Traditional marketing can’t hold a candle up to marketing automation when it comes to lead generation. The prior takes more resources, time and money, whilst the latter severely decreases overhead whilst increasing results. In 2019 there’s absolutely no excuse to not implement marketing automation software as a part of your overall marketing and sales strategy.
Still not convinced? Let’s have a look at the stats.
According to Focus Research, 75% of companies who use marketing automation see an ROI within just 12 months. 44% see that return in just 6. Focus also reported than 70% of companies who implemented marketing automation software had their ROI expectations met or exceeded.
Automation is a productivity hack. Nucleus Research found that marketing automation drove a 14.5% increase in sales productivity, whilst reducing marketing overhead by 12.2%.
Chief Marketer reports that 28% of marketers see an increase in revenue per sale when using marketing automation.
And finally, according to the Annuitas Group, companies using marketing automation to build relationship nurturing campaigns see a 451% increase in qualified leads.
Marketing automation plays a major role in lead generation, qualification and sales. Not only because it has such a high ROI, but because it frees up time and resources, allowing your marketing team to improve their strategy and results, and your sales team to focus on their sales pipeline.
Automating your marketing and sales processes not only decreases overhead and time spent, but it also improves your overall results; helping you kick goals with less effort. It’s a win-win situation!
Let’s look at some of the ways in which marketing automation effects lead generation:
Lead nurturing can be fully automated, and relevantly targeted
Qualifying leads takes time, and consistent effort. Automating your lead nurturing communication flows can help you save resources, and enables leads to qualify themselves.
Marketing automation software gives you the tools you need to create email campaign journeys which can be prepped and scheduled in advance. New leads will enter these journeys from the start, and will not be dropped or forgotten.
Your inbound marketing strategy can therefore be put on autopilot, sending traffic consistently relevant emails until they pop out of the funnel already self-qualified.
If you’re wanting to leverage marketing automation to produce high quality leads which are automatically funneled through to sales, then try out these marketing automation tools:
- Communication workflow builders. Visually arrange email campaigns in a flowchart and set rules and criteria on each campaign so that they’re sent at the right time to the right person.
- Capture prospects on landing pages, and your website. Encourage them to opt in, and sort them into relevant mail groups for targeted, automated nurturing.
- Use trigger based emails to send hyper-relevant emails to prospects based on their actions and behaviours on your website, or previous email campaigns. For example, for prospects who clicked on your CTA link but did not convert, automatically target them again a couple days later.
Automating your inbound marketing process enables your sales team to only focus on those leads who matter: the ones who self qualify and are funneled through a strategic, nurturing communications flow.
Marketing automation software can be integrated with your sales CRM – creating a seamless process between departments
Lead generation and qualification becomes as easy as pie when your marketing automation platform is integrated with your sales CRM.
Your sales team will have a major leg up if marketing data becomes readily available to them in their CRM. Consider this: all your prospects and leads’ interactions with your brand, and their engagement levels are recorded in your CRM contact database, making it quicker and smoother for your sales team to decide on what step to take next, and with who.
Syncing your marketing data with your sales CRM gives your sales team the opportunity to apply laser focus on the prospects and leads that are most receptive. With marketing automation, gone are the days where sales and marketing teams suffer from overlapping processes, and funnels that lead to nowhere.
Integrating your marketing automation software with your sales CRM will give some much needed transparency between departments; making lead gen and qualification that much less of a headache.
Lead engagement can be scored to improve lead qualification
We’ve mentioned engagement as a key measurement a few times in this article, and when it comes to generating leads, as well as qualifying them, engagement is definitely a key metric to measure.
Marketing automation makes measuring engagement a total breeze. Swift Digital’s marketing platform, for example, has an inbuilt easy-to-use engagement scoring module.
Engagement scoring enables your company to assign points to specific contact actions and behaviour. These points add up for individual contacts; giving you an overview of how engaged each contact is in your database.
Engagement scores can then be used to further segment prospects and leads into mail groups for specific targeting. Leads with low engagement scores can be onboarded onto an email campaign journey aimed at increasing their engagement, whilst highly engaged leads can trigger Sales CRM tasks to push them along the sales pipeline.
Personalisation and dynamic content increase conversion rates
According to The Aberdeen Group, personalized emails improve click through rates by 14%, and increase conversion rates by 10%. That’s a major win for any marketing strategy focussed on generating leads and closing sales.
Marketing automation software enables your company to leverage personalisation and dynamic content tools which increase the relevance of your emails, and therefore improve your conversion rates.
Personalization tools give you the opportunity to include the personal details of each recipient in your email, whilst only creating and publishing the one campaign. Dynamic content allows your marketing team to create numerous versions of content for your campaign, which appear or are hidden for recipients based on pre-set rules and criteria.
Marketing automation tools like these make your brand’s communications extremely relevant; increasing brand-lead trust, and putting the warming up process of prospects on autopilot.
When it comes to increasing lead generation results whilst decreasing resources and time spent, you can’t go wrong with marketing automation. Automating your marketing and sales processes improves your results, and makes the prospect-to-lead-to-sale funnel seamless, transparent and most of all – extremely successful.
Want to improve your lead generation efforts with marketing automation? Talk to our friendly team at Swift Digital about how our multi-channel marketing platform can help you kick goals this year.
The Preferred Email, Events and SMS Automation Software For All Australian Government Departments
Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning emails and events communications using our drag-and-drop email and event builder.
You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, polls, article feedback, and emojis and schedule messages to send at the right time.
Government departments’ unique marketing requirements are covered with Swift Digital, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.
Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software and event management working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.
Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.
To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.
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