Marketing Automation Second Big Victory: Autoresponders

[seonajmulislam00]

Many software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and many premium content products offer free trials for building the funnel as well as the email list. The challenge is for marketers to then sort the wheat from the chaff. I make it a point that every legitimate inquiry gets a response. Even if the lead is not qualified, I believe their first experience should be excellent. You never know who will be in a position to buy in five years.

Before using marketing automation, I had to go through my regional email queue and my regional trial queue, to sort through up to 100 orders per day. Even with templates and a seasoned sales mindset, I easily spent 10 hours per week sorting and routing emails and registrations. Now multiply that by two other managers and you have 30 hours per week of time. (30 hours x 52 weeks = 1,560 marketers per year – almost! Full-time hire) Sure, an “intern” or “associate” could do this – if we had one. But why would anyone do it when you can use marketing automation?

So I built a series of workflows based on campaign codes, territory rules, and sales campaigns to do the following:

Send an autoresponder providing more details about the taiwan telegram data product in question, asking them nicely to respond if they were serious. Students received a special response, while spammers received nothing.
Route inbound leads based on urgency factors such as real email addresses, product, location, and whether they requested a call. This is important! Always make sure people can still request a direct call so the lead can qualify faster. And always review leads to avoid ignoring a hot lead.
Use lead scoring to help classify leads by activity and qualifying target audience. Setting this up took a few days and some testing, but I gained back 1,560 hours per year, and 10 hours per week for the three of us. What could your team do with an extra 30 hours per week?

Marketing Automation Third Victory: Automatic Lead Routing

If you have a sizable database of prospects and customers, it can be difficult to identify engaged or sales-ready leads. With a marketing automation solution, you can easily score, rank, and route prospects who are engaging with your content. With marketing automation, you can then send the most promising leads (those who are engaged and in your target audience) over to sales as marketing qualified leads.

Why is this important? According to a 2011 CSO Insight survey, salespeople report spending 24% of their time researching leads and 41% of their time selling. If you score leads based on pre-determined criteria, you save your sales team time to call more leads and more qualified leads.

By the end of our first year with marketing automation, the solution had saved my team 1,832 hours per year across the entire team – or, as I said, the equivalent of a full-time rent. Questions about how marketing automation can save you time? Leave them in the comments below.