Lead nurturing is essential for any company to move potential buyers down its sales funnel and increase sales. In fact, those that are successful at lead nurturing create 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.
One of the essential components of multi-channel lead nurturing is marketing automation, which helps you pinpoint, segment, and target your individual buyer personas as you develop your inbound marketing strategy. So how can you utilize marketing automation to help nurture your leads?
Nurture Leads with Marketing Automation Using these 7 Simple Hacks
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- Find Your Best Leads
The data you gather from a marketing automation system will help you score and grade leads to ensure that only the top prospects are passed along to your sales team. When leads reach a certain score and grade, they can be automatically passed on to the appropriate sales rep, which can eliminate manual processes and speed things up.
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- Better Monitor Lead Activity
By utilizing marketing automation with customer relationship management, you will better be able to track the pages your leads are visiting, find out what kind of content they are interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle. By using this information, your sales reps can customize their pitches.
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- Communicate with Leads Throughout the Sales Cycle
Lead nurturing ensures that you know exactly when a lead is ready to buy because you will have communicated with them throughout the sales cycle. So if they are ready to buy right away, great; otherwise, you’ll be there when they reach that point.
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- Send the Right Content at the Right Time
Leads want to receive targeted content that fits their needs during each step of the buying process. By using the behavioral information you collect through marketing automation, your messages can be catered to those needs. You can further segment them based on industry or product interest, which will increase engagement and click-through rates.
For instance, if someone downloads your “Tips on the Purchase Process” they’re at a very different stage than someone who clicks on “What Is
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- Create Action-Based Triggers
Your audience doesn’t want to be e-mailed every day, but it’s important to keep in regular contact with them. And one of the ways you can do this is by using action-based triggers, such as including an offer to download a free eBook or sign up for a webinar, to determine how they will respond.
- Plan Schedules for Automated Tasks
Marketing automation can also help you create schedules that can be adapted to eliminate repetitive tasks. You can schedule email campaigns well in advance and automate status-based follow-up emails with your leads. You can also create “If then” campaigns that allow activity triggers to generate customized responses or content-generation suggestions.
- Send Real-Time Notifications
It’s essential for lead nurturing to be timely and pertinent to each lead. No matter where your lead is in the sales cycle, they may need to be reminded about an offer or action they need to take. Marketing automation can help ensure that real-time notifications can be utilized to meet the needs of your leads promptly.
Finally, you can use retargeting campaigns to catch your audience’s attention as they peruse the Internet. Seeing your offers around the web will keep you top of mind, helping contribute to the know, like, and trust that entices people to buy these days.
