Did you know that 63% of businesses confess their top marketing challenge is generating traffic and leads? The quality of those leads is another common obstacle. 68% of B2B professionals say increasing the quality of leads is their top priority.
But how?
Acquiring more leads and pinning down better leads takes either a chunk of money or a brilliant marketing director, right? There's no way a team can pull it off without at least one of those assets. You've just got to buckle down and work with what you've got...
Or do you?
What if we were to say that you can increase the number of leads you obtain each month and spend less money doing it? We're talking about high-quality leads that'll increase your conversion rates. If you want to learn how automated lead generation can change your business, read on.
What is Automated Lead Generation?
New software gives you the ability to automate your lead generation processes. You can create better leads without the investments traditional outreach requires.
The software has been around for a decade, though recent advances in technology have brought it back into the limelight. Expert marketers now rely on it. It streamlines their approach and cuts their workload in half.
Email marketing is at the core of it all. It helps sellers connect with hundreds of thousands of consumers with the click of a button. The software in question has been built to simplify the email marketing process.
ActiveCampaign and email gives you the power to automate your entire system. They have something for every part of your sales funnel.
First, a potential customer signs up for your email list. Then, you send them a sequence of letters designed to build trust and brand awareness. Finally, you sell to them.
You can then study your metrics to learn from your successes and failures alike.
As your skills develop, you can broaden your audience. You'll also grow more adept at building automated campaigns. With this kind of software, you can run a campaign with a quarter of the effort.
Best of all, you'll double the quality of your leads overnight.
Drip Campaigns
What is a drip campaign, you ask? It's what experts call an email marketing campaign. New software gives marketers the power to send personalized, automated emails to prospects. Which email the software sends can be tailored to your prospect's overall behaviors.
What the emails say and when the emails are sent is determined by the actions of your prospect. If they don't open your first email, for instance, a follow-up email is sent the next day. If they do open your first email, they might get a letter built for someone further down your sales funnel. And it might not arrive until three days later.
This process of spacing out the emails is akin to a dripping faucet, hence the name. These drip campaigns have been around since the advent of the internet. The difference is they now run themselves after your initial setup.
Most programs come with powerful segmentation capabilities. They enable marketers to divide their leads database by channel, industry, and/or the stage of their buyer's journey. This kind of segmentation is what improves your lead quality.
The leads who head to your landing page will be leads at the bottom of your funnel. Your software will supply useful resources to the rest, building trust and awareness. It'll nurture them until they're ready to convert.
Landing Pages
If email is the right hand of an automated marketing campaign, landing pages are the left. They act as your closer. They're meant only for the leads at the bottom of your funnel.
Modern marketing automated programs (MAPs) include options for creating and deploying landing pages. Any information your prospects give you on these pages is automatically uploaded to their profiles. These profiles store every scrap of relevant data you've been given accordingly.
The program stores their new data alongside their other stuff. Address, best times to reach them, and stage of their buyer's journey all land next to one another. Marketers used to keep track of all this information by hand. Now it happens in the blink of an eye.
A well-designed landing page will skyrocket your conversion rates. That's true especially when you factor in metrics and testing.
A/B Testing
A scientific approach to marketing first became popular in the 1950s. That's when Hopkins wrote his classic work, "Scientific Advertising." Thanks to advances in computer science the field has exploded in recent years.
Nowadays, you can't call yourself a true digital marketer (or even business person) without relying on quality metrics. A/B testing is one of the most popular routes to acquire metrics on things like click-through rates and conversion rates. With that information, you can better personalize your campaign to suit your buyer's need.
With automated software, the process is simple. Essentially you create two versions of the same piece of marketing material. Examples include landing pages, emails, social media ads, etc.
Each version is the same except for one particular element. It may be a word in your headline; it may be the color of your background or the graphic you use. Choose a single element that you think may need tweaking.
After you create two versions, run them as you would normally. The software will record important data about how your audience responded to both versions. After you run them for a week or two, you can read the results and change your strategy accordingly.
Rinse and repeat.
What's Next?
Well, what did you decide? Is automated lead generation for you? Can you see where it fits into your marketing strategy?
Automated internet marketing may sound difficult, but the core elements are fairly simple. Start with the basics: email, landing pages, and thorough scientific testing.
Master each element before you move on to the next. Do that, and you'll be swimming in more leads than you can handle. Just remember to send us a postcard when you make it to the big leagues.
If you're need of assistance with lead generation, please do not hesitate to contact us.
So long and good luck!