Marketing Automation Tools-The need of the Times

Marketing Automation Tools : The Need of the Times

Almost everyone thought that the recession would alter the way B2B enterprises viewed marketing automation and that enterprises would think twice before investing in marketing automation. However, even as marketing strategies are becoming complex and terribly intricate, the recessionary times have seen marketing automation tools emerge even stronger as they have now become adept at understanding and offering solutions that cater to these complexities. An optimized marketing automation tool can provide enterprises effective reduction in costs along with end-to-end marketing operational efficiency. In a constantly evolving business landscape, conventional methods of emailing, print advertisements, etc., have been replaced by newer marketing initiatives, webcasts, search engine optimization, etc. A good marketing automation tool can help capitalize on your marketing promotions and campaigns by providing you with qualified customer leads.

Benefits of Marketing Automation Tools

• Radical reductions in cost: Manual campaign executions take time and can be fabulously expensive. An optimized marketing automation tool can not only launch but also execute online marketing initiatives speedily.
• Evolve with the changing environment: Change is inevitable, therefore an optimized marketing automation tool that can respond quickly to changes in the marketing environment can be enormously beneficial for enterprises and their sales teams. Such a tool will improve agility among sales teams as far as their responsiveness towards different evolving aspects of the business is concerned.
• Business intelligence: Once you know your customers inside and out, catering to their needs will be very easy. A marketing automation tool can offer such intelligence, enabling enterprises to run marketing campaigns that have been planned on the basis of such customer related information and ensuring complete success.
• Gets you closer to your customer:  Marketing teams across the world search for that one formula that can provide them with the perfect information about their customers’ specific needs and wants. An optimized marketing automation tool can provide such information to assist marketing teams in engaging such content that is customized according to every customer’s likes and dislikes.

• Effective lead management with enhanced productivity: It is time every enterprise bids a hasty goodbye to dull and repetitive campaign planning tasks. Marketing automation, with its effective lead management software, can offer maximized productivity for all your campaigns.

Every enterprise can benefit from the advantages that marketing automation tools can offer for diverse marketing campaigns. From providing qualified leads and optimized cross-channel communication to effective prospect-customer management, the right marketing automation tools can truly turn an enterprise around and bring in enhanced productivity and ROI.

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Effective Lead Nurturing For Increased Sales



Getting potential customers to come to your website and register does not guarantee increased sales. Not all prospects are ready to buy, but that does not mean that they will never buy. You need to keep these prospects engaged if you want them to ultimately buy. It is important to nurture them so that eventually they become your customers.

The concept of lead nurturing has become immensely popular with marketers today.  It can be thought of as the art of keeping your prospects engaged with the right kind of information at the right time so that ultimately you are the choice the prospect makes.  Lead nurturing is the process of developing a positive long-term relationship with leads/prospects through meaningful dialogue, keeping their attention with a series of time-appropriate messages and then tracking their development into sales opportunities.The information or communication sent to the customer needs to be appropriate and timely or your customer may lose interest in your product and make your marketing efforts ineffective. Lead nurturing programs have become much simpler to design and launch with marketing automation.

According to Aberdeen Research, implementing a lead nurturing practice can yield a 50%+ increase in sales-ready leads, making a large impact in a company's revenue and growth goals. 

Based on lead nurturing, marketers categorize leads based on their sales readiness and pass on to the sales team, only those leads that are ready to buy. And the prospects that are not ready are further nurtured to create interest in the products or services offered. The sales team, on the other hand, makes great progress as they have only hot leads to follow up on. And if any hot lead turns warm, it is directed back to the marketing team to be nurtured. Thus, with lead nurturing, enterprises can ensure maximum sales success.

Highly Effective Stages of Lead Nurturing

Some of the best practices in lead nurturing that can bring about the desired results are:

1. Map out a Strategy – Chalk out a strategy that can help you keep your leads interested. Plan out the kinds of content that need to be delivered to the prospect as a part of lead nurturing program, keeping in mind their interests. The kinds of content that can be sent include white papers/articles, case studies, data sheets, videos, podcasts, webinars, links to specific industry news/resources and interviews with experts/executives.
2. Personalize Your Interaction – Personalizing emails is a good strategy. It kind of breaks the ice. Send relevant content based on the interest in the prospect. You have a much higher chance of keeping your prospect in the fold if you provide information they want.
3. Create a Lead Nurturing Schedule – Develop a schedule for sending out information to the prospect. This helps you keep track of where you are in the lead nurturing funnel.
4. Reinforce Brand/Product – The prospect has shown interest in your product, and it is up to you to keep his attention with timely messages. Share white papers, videos or demos about your brand or product. Develop case studies and share success stories with clients. In this way you will be able to create an image about your brand.
5. Strengthen Relationship – Once the image is built, you need to strengthen it and maintain that interest further. You now need to send a controlled communication to influence the prospect’s buying decision.
6. Close the Deal – Once the prospect is purchase ready, it is time to pass them on to the sales team to close the deal. This can be done with offers of a free trial, and sending references.

