There are few metrics that cause B2B marketers more headaches than ROI. As B2B marketers, this metric is one of the most important for justifying our efforts (and budget requests) to senior management. If you’re deciding whether to pitch a marketing automation system to your c-suite, here are five ways that marketing automation can help you boost your ROI.
1. Nurture Prospects
Nurturing prospects to a sales ready state is a necessity now that customer relationships drive the buying cycle. It’s no secret that nurturing will get you a bigger return – and with a marketing automation platform, you can automatically add prospects to nurtures based on their interactions with your content.
The proof is in the pudding: 15-20% of leads that were “not yet ready to purchase” wound up converting after being nurtured. (Gleanster)
2. Identify Warm Leads
Knowing when a lead is sales-ready is probably the most important thing when trying to boost your conversion rates and increase your ROI, and it’s also something marketing automation is good at: you can track prospects’ activity across your website and ensure that when they’re ready, you’re ready. Scoring and grading take the guesswork out of determining sales-readiness by assigning prospects a letter grade and a number score based on each unique interaction they have with your content
Did they visit the pricing page? Watch a video? Download a white paper? You can set up each of those actions to add to or subtract from a prospect’s score and grade, and when they’re both high enough (you can determine what that should look like), then you can pass them on to sales.
3. Get Qualified Leads to Sales More Quickly
50% of Buyers go with the vendor who responds first (InsideSales) so making sure that warm leads get passed to sales quickly means a higher chance of closing the deal and a greater ROI. How do you automate such a delicate process? Have your leads automatically passed to sales when they reach a certain score or grade. Sales will then receive an alert that a new lead has been assigned, and a prompt to follow up as soon as possible.
4. Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
When marketing and sales are aligned they work as a team to move leads through the funnel, educate prospects and maintain relationships with clients, which leads to a higher ROI overall. Marketing automation opens up the lines of communication between marketing and sales. Marketers can provide sales with the content they need, and keep tabs on sales’ communications with clients by creating templates that save time and stay on-brand. Cold leads can then be bumped back to marketing to be warmed up in a nurture and sales can spend more time focusing on warm, qualified leads.
5. Drive Epic Lead Generation
Give your lead-gen efforts a boost by creating forms and landing pages that can funnel data straight into your marketing automation platform. Map out your campaigns based on the potential actions a prospect might take and be ready with the right nurture, case study, or offer.
Fancy seeing what your ROI would look like with a marketing automation solution? Try out the ROI Calculator.
