Rat Race Armaggeddon: How Marketing Automation Boosts ROI with Higher-Quality Leads

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

How Marketing Automation Boosts ROI with Higher-Quality Leads

Conversions and ROI stand as the ultimate indicators of success for campaigns, but marketing automaton pays its role in boosting both, especially by producing higher-quality leads for sales. According to Instapage, 82% of B2B and B2C businesses use marketing automation software for email marketing and businesses using marketing automation are twice as effective at lead generation as those using blast email software. Research Forrester made available to Marketing Dive indicates that global marketing automation spend is expected to reach $25.1 billion by the end of 2023.

Advantages of marketing automation

Obviously, the digital marketing world has recognized the advantages in efficiency and effectiveness marketing automation provides for both B2B and B2C. With customer data and automated processes, marketing automation helps drive lead management, scoring, and nurturing. Thus, it produces higher-quality leads to be turned over to sales.

How do working with marketing automation tools result in better leads? It does in these four important ways:

Enhances marketing performance

Automating email scheduling, sending, segmentation, targeting, data management, and other tasks helps save on time, effort, and costs. It allows even smaller marketing teams to compete with larger ones. With those tasks automated, marketers can spend more time looking at the data, planning their campaigns, tweaking the creative, and thinking of new and better ways to connect with prospects and retain existing customers.

Helps to better understand customers

With automated tools, marketers can get a better look at customers’ online behaviors and actions. They can also add in important customer data, such as demographic information, customer backgrounds, their positions, businesses, industries, and preferences. Using connected data paints a more complete picture of customers and gives insights into their preferences and how marketers might help them.

What channel does a customer prefer? What sort of emails do they open? What kind of content do they click through on? What frequency do they like to be sent marketing messages? At what point on the customer journey do they convert?

The answers all lie in the data.

Optimizes using testing results and digital analytics

The use of A/B and multivariate testing lets marketers optimize by seeing what content, copy, design, subject lines, headlines, CTAs, offers, and more draw more of a response from their audience. Based on the results, they can tweak, improve, and drop whatever doesn’t work all together. Testing results along with customer data will help personalize marketing and make it as relevant and valuable to customers as possible in order to better speak to how they can address the pain points keeping them up at night.

Digital analytics show marketers their campaign results. What worked and what didn’t? What drew interest and where did customers drop off on their journey? Take note and work to improve.

Improves alignment between marketing and sales

Sharing the same data puts marketing and sales on the same page when it comes to leads. The better the data, the better marketing can ready a lead to be turned over to sales. And the better the data, the better chance the sales team has of closing the deal. Using the same set of data allows marketing and sales to not duplicate their efforts and narrow their focus on winning a lead over. It also helps for them to be aligned for when the sales team determines that lead isn’t ready to convert and sends them back to marketing for more nurturing

This results in:

More insights into customer behavior
Better speed to lead
Marketing-approved communications that can be used with customers and prospects whenever they’re ready to speak with sales

All this gives marketing and sales by working together a better chance of making conversions.

Marketing automation provides opportunities for increased ROI

Enhancing marketing performance, better data management, and tighter teamwork between marketing and sales results in better lead generation, management, and nurturing. These all contribute to working with a higher quality of leads, which inevitably will lead to higher ROI for your efforts.

For more information about marketing automation, please read: