascend2, nearly two-thirds (63%) of “very successful” companies use their marketing automation systems extensively, while more than one third (37%) achieved best-in-class status with limited use. So, there is a clear need. Also, consider that there are now free solutions available that eliminate concerns about cost. Ultimately, it’s a no-brainer to use marketing automation. Here are seven ways that doing so will boost your sales in 2021:
Higher Lead Quality
Marketing automation allows you to design a lead scoring mechanism to score leads for specific actions they take. These include web page visits, email opens, email clicks, downloading high-value content, and more. Once the lead reaches the qualification scoring threshold, it will automatically be passed over to sales with an automated alert that informs the rep to reach out. It is essential because a Harvard Business Review study found that prospects are seven times more likely to buy from you if you respond to their inquiry within one hour.
The main benefit of this is letting your sales reps focus on only the most sales-ready leads and no attention on dead-end leads. It results in faster conversion times, higher conversion rates, and more deals closed. Plus, it lets them spend less time cold calling and more time interacting one-on-one with their hottest prospects.
Intelligent Web Pop-Ups
Web pop-ups are all the rage these days and for a good reason. They are highly effective at engaging visitors on your website. There are a variety of ways to leverage web pop-ups to drive sales. The best time to engage a prospect is browsing a website, and your brand is the front of their mind. Web pop-ups make it easy to do just that by placing pop-ups across your site that appear when you tell them to display your chosen message.
Use them to display links to high-value content. Add new contacts to your lead database with blog or newsletter sign up forms. Offer discounts or promotions to new site visitors. And even prevent visitors from leaving your site by using them to predict exit intent and display an offer that can re-engage them and motivate them to keep browsing. It might just be the slight difference that turns an exciting prospect into a paying customer.
Segmented and Personalized Email Marketing
Email marketing still works wonders for engaging prospects, generating new leads, and converting prospects into customers. Email marketing is not dead. However, with such massive competition sending constant marketing emails, it is easy for leads to overlook your messages or delete them without ever reading what is inside. You need a way to set yourself apart from that competition—one of the best ways to accomplish, i.e., to segment your email lists and personalize your emails.
Using the system tags provided by your CMR, you can mark individual contacts based on behavioral characteristics, such as the emails they opened or the products they bought in the past. Based on demographic data, you can also tag contacts. The truth is that not all of your products or services will be relevant to every last contact in your database, so sending blanket marketing email blasts to the entire database brings you back to the state of being easily overlooked.
However, with system tags, you can create leads with similar attributes and then send them emails with personalized offers based on those attributes. Your emails will be much more relevant to the recipient, increasing the likelihood of converting them into customers.
Automated Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are email campaigns and contain a series of pre-drafted emails sent in succession at specified time intervals. You draft and create the emails in your marketing automation solution, specify a target list of recipients, set the time intervals for the emails to be sent.
You can kick off the campaign to a static group of leads. You can also use system triggers to add new contacts to the beginning of the campaign when they display behavior that indicates interest, such as signing up for your blog. When you use email drip marketing for lead nurture campaigns, in tandem with lead scoring, qualified leads are automatically passed over to sales, increasing the chance of closing a deal. You can also use them for a host of other purposes that directly or indirectly impact increasing sales.
Reducing Lead Response Times
How important is it to respond to an exciting lead on time? If they are interested today, they will still be interested two days from now. Wrong! The longer sales reps wait to contact an interested lead, their ability to convert that lead declines rapidly. Forbes reports that the odds of making contact with an interested lead drop by 3000 times if the first call is not made within the early five hours after lead submission or qualification.
Also, according to Forbes, only 27% of leads ever get contacted. With a combination of awareness, best practices, and technology such as marketing automation, companies can increase that number to 92%. What is the result of doing so? Increasing response rates from 27% to 92% causes a 314% lift in lead conversion results. Think about that. By utilizing marketing automation and sticking to set best practices around usage, you can increase your sales reps’ conversion rates by over 300%.
Better Lead Insight
If your marketing automation solution integrates with a CRM—or better yet, is part of your CRM, as is the case with Agile CRM—the amount of insight you can maintain on leads is enormous. You can know their address, birthday, product interests based on purchases and web pages visited, the content they downloaded, and so on.
Imagine that your sales rep makes a cold call and knows nothing about the lead—her chances of engaging that lead is drastically reduced. She may start a conversation with a vegetarian about a new meal delivery service. It is really like shooting in the dark and trying to hit your target. According to Salesforce, on average, over 30% of a sales rep’s time is spent searching for the right data instead of selling. That is not only highly inefficient; it just does not produce results.
However, what if your sales rep can quickly view the profile page of a lead before making that call? They go into the conversation armed with loads of insight that will enable them to quickly find common ground, build rapport, and zero in on the topics that lead most interest, which means that their chances of closing a deal increase exponentially.
Less Data Entry, More Selling
Sales reps can often spend vast chunks of their days entering data around new leads they met. This eats up their time like nothing else. With the use of web forms for lead data capture, new leads automatically flow into the system, and their profiles are populated with all the data you request in your form. This saves immense amounts of time that your reps would otherwise spend on manual data entry.
Not only does this ensure more accurate data coming into your marketing automation system, it lets your reps focus on what is most important: reaching out to leads and closing deals. The time savings are substantial, and the number of leads your reps can reach in a given day goes way up. This leads to revenue growth and higher customer satisfaction, as reps can devote more one-on-one time to each lead.
Bottom Line
At this point, marketing automation is a must if you want to be competitive in today’s shifting business and technological landscape. If all the other kids on the block are doing it, and you are not, you will quickly fall behind and find it increasingly difficult to catch back up.
It is essential to embrace technology trends, and having a marketing automation solution in place is par for the course now. Without one, your sales will go down, and you will quickly lose your competitive edge. If you are not using marketing automation today, start looking for a solution to continue to be competitive tomorrow.
