Four Ways Marketing Automation Can Transform Lead Tracking

CRM Integration

Marketing automation is only one piece of the lead tracking puzzle. Once leads move to the sales funnel and become sales-qualified leads, they’re often in the territory of the sales team and a customer relationship management system, rather than just a marketing automation system. Make sure that pass-off from marketing to sales is seamless by assuring that your marketing automation software integrates completely with you CRM system so that no leads fall through the cracks.

Data-Driven Marketing

Every marketer knows the importance of data, but many marketers still struggle to use data effectively on a daily basis.

Data is unwieldy. It lives in a database. It’s often not digestible or actionable, or at a marketer’s fingertips when needed.

Marketing automation systems link to your database and automate much of the data-driven actions that marketers often skip because they take too much time. Chief among these data-driven actions are segmentation and lead tracking. Automation systems can categorize your leads and customers according to where they are in the buying cycle. This helps you send different content that’s specific to each lead, increasing your marketing and sales effectiveness. Lead tracking will automatically update your system when a lead becomes a customer or a lead does something important that might signal a movement toward buying – such as downloading a price sheet, etc.

Email Marketing

Email is a vital communications link to leads and existing customers. Make sure your automation system can track email marketing results and roll them directly into its system, so that all of the data-driven capabilities of automation extend to how you communicate with leads and customers via email. Personalized emails, triggered emails and free trial or discount offer emails are vital ways to move a lead down the sales funnel toward that coveted end goal of conversion.

Make Tracking Painless

If you’ve worked in spreadsheet purgatory for any period of time you know the feeling of staring at the cubes of a spreadsheet until your eyes go blurry. Often you’re trying to track the performance of a campaign, or digest year-long marketing stats. Rest your eyes and your spreadsheet-addled brain by letting your automation system showcase your statistics in visual displays. This is the way that most boards or C-suites want to see the data presented anyway. Automation systems don’t just spit out pie charts, and bar graphs; they dynamically track performance and segments and suggest or automate marketing actions based on the real-time performance of a campaign.