Optimize Lead Nurturing with These Marketing Automation Practices

Turning a lead to a customer requires lots of effort and focus on the right marketing tactics. Without proper lead nurturing, it would be extremely hard to increase your conversion rates. In order to get the best out of lead nurturing, consider implementing marketing automation tools to save you time and make sure that these processes are error-free.

Marketing automation increases the speed and it eases the implementing of different tactics. Considering that 49% of companies (and 55% if you’re in the B2B industry) already implemented marketing automation technology, that tells a lot about your competitors. Are you willing to step up and maximize lead nurturing by automatizing the process?

1. Advanced Lead Segmentation

Segmented campaigns can result in increasing as much as 760% in revenue. For a successful segmentation, you need to divide leads into groups based on similar characteristics that these leads have. However, since each lead is a person on its own, it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to do this segmentation manually. With marketing automation, you can save time and segment groups in a very precise way that will enable you to implement different marketing tactics for achieving the company’s goals.

Before segmenting the leads into smaller groups, think about what characteristics are important for your brand. There are many characteristics to consider, such as age, geographical location, gender, lifestyle choices — the list can go even further.

Let’s say a food delivery app runs in Stockholm and Malmö. They decided to run a promotion for free delivery on every order over 50 euros. However, they want to boost orders only in Stockholm, so this promotion excludes all app users that live in Malmö. This is where segmentation based on the geographical location plays its role. Instead of sending the email to all app users, or manually selecting those who live in Stockholm and waste plenty of time (while sending it to some app users to Malmö by mistake!), by automating segmentation you can send this email to only one segment group, which in this case consists of app users based in the capital city.

Segmentation is crucial for many aspects of your marketing strategy. Out of all these aspects, the relationship you have with your customers is one that is largely influenced by your approach to segmentation. The customer relationship can either really benefit from automation or suffer from being neglected or nurtured in the wrong way. It’s easy for customers to move on to another brand, so make sure to take care of the relationship by establishing it in the early stages of the interaction.

2. Behavioral Marketing Approach

Once you segment the leads according to the basic characteristics we’ve already mentioned beforehand, you can dive deeper and segment even further. With that we mean to segment the leads by their behavior patterns during online searches, purchases they already made, user interests, frequent searches, etc.

For example, the food delivery app will base their segmentation further upon food preferences, previously-browsed meals, allergies, lifestyle choices, etc. The more you narrow the segmentation down, the better the personalization options you’ll have.

According to Marketo poll, almost 79% of consumers say they are more likely to engage with an offer if it has been personalized according to previous interactions the consumer had with the brand. This is exactly why behavioral marketing is one of the most efficient ways to bring leads closer to making the action you want them to take. People like receiving tailored messages that are really relevant to them. In a sea of competitors who include hyper-personalization in their campaigns, it is very easy to be replaced.

With marketing automation, you are able to really dive deep into the user’s preferences and past behaviors. The data you gather is then going to help you to create personalized content for your future marketing campaigns. It will also give you more options for effective user engagement, including the ability for cross-selling and up-selling, contextual targeting and email retargeting.

3. Lead Prioritization Through Scores

You did proper nurturing by segmentation and you used the data for relevant content creation. Then, observe and come up with a conclusion about your leads and the possibility of turning them into lasting customers. How many of them are likely to convert?

No matter how much effort you put into lead nurturing, some of them will never convert. Instead of investing in non-converting interactions, you can put more focus into those that are likely to do so. Many marketing automation tools offer lead scoring. It is an automated process of assigning a particular number of points to a certain lead. This type of scoring depends on the interaction between the brand and the lead.

With each activity, you add points to a certain lead. For example, if a lead signs up for your newsletters, they can automatically get 5 points. Later, if they contact you for questions, this activity can bring them another 5 points. The more points, the more active a lead is and the bigger the possibility to convert.

Automating this process clearly lets you know which leads need more nurturing, and which leads don’t. However, this doesn’t mean that you should stop right away the interaction with the leads that probably won’t convert. You should slowly decrease the interaction, but still, keep some kind of contact with them. Ask them whether they still want to be on your lead list if after some time they still don’t interact.

4. A/B Testing through Analytics

Implementing different marketing tactics that would eventually reach the end goal is a great success. However, if you want to ensure success in the long run, what you’ll need is the help of marketing automation with analytics and reports.

Test different variations of that certain campaign to see if there’s a need for improvements. For example, you can test out different CTAs, copy, design, time of sending, etc. This way you can see what the leads react on the most, and then keep on including these elements in further campaigns.

Analytics tells you which actions bring you the best results, and where you go wrong. Use this data when creating your marketing strategies. You will be able to create campaigns that will maximize the nurturing and make sure that the leads are a step closer to the end goal.

Neglecting the data that analytics and reports are offering will only put you behind your competition. With the help of marketing automation tools, you can analyze strategies and measure your efforts to success.

Conclusion:

Lead nurturing doesn’t end when the lead buys something from you. It is a process that lasts continuously and is done for a simple reason: customers need to be reminded of your brand and what it can do for them. In the digital world, where the competition is fierce more than ever, it is extremely easy for customers to switch brands the moment they’re not satisfied. By providing high-quality lead nurturing through marketing automation tools, you’re speeding your way to success while optimizing the process of increasing both engagement and sales — and that is just two among many other benefits you get from marketing automation.

We, at Alite International, have been working with multiple large organizations in supporting their move towards full marketing automation & executing cross-channel marketing strategies. If you need any additional information, do not hesitate to send me an email on kiril.jakimovski@alite-international.com. Or you can visit our website and read more: https://alite-international.com/.