As your business booms and you get busy with new strategies and marketing campaigns or even brainstorming for new services or products, it’s natural that some of the other operations—like marketing or lead generation—add extra weight and pressure to your schedule.
No matter how long you have been in the industry, even the most seasoned business owners can have trouble generating leads from time to time.
This is why automation is a life saver for contemporary entrepreneurs.
Instead of spending hours manually sourcing leads—over the phone or by sending cold emails—automated lead generation combines the power of AI tools and machine learning to let you set up your workflows so that the emails and the data come to you.
What can you do by automating lead generation?
How can you use automated lead generation for your marketing efforts? What are the activities you can automate?
You can employ lead generation and marketing automation to complete your logging processes.
Non-selling or closing activities, including logging emails and phone calls, can be automated and made visible to everyone in your team for future decision-making purposes.
Measuring your sales metrics is also possible with automated lead generation. This includes everything from the number of calls made and emails sent to the number of conversations and scheduled meetings.
Using marketing automation for sales also enables automated lead management. You can boost productivity with set automatic lead assignment rules based on predefined criteria.
You can accurately determine your sales KPIs, which include total revenue, market penetration, net promoter score (NPS), average lifetime value (LTV), revenue by territory, and year-over-year (YoY) growth.
So what does your business stand to gain when all these factors align?
– Increase your operational efficiency
Lead generation automation lets you create lead-based marketing campaigns without in-person meetings, saving you time, money, and labour that would otherwise be spent on manual tracking.
When you remove the necessity to complete tedious and repetitive tasks your sales teams perform in a day, you can empower them to focus on other operations, like selling, which requires more human intelligence.
The overall result is getting more work done with less effort and costs.
– Streamline your lead management
With lead generation software that can gather, sort, and nurture prospective clients, you can easily connect to all possible clients and promote your product. But the benefits of using marketing automation for lead generation don’t end there.
You can also:
- Determine which leads are most likely to become customers
- Analyse their buying behaviour based on demographics, their level of need, and financial capabilities
- Personalise your lead nurturing efforts with automated list-building programs
– Get more qualified leads
As your business scales, personally guiding every prospect with custom emails becomes challenging. This is especially true with hard-to-qualify prospects.
When you combine lead generation and marketing automation, you can complete this process by sending nurturing emails sent to leads in many stages. This means sending an email to welcome a new subscriber, providing educational content for a lead with downloadables, or re-engaging inactive contacts.
Over time, this will result in nurturing your contacts into qualified leads, increasing the chance of them becoming your customers.
– Enhance the experience of your audience
One of the most important benefits of automating your sales processes is that it provides you with an opportunity to reach out to people at the right point in the sales funnel.
With features like chatbots that let you lead 24/7, you can easily get in touch with potential customers and improve your efforts at converting them to paying clients.
Automation can help speed up your processes while decreasing response times, showing customers that you consider them a priority in your business.
In return, by boosting their trust, you’ll be able to keep them engaged after you make sales and increase your client retention rates as well.
– Experience shorter sales cycles
Adopting automation can make your entire sales process move swiftly and without the increased risk of human errors.
As you nurture leads automatically and provide personalised content, you can facilitate relevant content, including those that explain your products, appease your customers’ preferences and hesitations, and offer value.
This means bypassing the time spent waiting for your lead to come back to a certain page or marketing material and completing the sales process faster.
Studies reveal that nurtured leads experience a 23% shorter sales cycle.
– Better your follow-ups
While following up is crucial to close the deal, an average salesperson only makes two attempts to reach a prospect. Particularly as your business scales and your sales team get busy, constant, continuous follow-ups may not be a possible feat to achieve.
Lead generation and marketing automation together can provide helpful clues to salespeople as to when a prospect is interested. For example, this could mean receiving notification emails when a lead takes a specific action, such as downloading an eBook. You can also set up automatic lead scoring to highlight the best-fit leads.
By identifying the hottest leads, your sales team can prioritise calls with the best outcomes and make sure that no leads will fall through the cracks in your funnel.
– Track your performance
63% of marketers agree that the ability to define measurable objectives for their campaigns is the biggest value of marketing automation.
Lead generation and marketing automation don’t just simplify your lead capturing but also enable you to track the success of your campaigns.
This means the ability to track:
- The conversions history, including how many were converted
- The links that are converting your web pages
- The time people spend on various parts of the page
These details are extremely useful to determine what clicks with your target audience, identify what improvements or changes to be made, and fine-tune messaging on each page so prospects are encouraged to convert early during their journey.
Automated lead generation refines your sales cycle scale and lets your team operate smoother
Businesses who are constantly searching for new tools and processes that can help them save time, effort, and resources within their business strategies can benefit heavily from the combined power of lead generation and marketing automation.
Every person who crosses paths with your website will be captured, profiled, and scored due to automation software that can give you a worthy return on your investments.
If you’re interested in learning more about how automation can help you refine your sales and marketing efforts, don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation with Launchy’s experts today!