Managing leads is a sticky process with a lot of moving parts, but it’s non negotiable. After all, leads are the lifeblood of your business.
The problem is, there are so many tools that require management along with your leads: form data, CRMs, email lists, and more. That means your sales team is expending extra energy every time they need to move form data to the CRM or manually update email lists.
If you’re struggling to keep up with it all, you’re not alone. Executing an effective nurture program takes constant hustle, and there’s no room to slow down. In fact, 60% of marketers gave their nurture program a failing grade.
But none of it is optional if you want qualified leads instead of cold ones.
We’ll let you in on a secret: you don’t have to spend time and resources on the manual aspects of lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing automation is the key to qualifying leads without burdening your sales and marketing teams.
Automation allows you to:
More importantly, it lets you accomplish all that without getting elbow-deep into the manual processes that take up so much time and resources.
Lead nurturing automation is a part of marketing automation. With marketing automation, you can take the most time-consuming manual processes in lead nurturing and make them hands-off.
Think about the amount of time you and your team spend:
Let’s say the average marketer works a 45-hour week—when’s the last time you weren’t burning the midnight oil?
The average marketer spends 16 hours on manual tasks each week. That’s nearly a third of your 45-hour week!
What could you get done with 16 extra hours in every workweek? Imagine having the time to focus on special interest projects, like your thought leadership column on Medium or redesigning your website.
Lead nurturing is one of the many areas where marketing automation excels. It’s easy to lose a lot of time in lead nurturing tasks, since (if you’re doing it right) there’s a never-ending stream of leads to score and move down the pipeline.
Using lead nurturing automation, you can:
And that’s only the beginning. We’d need to keep you here for hours to be exhaustive. That’s how valuable lead nurturing automation is to your marketing ops.
It’s not just about saving time and outsourcing manual tasks, even though that’s a big part of it. Lead nurturing automation also allows you to be more strategic and effective with your conversion processes.
Lead nurturing automation is a game-changer, but only if you know how to implement it. Don’t worry—these platforms are user-friendly. We’re talking about strategic implementation that uses best practices.
There are a million ways to implement automation, and none of them are wrong. You’ll tailor your own automation process to match your team’s needs.
You can start with these 3 tips for better lead nurturing automation:
Automation tools can help you break down your email lists (and other contact lists) into sublists that make sense in terms of demographics, behavior, and more.
The people who opt-in to receive communications from you have one thing in common: their interest in your brand or solution.
They may have more commonalities, but don’t count on it. Instead, use marketing automation to segment contact lists by country, purchase history, browsing behavior, and more. You can also automatically funnel new contacts into these segmented lists to minimize list maintenance.
With these targeted lists, you can create experiences that are more personal and offer more direct value. In fact, 51% of marketers say that the most effective method of personalizing a lead nurturing experience is email segmentation!
Lead magnets are an incentive for a potential prospect to join your contact list, and they’ve got to be irresistible.
That means don’t expect the same email newsletter to make the cut across the board. (Newsletter signups are important, but they’re not a catch-all lead magnet!)
Instead, choose a lead magnet that’s right for the audience that will see it. The beauty of marketing automation is that it’s simple to set up multiple lead magnets for different segmented audiences.
For instance, leads who are looking for educational content may want to see:
Solution-focused leads respond well to lead magnets such as case studies and comparison guides; while leads who are late in the Buyer’s Journey may want to see free consultations, trials, or demos.
Lead management involves both sales and marketing, so it’s important to have a process laid down clearly so the transition goes smoothly for leads pre- and post-qualification.
For instance, a straightforward lead handling process includes these steps:
This is a lot of manual work without marketing automation, but with it, you can create a workflow that moves each lead through this preset journey without much interference required.
Finding success in lead nurturing automation means choosing the right automation platform and finding the right inbound partners to help you execute it.
There are dozens of automation platforms vying for your attention, but HubSpot may be the one that’s most worthy.
We love HubSpot because it’s a single unified platform for marketing, CRM, sales, service, and CMS—an instance of automation saving time in yet another way.
You may already have a dedicated marketing team that’s ready to put their implementation skills to use, but lately, that’s not the norm. In fact, 73% of best-in-class marketers outsource their marketing automation planning, either in part or in full!
If you’re ready to get set up for success, consider giving ContentBacon a call. We’re a HubSpot Solutions Partner, so you know that we live and breathe marketing automation. Call us today so we can support you in your automation foray and get those 16 hours back into your week!
Download the Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Automation to get your FREE inbound campaign checklist, SMART goals template, and step-by-step walkthrough!