In going through the above stages of lead nurturing, you can build up a relationship with the prospect and seamlessly progress to making them potential customers. These best practices can help marketers achieve better sales and improve ROI.

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Intelligent Lead Management Strategies

A mutual effort between sales and marketing  is the most important in lead management , as these two departments determine the success of a business to a large extent. As we know, leads are crucial links to any prospective sale. Converting these leads to sales and enforcing a stable lead management process is what ensures success in a business.

Combining the Chalk and Cheese

A business could suffer enormously, if there is a difference with the sales and marketing teams. To make progressive headway businesses should understand the need for marketing and sales alignment, and make optimum use of lead management capabilities. The process may not  be  an easy one, though some best practices in lead management can help enhance productivity and quicken the sales cycle.

It is vital to focus on retention and nurturing of leads with the help of a process that integrates sales and marketing efforts. Marketing automation software can facilitate such a process by providing favorable lead management solutions that help marketing teams to nurture leads during the early stages and make them qualified enough for the sales team to pursue further.

Lead Management Benefits

1. Keeping a tab on each lead –Helps in keeping the sales team clued in on the leads that have been contacted. This way the leads are more systematized, and multiple contacts with prospective customers can be avoided.. .
2. Concentrate on Sales – Lead management eliminates time-wasting tactics such as cold calling, and provides a good opportunity for your sales team to concentrate efforts on sales-ready leads.
3. Lead Segmentation – Lead management can be helpful in categorizing leads as per their locations, occupations, business etc. This in turn helps you to identify their needs and sell accordingly. Also, with the help of lead scoring you can choose leads that you wish to pursue and those that you want to nurture.
4. Predictability & Analytical Advantage – Data gathered through lead management can be used as reference for future enhancement, and for ensuring complete customer satisfaction.
5. Collaboration & Team Work – Lead management allows each team member to see their individual progress as well as that of others. This gives them a chance to correct their mistakes and enhance their efforts.
6. Personal Touch – Lead nurturing and other lead management techniques give a personal touch to your relationship with prospects, and help in developing a strong bond, which is not possible through cold calling.
7. Flexibility & Versatility– Every business has different needs and lead management programs can be customized according to the requirements of your business.
8. Comprehensive Information– Lead management can help you gain valuable information about your leads, and can give you a fairly good idea on which are the best channels to approach them and what messages would be most appropriate for them.

Managing leads effectively is most vital and cannot be stressed enough. A strategic leads management is perhaps the best solution in today’s competitive market environment.

Hence, by following lead nurturing best practices and employing marketing automation solutions, your sales and marketing teams can work in unison towards the common business goal, and achieve the desired results.

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Lead Nurturing – Uncover a Gold Mine of Opportunity

Nurture is very simple word that means to supply with nourishment. Today, lead nurturing is immensely popular with marketers because it is a simple yet extremely powerful marketing automation software. Lead nurturing programs can be compared to a garden that will produce a good harvest only if tended well. Similarly it is not enough to just generate leads, it is important to nurture them to be converted into customers.

Organizations spend huge amounts of money marketing their products sending mailers, email and invitations to webinars or advertising heavily on TV and radio. The leads generated by this exercise are passed on to the sales team. As sales are responsible for generating revenue for the quarter, they tend to ignore the prospects that are not hot – thus sales teams ignores almost 80% of leads generated by marketing. That is 80% of the budget going to waste.

This gap between sales and marketing teams is the biggest challenge faced by B2B enterprises. Once the lead is handed to the sales team, the marketing team no longer follows up on these leads as they have already been handed over to sales. Hence it makes more sense for marketing to pass on only the qualified leads to sales. This is whereLead nurturing programs comes in.

Lead nurturing in the B2B space is the process of building long term trusted relationships with qualified prospects irrespective of whether they are interested or not, through a consistent dialog throughout the sales lifecycle. Thus we can say lead nurturing is a process that converts inquiries into leads and leads into sales.

Remember 75% of these unqualified prospects will eventually buy from you or your competitor. Yes, there are some who may be unqualified; those should be siphoned out of the system immediately. The rest we should care about and focus on. Lead nurturing best practices helps keep your finger on the pulse of those undeveloped prospects.

According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead.

Build a Relationship

Lead nurturing is used to build bridges and inspire trust between the lead and yourself. It helps you to provide valuable education and information about the product to the lead up front, in the form of letters, emails, case studies, white papers, articles, webinars and success stories.

By using this kind of lead nurturing campaign you relate with your prospect better and get deeper insights into their buying intent. Once you have built that trust you are looked upon as an expert. You don't sell; you only provide information and solutions. You space out your campaign depending on the lead time. You ultimately benefit from more and higher quality sales leads and increased conversion rates with an increased bottom line.

Thus if lead nurturing is done right fewer leads are lost, more qualified prospects get into the funnel and your sales team can focus their attention on the most promising of them.

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