Marketing Automation as a Lead Generation Software
Marketing automation is a form of software that allows businesses to produce sales leads by sending automated marketing communications to clients via email, websites, social media, and text messages. The technology is a subset of customer relationship management or CRM, and it’s commonly used by marketing departments to automate repetitive operations and boost overall marketing productivity.
Sales and marketing collaboration is a common issue that stems from a disagreement over lead qualification. Rather than cooperating toward a viable solution for converting leads into consumers, these parties frequently exploit one another as scapegoats. This type of disconnected marketing-sales collaboration might stymie your company’s progress.
Marketing automation was created primarily as a foil for salespeople’s preferred platform, customer relationship management software. MAPs centralize consumer behavioural data from email campaigns, website activity, and social media interactions, like how CRM software consolidates all the data sales teams require about incoming prospects and accounts.
Given that the most long-running debate between marketing and sales centres on lead quality, this behaviour data could be the olive branch that both parties require to build a fruitful alliance.
Below are a couple of examples of organizations who have implemented marketing automation in their processes.
Marketing automation helped in a 175% increase in revenue: Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters failed to synchronise sales and marketers, just like most significant businesses experiencing rapid growth.
Blast and broadcast campaigns were also being carried out. The idea of segmenting leads was nonexistent, and the marketing team sent leads to the sales team even if they weren’t qualified.
Marketing automation was put in place to improve the operations. This process begins by using a CRM to first consolidate leads. A lead scoring standard was then backed and put into place. Profiles of desirable clients were then developed.
A 23 percent increase in leads forwarded to sales teams and a 175% gain in income attributable to leads generated by marketing were achieved because of these adjustments, thanks to automation.
Dell saw a double-digit increase after testing templates: A/B Testing and Automation
The Dell team sought to improve and upgrade the appearance of their email templates. Improvements in key performance metrics were another objective of these landing page optimizations.
To be more specific, they first sought to assess the effects of altering the standard email top navigation, which most businesses adhere to firmly.
They hypothesised that moving the typical top navigation to the email footer could boost hero engagement and produce better outcomes.
Numerous case studies and industry research can be found if you look in the field. Some people like using the header at the top, whereas others disagree. We had never attempted that at Dell before. — Jessica Vogel, Senior Global Market Manager at Dell.
They could thereby lessen the noise before the receiver reads the email’s essential message.
By just testing their navigation bars in the emails and aligning with their international consumers, Dell witnessed a double-digit win with an increased focus on developing mobile responsive designs.
To study and comprehend the outcomes of these new email templates, they conducted an A/B split test. And to see if the new template design made it easier for users to get to the main call-to-action.
Though marketing automation helps in nurturing the leads and converting cold leads into warm leads — it doesn’t do the selling by itself. (Esp when the ticket cost is high. When you have a lot of leads, finding out the most serious leads from the junk leads cannot be done without marketing automation. Many CM tools will help you score the leads based on the lead activity within the funnel. For example, you can give 1 point for every email open and 3 points for every link click. The more the score of a lead, the more engaged they are and the better the chances that they will convert into a buyer if the sales team engages with them.
References:
· Prakash, Ankit. “11 Amazing B2B Marketing Automation Examples for 2022.” Aritic PinPoint Blog, aritic.com, 8 Dec. 2021, https://aritic.com/blog/aritic-pinpoint/marketing-automation-examples/.
· McDaniel, Scott, and Steve Beger. “Email Marketing: Template Test Drives Double-Digit Increases for Dell | MarketingSherpa.” MarketingSherpa, www.marketingsherpa.com, 17 Feb. 2016, https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/template-test-drives-double-digit-increases.
