Marketing Automation To Generate More Sales Leads
Marketing Automation with priority streams, dynamic lists, and click-through targeting allows for several different actions than traditional ones to boost leads. We will explain three ways to use Marketing Automation to take advantage of Leads to generate even more opportunities for the sales team.
Leveraging Leads That Are Not Yet Ready To Buy
This first use of automation is the least conventional. Few companies pay attention to these Leads, as they let Marketing Automation do the work of nurturing them. It is the role of automation to take care and nurture these Leads automatically, as approaching them too early can ” burn the start” and waste an opportunity. However, if the Lead has a good profile, it is worth closely monitoring their actions to approach them at the most appropriate time possible.
To be able to closely monitor these Leads with great potential but who are not yet mature, a good way is the following:
- Create a segmentation list with the criteria that your company considers a good fit (certain positions, segments, company size);
- Create an automated flow with the following rule: if the Lead enters this list, assign a salesperson as the owner of that Lead (in RD Station Marketing, you can distribute the Leads among a group of sellers);
- Finally, configure the flow to notify the Lead owner by email whenever he makes a new conversion (download a material, click on a link sent by email).
The salesperson who owns the Lead can follow up very closely. When he realizes that the Lead is already more prepared, he can approach with much more security and a greater probability of closing.
In this situation, the goal is to monitor Leads with the highest potential closely and only approach them when they demonstrate that they are more mature and interested in buying. It is possible to identify this maturity in several ways. Still, the most common is by downloading some specific materials and clicking on a link present in the emails (such as price page, features, etc.).
Leveraging Almost Ready Leads
This second technique is to start taking advantage of leads that are a little more mature and are already showing minor signs of interest in your product or service. It is widespread to place a call-to-Action the last emails leading to the product during nutrition emails, such as a free trial and quote request, among others.
Companies usually create the nurturing flows, insert the Leads into this flow, and in practice, they only relate to those who asked for a free trial or a quote. What most marketing managers don’t realize is that many good opportunities end up being left behind this way.
Exemplifying with numbers:
- In a given email from the nutrition flow, we put a Call-to-Action for a free trial of the tool;
- The link to the free trial page had 120 clicks;
- Of the 120 visitors, only 50 converted and started testing the device. That is a 42% conversion rate.
Those 50 conversions are the Leads that everyone tends to pay the most attention to, correct. However, what happened to the other 70 Leads who clicked on the link in the email? Most companies ignore these leads and miss out on good opportunities.
If Leads received multiple materials, opened a series of emails, and even clicked on the Call-to-Action, they had minimal interest, even if they didn’t convert. Some don’t convert because they’re not interested in the product or service and are just curious. But a portion did not convert because of laziness to fill in the fields or because they left it to do so later — and ended up never doing it.
The trick is right there
Being able to identify, monitor, and approach Leads that showed interest but for some reason did not convert. To monitor these Leads, you can configure Marketing Automation as follows:
- Create a segmentation with Leads who clicked on the link of a particular email and did not convert on their Landing Pages, such as people who clicked on the free trial link but did not start the test;
- Create an automated flow with the following rule: if the Lead enters this list, assign a salesperson as the owner of that Lead (in RD Station Marketing, you can distribute the Leads among a group of salespeople);
- Configure the flow to notify the Lead owner by email.
The Lead may not be quite ready to buy, but they are at least curious to know more, so it’s worth approaching. The essential thing in the process is to ensure real-time notifications and actions.
Leveraging Ready Leads
This last case is the simplest, but it is also where great opportunities are lost for lack of something straightforward: speed. The Lead is now ready to buy and has demonstrated this through conversions. From that moment on, the speed of approach is crucial for success.
According to the Ultimate Contact Strategy study, by approaching the Lead in the first minute after their conversion, their chances of becoming a customer increase by 400%. Marketing Automation can also help with this by shortening the steps in the lead passing process, speeding up this process, and saving precious minutes.
Automation should be pretty simple:
- Create a segmentation with Leads who have shown a clear interest in your product (converted to Landing Pages such as a free trial, quote requests, etc.);
- Create an automated flow with the following rule: if the Lead enters this list, assign a salesperson as the owner of that Lead;
- And finally, configure the flow to mark the Lead as an opportunity and send the Lead to the CRM directly into that seller’s pipeline.
This Lead delivery is done through the integration between the Marketing Automation and CRM tools. In this way, we guarantee that the Leads are sent instantly and that it is already delivered to the seller.
