The process of converting leads into customers is riddled with obstacles. As a marketer, you want to target the right leads with the right messaging. But for many businesses, this poses a significant challenge.
If you’re struggling to drive results with your marketing efforts, consider using automation. That’s because marketing automation empowers you to identify, prioritize, and nurture leads more effectively.
Here are the top five ways marketing automation can help you convert more leads and maximize ROI.
Table of Contents
1. Nurture leads through your sales funnel
Lead nurturing refers to using automated email marketing to inform and nurture leads. Guiding leads through the acquisition cycle is the most common use case for B2B marketing automation.
This tactic works particularly well where leads require a large amount of trust and education before making a purchase. You can use automated workflows to guide leads through the sales funnel, providing them with relevant content at each stage to build trust and engagement.
Once a lead signs up to your list, follow up with targeted content until the lead is warm enough to be passed off to the sales team.
Lead nurturing does two things:
- Tracks leads as they move along the buyer’s journey
- Adjust your digital marketing tactics and messaging according to the different steps
The best marketing automation workflows to build B2B relationships include:
- Welcome email sequences to introduce new subscribers to your brand/product
- Email marketing sequences following gated content (i.e. free downloadables or webinar signups)
- If/then/else sequences depending on specific lead activity (page visits, email opens and clicks, etc.)
2. Set up lead scoring
Just as B2B leads need to be nurtured, they also need to be qualified. This means putting a system in place to determine which stage a contact is at in the buyer journey.
B2B sales cycles can be long and complex. And for a marketer whose job is to send high-quality leads to sales, timing is everything. What’s the best way to achieve this?
Create a lead scoring model. A lead scoring model assigns leads a ‘score’ based on their engagement level or predefined attributes.
Marketing automation takes care of this by assigning ‘points’ to leads. This usually occurs whenever their interactions suggest a growing interest in your brand (clicking an email link, browsing a product page, etc.). You could also assign points based on attributes. For example if their email contains the domain name of one of your targeted accounts
With Brevo, setting up a lead scoring model consists of creating a custom CRM attribute for the score, determining the actions that deserve points, then setting up an automation workflow that calculates the score.
What’s more, the lead score itself can serve as an automation trigger. For example, a score between 80-90 could trigger a specific email or move the contact to another email list (we’ll talk more about automated segmentation later).
3. Tailor content with dynamic personalization
Once you’ve defined your target audience, send dynamic content to create unique, personalized experiences for your prospects and customers. This includes everything from tailored product recommendations to purchase confirmations.
Dynamic content allows you to create personalized email campaigns that adjust to your subscribers’ details on autopilot. No need to craft multiple templates for each specific case.
You can create personalized emails in a few clicks, from showcasing the most related content to recommending products based on their interest.
4. Target your audience with segmentation
Email list segmentation leads to more relevant messaging and higher engagement. You can segment your audience based on various criteria such as demographics, behavior, and preferences.
Marketing automation allows personalized and targeted communication, increasing the relevance of your messages. Setup is easy if your automation tool, like Brevo, offers dynamic segmentation. Brevo lets you create automation workflows that move contacts to specific lists depending on web pages visited, email engagement, etc.
For example, you can create a segment for abandoned leads. To do this, you’ll first need to identify dormant users based on various criteria (e.g. last login date, purchase history). Then re-engage them with targeted content, including special offers and personalized recommendations.
A marketing automation platform should either have its own CRM component or integrate with your existing CRM. Use automation to keep this database up to date by automatically assigning attributes to individual customer profiles.
5. Prioritize leads and drive conversion
Converting leads into paying customers is a time-consuming process. In order to maximize your ROI, you’ll need to target leads strategically. That means prioritizing leads with the highest potential for conversion. Marketing automation makes it easier to identify these leads via lead scoring.
Once you identify your high value-leads, offer them exclusive discounts or limited-time offers. Or automate reminder messages across channels, from email to SMS. That way, you’ll get customers to come back and avoid missing out on valuable sales.
Maximize ROI with marketing automation
Start by laying the foundations for a successful marketing automation strategy by making sure you’re clear on who you’ll be targeting, how, and when.
Marketing automation not only boosts your returns. It also frees up time to explore other opportunities to optimize your marketing processes.
Ready to get started? Brevo offers a range of solutions to boost your marketing automation ROI.
