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What You Need to Know to Make Your Marketing Automation More Effective

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What You Need to Know to Make Your Marketing Automation More EffectiveThe benefits of marketing automation are well known, including improved lead management, staff efficiency, marketing ROI, and increased sales. Even so, not all marketing automation campaigns are as effective as they could be. The tips below are provided to make your marketing automation more effective.

Planning Is Primary

The first and most important step in developing an effective marketing automation campaign is identifying and fleshing out goals for connecting with leads. Whether that is through social media, email, website content, or a mix of methods, it is important to consider the best ways to communicate, as well as how frequently to communicate with leads, to obtain optimal results.

Gathering Data

The process of building an effective marketing automation plan relies heavily on understanding as much about a target audience as possible. Taking the time to gather and analyze data for the purposes of determining a lead’s choices is well worth investing the effort and time.

Tell Prospects What to Do

Including a clear call to action is vital to help prospects uncover the information they want while also driving follow through. By linking a call to action with an offer, a marketing automation campaign gives prospects greater incentive to take the next step. This is particularly important for prospects at the top of the sales funnel.

Scoring Leads

Among the greatest benefits of marketing automation is the ability to score leads. While marketing automation tools are great for driving leads, it should be recognized that not all leads are the same. Some leads are hot, while others are simply should be passed by. Lead scoring helps to discern the difference between the two, and ensures that valuable time and effort is not wasted on leads destined to generate little return, while simultaneously focusing more effort on leads with the most potential to convert to paying customers.

The process of building a new marketing automation plan can at first seem overwhelming. If you approach the process in a step-by-step manner, however, the process becomes simpler and sets the stage for greater success.

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Deploying Long-Tail Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation to Build Relationships  

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Deploying Long Tail Nurturing to Build Customer Relationships Using Marketing AutomationThe more touch-points you have with website visitors, the more opportunities you have to convert those visitors by collecting their contact information. Long-tail lead nurturing, combined with marketing automation, provide the additional touch points you need to build trusting relationships with prospects and customers. Determining when and where to deploy those touch points can often times be a challenge for many marketers. In addition, contact prospects at the wrong time and you run the risk of scaring them away. Wait too long to contact a lead and you likewise run the risk of losing that lead forever. Timing is absolutely vital to successful marketing, regardless of industry.

Long-tail lead nurturing gives your brand the chance to build solid relationships while becoming a trustworthy, helpful source of information. By helping your visitors with their problems or questions and staying in contact with them,  you are able to set the stage to convert that lead into a sale later on.

What Is Long-Tail Lead Nurturing?

By deploying long-tail lead nurturing, you gain the chance to use an array of intelligent actions that are designed to engage your visitors even further with the use of multi-touch, multi-channel communication. For instance, after a visitor enters information to receive free information (like a crash course on training) via an engagement window, you can then leverage the opportunity to follow up with that visitor via text messages, emails, direct mail, and more. You can even take advantage of the chance to assign leads to specific salespeople and have touch points delivered automatically, thus taking advantage of one-on-one communication.

Unlike traditional ‘drip’ campaigns, automated long-tail lead nurturing is designed in an intelligent manner to reflect the interests and actions of your lead.  As a result, you can rest assured that your leads are provided with exactly the right information at precisely the right time.

Why Is Long-Tail Lead Nurturing So Important?

It’s no secret that many of your site’s leads never actually convert into sales. What you might not realize is the extent to which that happens. According to research from MarketingSherpa, 79 percent of leads never actually convert into sales. Furthermore, the primary cause of such poor performance is a lack of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is so important that brands that perform well at lead nurturing tend to generate up to 50 percent more sales-ready leads.

As important as the sales funnel may be to the conversion process, there are always holes present within that funnel. Long-tail lead nurturing helps to seal those holes so that you are able to convert more leads into sales while losing fewer targeted leads.

Although a triggered long tail lead nurturing campaign might seem to be a bit impersonal, the exact opposite is actually true. When you are able to deliver content that your visitor want and when they want it, they’ll likely not care how or why the information arrived, provided it is relevant. Ultimately, when lead nurturing is performed well, the process will feel quite personalized and not at all impersonal.

