Brand & Capture

When we think of lead scoring, it’s easy to get caught up in making a qualified lead’s score higher. After all, sales wants to be able to know at a glance if a lead is worth their time, and the higher the lead score the better you look as a marketer, right?

In an age where consumers receive 5,000 marketing messages a day, your prospects don’t want irrelevant emails. They want, as Seth Godin puts it, “me-mail.” If you provide highly targeted messages to leads making their way through your sales funnel, they’ll be a lot more likely to listen to what you have to say, and may ultimately purchase. The benefits of segmenting your email list are clear. Studies have found that list segmentation can improve open rates 39 percent and lower opt-outs by 28 percent. When more segments are combined with an already sophisticated lead-nurturing program, your enterprise will be virtually unstoppable. Consider the following statistics:

Marketing automation has the potential to increase efficiency of marketing and sales activities, as well as generate more revenue from your marketing investment. But there’s one thing that holds back every marketing automation program or campaign: creative production.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned persona-based lead scoring was the most valuable part of any marketing automation strategy. But this brought up a good question: How do you gather this essential lead intelligence for automation? The answer is simple: create high-quality content.

Marketing automation, the tools used to streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows, can provide a much-needed boost in the efficiency of your marketing campaign. At its heart, marketing automation should enable you to better and more quickly respond to the needs of leads and prospects by triggering the automated delivery of relevant, timely and valuable information when and how it’s needed.

Looking for a surefire way to reduce form conversions and scare away your prospects? My guess is probably not; however, when you repeatedly ask prospects for the same information or present them with long conversion forms, that is exactly what you are doing.  Fortunately, marketing automation services, such as HubSpot, Eloqua, and Marketo, offer progressive profiling. While this is not a new technology, it is certainly one that is underutilized.

As Thomas Edison once said, "Hell, there are no rules here—we're trying to accomplish something." This sentiment applies perfectly to lead scoring. Why? Because we don't always know exactly how to create rules for lead qualification that will reliably move warm leads to the sales team and leave the rest for lead nurturing. This isn't a perfect science, and it takes time and testing to get it right.

If you’re new to marketing automation, you might be a little overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles your chosen system has to offer. To some extent, the learning process never really ends; as your business evolves and your marketing automation vendor provides updates, you’re probably going to need to spend a good chunk of time educating yourself on the best ways to use the tools at your disposal for your particular business.

Enterprise inbound marketing is all about data. We are collecting data constantly, from every visit, every lead and every customer. We are tracking everything from blog post subscribers to Facebook likes and working out how to make sense out of the data. What's the point of all of this BIG DATA? We are seeking knowledge of the customer journey from initial awareness through sales closing in order to optimize the path and making it easier for customers to find us and buy from us. We are reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs) to the C-Suite so that they can make informed decisions about marketing budgets and deployments. So what should we be measuring and how?

Marketing automation systems perform several vital functions in the enterprise inbound marketing process. They facilitate the publication of content and enable tracking its consumption by visitors, subscribers and leads. They build and track demand generation campaigns. They make it easy to produce and track lead nurturing content and update the status of leads as they move through your sales funnel. The best marketing automation systems offer much more in the lead management arena (segmentation, scoring, intelligence, CRM integration) and assessment/analysis arena (channel analysis, campaign assessment, revenue performance management). Our process is designed to get the most out of your marketing automation investment.