The 80/20 rule is not a law of nature
Automate your lead classification and focus on the customers that really matter.
80% of your company sales come from 20% of your customers.
Did you every wondered if the 80/20 rule is a law of nature? Why should that be the case for everyone? Imagine how successful you could be if you only had this 20% of customers?
This article is about a marketing automation that allows you to automatically filter out for follow-up only those promising customers that really promise great potential. This automation can be set up in a few minutes and then runs in the background without any manual intervention. Since you don’t have the possibility to intervene, you don’t run the risk to fall back into old habits and to process too many small customers.
Automatic lead classification with Integromat
This automation unfolds its power through the sensible combination of several software components. At its core is the Integromat automation platform, which combines three other cloud services to deliver the desired contacts. Integromat requires only an email address as a starting point for automation. This can come from a website registration form, for example, or be fed in some other way. In this example I assume a Gravity Forms of a WordPress website. Alternatively, however, JotForm or Google Forms would also be possible as input.
Validate the input
The first step is to pass the email address to the MailboxValidator service. This service checks for example if this is a valid email address, if the email address is from a typical free provider like Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook.com and determines a mailboxvalidator_score which indicates which quality the email address has. The purpose of this validation is simple. The more emails you have, the more rigorously you can pre-select at this step. If you have hundreds of registrations, you should focus here only on emails with a high score. Email addresses from Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo should be sorted out directly.
Enrich the email address to get to know your customers
The next step is to pass the email address to Clearbit. This service tries to identify a person or a company based on the email address. If Clearbit can identify a company based on the email domain, it returns information such as company name, address, date founded, number of employees, revenue, Alexa siterank and all social media channels. For example, the following graphic shows the result from info@medium.com. No person can be determined, but clearbit immediately recognizes the company.
You can now use a filter in Integromat to determine which companies are relevant for a follow. You should design the filters in such a way that you really only identify the relevant companies and do not get bogged down with too many follow-ups at the same time. For example, you can filter by the number of employees. Alternatively, you can specify that only people in a management position are returned. Another approach would be annual sales volume. You decide which metric is relevant to you and how many follow-ups you want to do.
Save all lead information and start your follow up
The last thing you need to do is save the contacts you have now identified so you can start and track your follow up process. The easiest way to save all contacts is to use the online spreadsheet SeaTable. In SeaTable you create a table and store there all the information you get from Clearbit. You can then expand this table as you wish to record your follow-up activities such as phone calls, e-mails or personal meetings. This way, you and your team will always keep track of your follow-ups.
Expand your marketing automation
Of course, this is not the end of the possibilities. For example, you could additionally hand over the email address to Sendinblue or ActiveCampaign to start an email automation directly. Alternatively, you could consider sending your new contact a personal video message via Dubb. This depends entirely on how you want to engage or contact your customers.
This automated lead classification using Integromat can be set up in less than an hour. But even if you need extra time to design the exact filters that fit, this workflow will be of great help to you in no time. Automation will make your life easier and save you a lot of time, helping you identify only relevant people or companies where you should really invest further time.
If you need some more inspiration, Integromat can also help with preparing your weekly team meetings or monitoring the news about every publication about your company.