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Exit Intent: Why It’s Important and How you Can Use it to Convert Website Visitors

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Using Exit Intent to Convert Website VisitorsRegardless of best efforts, the reality is that many visitors to your website will still leave your site without making a purchase. Even the biggest online sites experience this same problem. Boosting your conversion rate by one to two points could make a significant difference in terms of failing or succeeding. Needless to say, it’s vital to convert website visitors whenever you can.

The reality is that website visitors are fickle. Some customers will even place items in their shopping carts and then leave without completing a purchase. The good news is that there is a solution to this problem. It’s called exit intent technology and it can be used to convince your website visitors to stay and eventually make a purchase. By enticing visitors who might otherwise choose to leave your website, exit intent technology allows you to hold onto visitors and ultimately increase sales.

How Does Exit Intent Technology Work?

One of the most important things to keep in mind when trying to determine why your visitors are leaving is that something originally attracted your visitor to your site. This could be a product, your brand reputation, or even an effective marketing campaign. Whatever it was, something drew your visitors to your website and encouraged them to look around.

The goal of exit technology is to remind your visitors of what got their attention in the first place. Perhaps you have products that your visitors have not yet seen. If so, you could highlight those products along with appealing prices. Are you currently offering a free shipping option or a special discount? If so, exit intent technology ensures that your customer sees those offers before they decide to leave your site.

Exit intent technology works by tracking the mouse movements of visitors as well as their speed in order to detect the precise moment at which the visitor may be able to exit your website. As a visitor is about to exit the website, an engagement window will prompt the visitor to linger on the site by displaying a highly targeted campaign that matches the visitor’s reason and interest for being on the site.

For instance, perhaps the visitor was reading material to learn more about a specific product. Or, maybe the visitor had expressed interest in prices, but failed to make a purchase. Exit intent engagement windows are deployed at precisely the right time to provide targeted offers or coupons to your website visitors.

Taking Advantage of a Second Chance at Conversion

Even if your first attempt at converting a visitor failed, exit intent technology gives you a second chance to convert that prospect into a customer. This can be approached in a variety of different ways, including reinforcing your original marketing message and call to action, changing to a different offer or message, and capturing contact information. By restating your message differently, you can take advantage of the opportunity to convince visitors to rethink  their decision to leave your website.

Consider a Crash Course

Another effective way to sustain relationships with website visitors and grow your brand is by offering crash courses. Think of these as mini training courses. You could trigger an offer for someone to get a crash course if they try to exit a specific page. You could have a crash course for each of your product/solution pages, or maybe even your pricing page. If someone’s interested, they might accept your offer for free training. You’ll benefit by converting website visitors and capturing their name and/or email. Now you’ll be able to market to them in the future.

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The Link Between Content and Conversions

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The Link between Content and ConversionsDisplaying dynamic, engaging content in real-time as visitors arrive on your website is an incredible way to encourage visitors to stick around and convert into paying customers. As technology has advanced, the ability to do this is no longer a pipe dream but is very much a reality. By building a rich profile of the visitors arriving on your site that becomes stronger over time, you can do exactly that. This is what we call the magic link between content and conversions.

This can be accomplished through a combination of behavioral information, including actions taken by visitors, such as clicks, email opens, document downloads, page visits, webinar attendance, video watches, and more. Along with demographics from your own CRM and social data, it becomes possible to deliver a powerful and effective customer profile. When retrieved in real time and used in precisely defined rule sets, this data makes it possible to create a much more personalized website experience for your visitors.

Many website owners make the mistake of thinking only of themselves and their needs when creating their website and future content. In order to engage your audience in an effective manner and convert those visitors into paying customers, you must first lean how to address your visitors’ basic concerns. This is particularly true when it comes to first-time visitors to your website. When a visitor first arrives on your site, he or she will typically ask, even if subconsciously, the following questions:

  • Will this website meet my needs?
  • Can I trust this website?
  • Does this website have the solution that will solve my problem?

Leveraging real time data-driven content gives you the ability to find out exactly what it is that your visitor wants and deliver content that will reassure visitors that your site can meet their needs, can be trusted, and has the solution to solve their problem.

