Marketing Automation Software allows companies to track, analyze, and nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into brand advocates. Marketing Automation Software introduces precision and process to both lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns through its ability to track, score, and assign leads efficiently.

To further illustrate these concepts, I’ve taken the liberty of breaking down the knowledge that can be gained from marketing automation software into three major areas of emphasis.

1. Lead Quality

Most prospects visiting your company’s website and consuming your content have not yet entered a purchase-ready mentality. As such, sending and assigning leads near the top of the sales funnel to the sales team annoys prospects and wastes sales representatives’ valuable time. Instead, marketers should offer educational content to advance the prospect down the sales funnel before assigning them to a sales rep. Marketing automation software makes this process easy by utilizing lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a practice of attributing point values to certain attributes or actions taken by leads to measure their fit for your products/services and readiness to make a purchase. Examples include:

• The company they work for

• The industry they work in

• Demographic information

• Volume of website visits

• Specific forms submitted (downloads and/or requests)

• Specific pages visited

When leads reach a certain score, they are automatically shared with a sales rep, and the rep can immediately see the contact’s history of interactions with your brand. In essence, the higher the score, the higher the priority for a sales touchpoint. This allows sales reps to use their time wisely, concentrating their efforts on highly qualified sales leads rather than wasting time on low-quality leads unlikely to convert. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning again this entire process is completely automated!

2. Buyer Journey

Another area of emphasis is the buyer journey. Marketing automation software also gives marketers the ability to understand a buyer’s journey from the very first encounter with the brand to the purchase (and beyond). This knowledge is critical to decreasing the sales cycle by presenting prospects with relevant content that will hasten the path to the purchase.

For example, ABC Company notices, through marketing automation, that 90% of their customers visit the company website at least three times, visit the pricing page, and request a consultation before making a purchase. Wouldn’t it be wise, then, for ABC Company to make it a goal to have every lead go through this journey? I know I would if I were them. Specifically, I would use lead nurturing emails to make sure they make it back to my website at least three times, obviously using the pricing page and consultation landing page as my featured email links. I may even redesign my website with this information in mind; if not my entire website, at least the homepage.

Tip: I would also encourage ABC Company to assign a significant point value to each of the proven high-conversion actions—i.e. three web visits, a visit to the pricing page, and a consultation request—when setting up their lead scoring.

The goal here is to use marketing automation software and tactics to discover trends that will shorten the sales cycle and convert more customers by using information relevant to the purchasing process identified through analytics. Say that five times fast…

3. ROI

Return. On. Investment. Every marketer and business executive seeks a clearer understanding of ROI, and it is not difficult to understand why. In its simplest form, the ROI metric is asking the question “Is it working?” With marketing automation software, that question is easy to answer. You can analyze a particular campaign as a whole and/or by each sub-element (ebook, blog post, social post, ad, etc.) to understand how many leads generated or nurtured by the campaign became customers. You can also determine whether the aggregate customer purchases stemming from the campaign outweighed the price of the campaign’s execution. Easy as pie. 

There you have it! I hope this gives you a clearer understanding of the various things you can learn by using marketing automation software.

Lastly, I encourage you to check out this blog by HubSpot for jaw-dropping statistics on marketing automation. You won’t regret it!