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| Marketing Automation |
In the lead management process, marketing automation continues to have a greater role. It helps in creating marketing campaigns in a way that they can be triggered automatically based on certain pre-defined rules. With the use of these rules and triggers, marketers are able to set actions that need to be taken when specific conditions are met. With this kind of automated lead management process, you can achieve better lead generation and management processes as well as uncover hidden leads waiting to be discovered. Here are some tips for using marketing automation for your lead management processes:
Define your lead qualification process
Before you start using automation to drive lead management, it’s important to define your lead qualification process. This process should include how leads are going to be triggered, how long the process will take, and how the leads will be qualified. Defining these things beforehand will help you use automation more effectively. For example, if you’re using a webinar as lead generation, you have to decide when will the lead be triggered. You may decide to trigger the leads when they’ve watched the webinar or after they’ve watched it for a specific time. The same thing goes for other lead generation methods like Content Marketing, PPC, Social Media, etc.
Establish a trigger-based lead management process
Along with defining your lead qualification process, you also have to establish a trigger-based lead management process. A trigger-based lead management process means that there are specific triggers that will prompt an action from your end – like sending an email, calling a lead, etc. Let’s say you’re using a webinar as your lead generation method. The process would go something like this: Once a lead registers for the webinar, they are put into a Lead Queue. After a few hours, they’ll be contacted via email. The email will thank them for registering and will also have a link to their free gift. After a few hours, the Lead Queue will send a reminder email to the leads. Once the webinar date arrives, the Lead Queue will prompt the team to take a call from the leads that registered.
Automate your ad campaigns
Ad campaigns are a major part of lead management. You have to be very careful with the ad campaigns as they can have a real impact on your bottom line. Most marketers, however, spend hours and hours manually managing their ad campaigns and, as a result, lead generation suffers. On top of that, ad campaigns also take a lot of time to get approved. With automation, you can save a lot of time and, consequently, improve your lead generation strategy. Automation can be used to trigger the ad campaign at a specific time or when a lead is qualified. For example, when a lead is qualified via webinar, you can set the automation so that the ad campaign is triggered immediately and ends after a few hours.
Use drip marketing to nurture leads
Drip marketing is all about sending out regular emails to your leads. You have to make sure that your emails are personalized and have a real value for your leads. Drip marketing is especially helpful when you’re dealing with unqualified leads. You can use drip marketing to help these leads arrive at the “Aha” moment faster. Drip marketing is particularly powerful when implemented with automation. You can set up your automation so that the emails are sent out at certain intervals – like after a certain number of hours or days.
Utilize email automation
Email automation is a feature of marketing automation software that helps you to send emails to your leads at certain intervals. Email automation is helpful in nurturing leads and driving them towards the “Aha” moment. You can use email automation to send targeted emails to your leads as well as follow up with them if they don’t respond to your emails. You can also use email automation to send personalized emails to your leads. You can use lead data and analytics to personalize your emails.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is an excellent way to streamline your lead generation and management process. With marketing automation, you’ll be able to create a seamless lead management process that will make it easier to generate leads and manage them. That being said, you don’t want to implement every aspect of marketing automation at once. Instead, you should start with the most important aspects of your lead management process, like lead generation and nurturing. Once you’ve gotten these areas under control, you can then move on to the less important aspects, like following up with leads.