In the early days of the Internet, marketers often had no choice but to create campaigns that were inexact in terms of focus and awareness. Today, we are able to see exactly who shares and clicks what as well as how visitors navigate our sites. Furthermore, we no longer have to wait a lengthy period of time to see that data. The data and metrics available today allow us to gain much deeper insights into what visitors do and what they want.

When it comes to reaching out to customers via online marketing, it is not always about what we say, it’s also about when we say it, where we say it, and how we say it. In particular, timing can be one of the most important elements in converting a casual visitor into a paying customer.

The good news is that you already have the data you need in order to create engaging content that your visitors will relate to. While you might not have the necessary framework in place to put that data to work for your website, tools are available to help you understand your visitors better and leverage data in real time to deliver powerful, personalized content at precisely the right time.

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Convert Visitors into Loyal Customers

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Converting Casual Visitors into Loyal CustomersAccording to a study conducted by the CMO Council, higher engagement and response rates are the number one reason for utilizing personalized content. The study further found that personalized content tends to convert more customers.  So why not start to convert visitors into loyal customers?

One of the most common problems that many brands experience in their online marketing efforts today is trying to convert casual visitors into loyal customers. As most brands are well aware, many visitors tend to arrive on their sites, surf around for a bit, and then leave without making any attempt to engage or making a purchase. In order to increase conversions and boost profit levels, it is essential for brands to learn how to convert more of those casual visitors into loyal customers.

While more traffic is always desirable for your website, the reality is that traffic only matters if you are continually increasing the number of visitors you convert. When it comes to designing a successful and effective website, too many marketers tend to focus on what they need to do to attract visitors to their website. Unfortunately, all of the work that you do to get people to visit your website will be for naught if you are not able to convert visitors into paying customers. In terms of converting casual visitors into loyal customers, one of the best ways to do this is to engage them with personalized content.

As advanced as technology has become, relationships are still one of the primary drivers that can encourage a prospect to choose one brand over another brand. While you might not be able to utilize face-to-face connections as you would with a brick-and-mortar store, you can still leverage your online presence in order to interact in a direct manner with those customers who visit your website. In this regard, you will be able to create more powerful relationships while encouraging visitors to take the next step to becoming loyal customers.

Without the tools to drive conversion, brand awareness may be nice, but your sales simply may not reflect the true number of visitors your website attracts. In order to convert casual visitors into sales, your website must be built with the right support.

Data-driven, dynamic content in real time is one of the most important elements website owners today can use to convert even the most casual visitors into loyal customers. In the design of your website, consider what information your visitors want most and whether they are able to find that information right away. Remember that most visitors today have incredibly short attention spans. Furthermore, they have far more online information from which to choose from today than they did just a few years ago. This means it is absolutely vital that you capture their attention right away and deliver the information they want most. Real time data-driven content can tell you exactly what a casual visitor wants and give you the ability to deliver the information they want in order to create more personalized content and drive higher conversions.

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Personalizing Your Content to Drive Engagement

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Personalize your Website ContentWith more content than ever online with which your brand must compete, learning how to personalize your content to drive your engagement has become essential. No longer is it enough to simply update your website on a regular basis. You must create a dynamic website experience that is designed to encourage prospects to convert to customers and shorten sales cycles. Personalization of your website content is one of the best ways to do this. Begin personalizing your content to drive engagement today!

The Benefits of Personalization

Thanks to technological advances, marketers now have the ability to take full advantage of personalized website content. By using personalized content, you can reduce clutter in the vast amount of online content that your brand must compete with and create a web experience that is far more relevant and personalized to the individual visitor. This is a far more targeted marketing approach that is also much more effective.

By providing your customers with a more personalized experience, your brand can benefit from visitors remaining on your website longer, downloading more offers, and ultimately making more purchases.

The social media revolution has dramatically changed the way in which the Internet is used. Today, it is more about user-driven content and user engagement. Website personalization provides your brand with the ability to change website content dynamically and extend offers based on visitor-driven criteria. Such criteria can be created in almost any way that you might desire, including visitor actions, website behavior, content interests, etc.

