Maximizing Results Using Marketing Automation
It’s important to understand how to begin maximizing results using marketing automation. Marketing automation is a tool for increasing operational efficiency and for generating revenue. It is about automating the routine and repeatable tasks associated with lead management, lead nurturing, lead qualifying, and creating and maintaining a marketing lead database. If it is done right, then it can help marketing organizations improve their productivity as well as their collaboration with sales organizations. Automation software enables marketing departments to measure what works and determine the impact on revenue. It does this by integrating with your existing sales force automation system, so that it makes marketing a true partner with sales throughout the lead management process.
Making the Most Out of Your Reach
Marketing automation helps you locate and engage prospects everywhere possible. Prospects may touch your blog, community site, social pages or a partner page, but they may not be visiting any site pages that are monitored by your revenue generating software (RGS) system. So simply engage the prospects wherever they are, with interactive, branded, marketing strategies that are embedded wherever possible. You can use partner-owned channels, their web sites, email blasts, community sites or any other avenue that is available. Rapidly create and offer engaging co-branded marketing units to partners, so they can easily incorporate into their campaigns. You can also launch using their channels to mutual prospects. This allows you to capture a short-form lead, right at the point of engagement. This will result in less re-directs, less friction, fewer dropped leads and fewer opportunities missed.
Tracking Prospects
Marketing automation can tell you what web pages a specific prospect has visited. You can use that information to score a lead to determine if the lead is sales-ready. You send out newsletters and nurturing emails to tens of thousands of prospects every month. You can learn more about specific prospects and their needs directly from your email. Marketing automation allows you to get answers in a simple, non-intrusive way, no matter where the prospect engaged with your brand.
Gathering Data
Marketing automation systems, along with real-time IP data providers are delivering more accurate information from prospects for landing pages and it is common to pre-fill form fields with the prospect’s crucial customer information (mapped from the prospect’s IP address). It is now possible is to leverage the same real-time IP data, combined with target account or account relationship information in an RGS system to dynamically change and serve highly targeted, relevant, marketing offers everywhere. Marketers will soon be able to define rules in their RGS system to map or update target accounts into different sales pipeline stages. RGS systems will then interact with external partner systems to make all of this possible.
Get More from Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can increase sales through lead nurturing using multi-touch, multi-offers nurturing campaigns. It also uses outbound marketing to follow up, nurture and qualify inbound sales leads. Use automation-driven campaigns to generate more referral or to up-sell cross-sell, and resell to existing customers. Marketing automation can increase sales productivity by focusing on qualified leads and reactivate old leads. It also offers useful content to build your site’s credibility. There are so many powerful ways that marketing automation can maximize your results and generate increased revenue.
