How to Decrease Lead Cycles with Marketing Automation

Artificial intelligence can be used for marketing automation and search optimization, among other things. Using AI for marketing automation can simplify sales follow-up and conversion funnel and can shorten your lead cycle.

From large companies to lean businesses, artificial intelligence examples such as marketing automation and search optimization is a game-changer. Businesses use it to automate seemingly mundane tasks, create and schedule email campaigns, and simplify sales follow-up right into conversion funnel.

However, each marketing automation tool isn’t created equally, there are more redundancies it eliminates and it becomes an automatic process that generates leads, converts potential buyers into loyal customers.

Now, let’s talk about ways how marketing automation shortens your lead cycle and some of the features to look for in a marketing automation tool.

Valuable Marketing Automation Features

If you’re becoming a virtual assistant and looking into making your sales and marketing duties structured, then you need a tool that provides the following basic features:

• The ability to tag a potential customer based on filters or qualifiers (type of industry or business affiliation)
• The ability to create a trigger based on your category, such as customers who downloaded your ebook or signed up for your newsletter
• The ability to automate a web flow and relieve yourself of repetitive tasks

News on artificial intelligence recommends these features as it save you time and lets you focus more on important inbound marketing activities you need to perform. Because of this, it shortens lead cycle, increase your generated leads, and more prospects converting to customers.

However, there is more into marketing automation than meets the eye. Here are some specific marketing automation functions that will lend a hand to your marketing and sales funnel.

Automate Marketing Activities at the Prospecting Stage

There are marketing automation software that can automatically log?sales calls and send out emails and save your sales team a huge amount of time. Usually sales calls are logged manually and sales emails printed out, which led to chaos if you weren’t able to organize the documentation process.

Automating the recording and monitoring calls as well as emails during the prospecting stage is an important task that marketing automation software accomplishes. The bulk of the work and it’s repetitive process can be setup digitally, draft your email content, schedule it ahead of time and deploy it based on various triggers can simplify your lead generation process. This way, your sales team can focus on:

• Setting up calls with leads that are really interested in your product or services
• Create documents such as quotations, contracts and agreements easily
• Strategizing other marketing tactics to increase conversions
• Organizing re-engagement campaigns to dormant leads

When potential customers show an interest in your product or services, being accessible to them through digital channels, providing them with a quote and a contract quickly is vital.?

Nurturing your Existing Customers

Client retention and customer acquisition are equally important, and keeping them is far less costly than generating new ones. You can use marketing automation tools to foster better relationship with your existing clients and create loyalty in them.

All-in-one marketing automation and CRM tools help your CRM activities and interactions with your current customers. Your transactions can be logged and because of that referencing and tracking pattern is made easy. You can also run reports that will help you determine your longest and most successful customer partnerships.

With this data, it can help you decide which types of businesses and industries you should focus your future marketing and sales efforts on. At the same time, with a marketing automation tool, you can monitor which online platform and marketing strategy can yield the best results.

In addition, it can help you identify which post-sales services and product features they prefer so upselling and cross selling, is simple. You can set rules or triggers in your email automation to let your existing customers know about your new products or services this way it may leverage your customer lifetime value.

Monitor Progress and Tweak your Strategy

The market status and trends in customers’ buying behavior, and new technologies all change drastically all the time. So, it’s just reasonable to tweak your sales and marketing strategies accordingly.

Marketing automation applications allows you to monitor your progress of all your campaigns with ease, this way you can gain insight early on and act on them right away. Analytics integrated in marketing automation software help you understand where you need to tweak or even stop your strategies if needs be.

With marketing automation, you can identify which digital platform you should choose, how to reach out to your prospects effectively and if your marketing strategy worked on not. And this is saves you from wasting your time guessing and wasting marketing budget.

Also, marketing automation software help you build relationships with prospects who aren’t yet ready to make a purchase. This allows lead behavior to identify how to persuade them to buy and when to do just that. It helps you sift and sort out leads so you can prioritize which one to nurture and get the highest return on your investment.

By Marilou Pitlo, Strategic Marketing Manager, Pro Technical Productions