Creating Engaging Web Content in Real Time

Analyzing visitor behavior and then re-designing your website content in real time gives your brand the opportunity to recognize and tap into your customer’s interests. This also gives you the chance to maximize engagement and sales by delivering incredibly personalized website experiences for each customer based on current as well as past behaviors.

Ultimately, it is important to recognize that when a visitor arrives on your website, he or she is only interested in their own specific needs. They are not interested in any other information and it is up to you to provide the personalized content necessary to pique their interest and keep them on your site long enough to convert them into paying customers. Each time that a customer returns to your site, your content should be updated to encourage customers to continue moving through the sales funnel without running the risk of having the customer be distracted by information they do not need and not relevant to them.

In order to maximize the opportunities made available by personalized content, it is important for your brand to focus on creating content rather than taking a broad spread approach. The creation of buyer’s personas can be an excellent way to determine the type of content that should be created to drive engagement. The latest technology has also made it possible to create a variety of content options for driving a more engaging web experience through home page content, cross-selling, and product level recommendations.

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Why Your Website Needs to Be More Engaging to Convert

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Engage your Website VisitorsDid you know that you only have about 15 seconds to get the attention of your website visitors? According to Chartbeat, that’s how much time you have to capture their attention, so make it count. Further data from Chartbeat shows that most people do not read web content the way we think. Adding to the difficulty in capturing the attention of visitors is the fact that there is now more content available online than ever before. Google receives more than 4 million search queries every 60 seconds. As if that was not enough to concern a marketer, consumers are now reviewing more and more information prior to making a purchasing decision. In fact, 85 percent of consumers turn to trusted online sources for information to assist with buying decisions. On average, consumers will actually engage with almost a dozen pieces of content before they actually make a purchase. If your website needs to be more engaging then start to look at ways to personalize website content and convert your visitors.

More Difficult Than Ever for Marketers to Stand Out from the Crowd Online

Although the vast amount of content available online may make it easier for consumers to review products and services, it has also served to make it much more difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd. It is no longer enough to simply regurgitate facts. Your brand must ensure that your content is as engaging as possible, which means addressing the wants and needs of your audience while simultaneously empathizing with them. Doing so will allow you to increase your level of audience involvement, while also converting more people. Today, your prospects expect your brand to express interest in them by extending ongoing interaction, both via social media as well as your website. If you deprive visitors of this opportunity, you are also likely losing out to the competition and sacrificing the opportunity for your business to build important relationships with your prospects.

Engaging Your Prospects to Convert Them into Customers

Among the most common mistakes that many marketers make today is plastering their website with one-way content. This can come across as anti-social and serve to drive away customers before you even have the chance to convert them into paying customers.

One of the best ways to quickly grab the attention of a prospect is to personalize your content to that particular visitor. It’s also important to make communication as relevant as possible. In other words, you need to ensure your content is visitor specific. A couple of ways this can be accomplished is by using the visitor’s name or even inserting the city or state in which they live to catch their attention.

It’s also important to ensure your website content has a unique voice. This helps your visitors know what to expect from your content while also helping to reassure them, which is an important step toward building trust and converting visitors.

While your brand may have more competition online, learning how to engage your customers with personalized content can help you increase your conversion rate and bottom line.

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Getting the Most from Website Visitor Tracking

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Getting the Most from Website Visitor TrackingWebsite visitor tracking offers an incredible wealth of insight. In fact, it can be one of the most powerful tools available in your arsenal when it comes to identifying and qualifying sales leads. Even so, you need to make sure you are getting the most from your website visitor tracking or you could be losing money.

First, make sure you are using all of the capabilities of your website visitor tracking. Remember, you can do much more than simply track page views. Website visitor tracking software can provide you with an incredible wealth of information about what your visitors are doing while they are on your site, including the pages they visit, what they did on those pages, and how long they stayed on those pages. If you want to know what your visitors are interested in the most and what is triggering their actions, this is the way to do it. Professional-grade visitor tracking can track document downloads, video watching activity, social media interaction, original lead source, 1:1 sales email engagement, and much more.

