How you can get more leads using marketing automation

The goals of any marketing strategy are likely to include producing more revenue for the business – and for that you need effective lead generation. There are many different ways to engage in lead generation for your business and marketing automation is proving to be one of the most effective.

What is marketing automation?

It’s the use of software to automate many of the marketing and lead generation tasks that would otherwise fall to individuals. Marketing automation software can be used to make just about any part of your marketing process more effective and efficient, from emails through to following up a purchase with relevant content. A survey by Gartner’s Software Advice found that 98% of small businesses are now shopping for marketing automation software so it is a trend that is firmly embedding.

How can you use marketing automation to generate more leads?

Email drip campaigns

Marketing automation is incredibly useful with respect to maintaining email contact with your customers – and drip campaigns are ideal for generating authentic leads. A drip campaign is a series of email messages that are automatically delivered on a pre-determined schedule to customers and designed to move them through the sales funnel. Audience segmentation is an essential part of an email drip campaign to ensure that you’re sending relevant messages to those who will be most receptive to them. An automated drip campaign can nurture leads until they are sales-ready so that your sales team always has a wealth of potential leads to work with.

More accurate lead scoring

Marketing automation can feed into lead scoring, something that is essential when it comes to identifying those leads that are ready to progress to the next stage of the sales funnel. Integrating marketing automation into the process means that the sales team can be more effective, making contact with leads that have been nurtured and are ready for the next level, as opposed to wasting time chasing prospects who are not.

Automation + landing pages

An email drip campaign can be used to funnel leads through to landing pages that are relevant to their interests and needs. There, customers will be able to provide their contact information in exchange for something genuinely useful to them, whether that is video content or written downloads, and another potential lead has been generated.

A/B testing

A/B testing is becoming essential in order to determine which version of an ad, landing page or email campaign is the most effective – and automation is crucial to its effectiveness. It allows for two versions of the same content to be created and then tested on a segment of your brand’s audience. From this a vast amount of data can be collected to make marketing more effective – for example, A/B testing of an email campaign can gather data such as email open rates, click throughs and downloads to see which version generated the most.

These are just a few of the ways in which marketing automation can be used to help your business do better when it comes to lead generation. At Iconic, we understand the tools that businesses can use to do more with existing marketing resources – contact us on 020 7100 0726 today to speak to a member of the team.