Website visitor tracking can also be incredibly beneficial for determining what is motivating your leads. Motivation is vital in terms of lead qualification. You must be able to determine whether a lead is simply interested, or whether he or she may be ready to make a purchase. Furthermore, you need to determine whether your lead is able to make the purchase. Website visitor tracking can provide you with the information you need to make this type of evaluation.

Remember, website visitor tracking will only deliver what you put into it. If you are not making use of the information generated, you will not see any improvement in lead qualification, follow up, or sales conversions. By taking the time to evaluate the information generated by your visitor tracking software, you will gain the opportunity to glean as much information as possible about your leads, eliminate those leads that may not be qualified, and learn precisely the right time to follow up with leads in the buying cycle. As a result, you can gain an incredibly strong edge over the competition while simultaneously meeting the needs of each individual customer.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads
Lead Liaison

Using Website Visitor Tracking Over Time to Build More Sales Leads

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Using Website Visitor Tracking Over Time to Build More Sales LeadsAll businesses want the strongest leads possible. After all, the stronger your leads, the more conversions you have, and the better your bottom line. While you cannot exactly create strong leads from thin air, there are some things you can do to grow stronger sales leads over time. One of them is to implement website visitor tracking.

You might be surprised to find that website visitor tracking is actually able to improve over time. This happens as behavioral patterns become more apparent as the software evaluates more and more sales leads. As a result, it becomes easier to identify relevant buying triggers. The key to making this work, however, is consistently following and analyzing the paths that recently converted leads have taken.

Building a Comprehensive Lead Profile

Website visitor tracking also gives you the ability to develop a comprehensive lead profile. This type of profile covers all of the demographic and behavioral characteristics that a qualified lead is likely to display throughout the entire buying process. Imagine how valuable that type of information would be. Not only does this information make it easier to connect with leads, it also increases the chances of converting more leads and the more leads you are able to convert, the more your revenues grow.

Ensuring You Do Not Miss Any Leads or Opportunities

By implementing website visitor tracking software, you gain the ability to capture every single lead on your website and ensure that you do not lose any. In addition, you can determine precisely which stage in the buying process a lead may be in at any given time. This makes it much easier to respond quickly to interested leads while also determining the best time to follow up with leads that may not be quite ready to be contacted yet. This is precisely why it is important to ensure you have a reliable website visitor tracking system in place. The stronger your leads, the more you will be able to understand what drives sales. Ultimately, you will be better able to respond to the needs of your customers.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads
Lead Liaison

Understanding When to trigger Lead Follow Up

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Understanding when to Trigger Lead Follow UpDo you know the right time to follow up with leads? It can be tricky to know the best time. If you follow up too soon, before a lead is actually ready, you run the risk of losing them. Conversely, if you wait too late to follow up, you also run the risk of losing them, albeit to the competition. While it is a bit of a balancing act, lead follow up can be best accomplished when you have the most relevant information available. The best way to obtain that information is with website visitor tracking.

One of the most important benefits of website visitor tracking is that it gives you the opportunity to determine exactly where your lead is in their specific stage within the buying process. It is absolutely vital that you monitor each lead’s online activity. Website visitor tracking gives you incredible insight into exactly where a lead is in the buying process. A variety of triggers, such as visiting your site’s contact page can prove to be a strong indicator that your lead is nearing the end of the buying process. This is information that you will not have available if you do not have website visitor tracking implemented. If you should happen to miss that particular trigger, you could also easily lose the opportunity to reach out and follow up with your lead. That could result in a lost sale. Naturally, losing a sale is something you never want to happen.

Some leads take a little time to warm up and are not immediately ready for follow up. Yet, other leads are ready, willing, and able to make a purchase right away. When that is the case, you also need to know about it. Website visitor tracking is incredibly effective for identifying interested buyers. If the online behavior and characteristics of a lead indicate that the lead is ready to make a purchase right away, you can take immediate action and ensure you do not lose that opportunity.

With website visitor tracking, you know precisely when to implement lead follow up so that you are always in touch with visitors at precisely the right time.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads