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How Lifecycle Marketing Automation Can Make Your Business Grow Faster

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Posted by John Beveridge on Apr 3, 2014 2:30:39 PM

How_To_Use_Lifecycle_Marketing_Automation_To_Grow_FasterAccording to Gartner Research, companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. If you want to grow faster, lifecycle marketing automation can make your sales process more human by providing the right information and outreach to your prospects based on actions that they take. So just what is Lifecycle Marketing Automation?

Lifecycle marketing automation is the process of managing your customer's buyer journey as they progress from a stranger to an evanagelist for your company to their sphere of influence. Marketing automation software tracks your customers' actions and preferences so that you can optimize your sales process based on marketplace feedback. Let's illustrate how the process works by analyzing each step of your customer's journey.

The Stages Of The Business Buying Process

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Step 1: A stranger becomes a visitor

The first step in the customer's journey is when a stranger visits your website by means of a search engine query, social media referral or from a referral from another website. Visitors can come to your site directly, but those visitors wouldn't be strangers because they knew enough about your company to find your website.

Your marketing automation software notes the website visitor's IP address, which starts the lifecycle marketing automation process. An IP address is the online version of a physical mailing address. The IP address is attached to hardware devices that are connected to the internet and allows the device to be identified and pinpointed.

By attaching an IP address to a unique visitor, your software can identify data points like:

  • What was the source of the traffic that brought the visitor to your website? Was it a search engine query? Social media referral? Website referral?
  • The IP address also allows for more granular information on the source of the visit. For example, if it was a social media referral, was it from LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+? If it was a website referral, which website brought the visitor to your site?
  • Which website pages did the visitor access and how long did they spend on them?

Although you don't know the identity of the person associated with the IP address, you're beginning to collect data on the visitor's online behavior that can be used to to optimize your marketing efforts. For example, if you find that most of your social media referrals are coming from Twitter and LinkedIn, you may decide to devote resources to marketing on those channels and reduce the resources you devote to Facebook.

You can also see which pages are producing the most traffic for your website. This will help you optimize your blog content to produce the content that attracts visitors.

Step 2: A website visitor becomes a qualified lead

A website visitor becomes a lead when they complete a form in order to access a premium content offer like an eBook, webinar or video. In its simplest form, the lead generation form will only ask for minimal information like name and email address.

For companies with complex sales processes, I recommend asking a few questions in your form to qualify the lead. For example, most of our forms ask for the lead's industry, role within their organization and company size. We use drop-down menus to allow the lead to quickly choose a category that applies to them.

From a software standpoint, a lead conversion connects the data given in the form to the IP address and allows you to connect past behavior on your website (like pages viewed and source of referral to your site) to the leads contact information. It also allows you to profile the leads future behavior as they interact with your sales process.

When used as described above, the lead conversion process lets you start qualifying leads to determine how to best work with them in the future. For example, if a student who wants to learn about inbound marketing downloads one of my eBooks, it's unlikely that I will sell them anything in the foreseeable future.

However, if the form tells me that the lead is a decision-maker at a company in one of the industries I target, I know that this lead is worth pursuing.

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Step 3: The journey from qualified lead to customer

The transition from qualified lead to customer is where the data you've gathered in your lifecycle marketing automation process really pays off.

By using your lead generation forms to segment customers by the factors that are important to you, you can communicate far more effectively with your qualified leads. For example, my lead generation form might tell me that lead A is a business owner at an insurance agency with between 20 and 50 employees. Another form might tell me that lead B is a marketing manager at a software company with between 200 and 500 employees.

Using this data to customize your approach will improve your business performance. Clearly, lead A (small insurance agency owner) and lead B (mid-sized software marketing manager) have different pain points, priorities and outlooks. A customized lead nurturing approach for each market segment will resonate far better than a generic approach that tries to split the difference.

At this point, you can incorporate demographic data with the lead's behavior on your website to really start to understand them better. For example, if the insurance agency owner that's read several blog articles and downloaded 3 eBooks is looking at the pricing page on my website, it's likely that they are in the consideration or decision stage of their buying process. It's a good signal to initiate a sales outreach.

Another important element of this part of the sales process is the transition from an online relationship to a personal relationship with the potential buyer. Unless you're an e-commerce company, you will need a personal relationship in order to close a business deal.

Let's take a look at how lifecycle marketing automation can optimize this process. You can set up your marketing automation software to "pass" the lead to a CRM system when the lead has satisfied pre-defined criteria. For example, a lead score greater than a threshold value or a combination of number of pageviews and a trigger event like viewing the pricing page.

This is where the sales professional gets involved in the process. The sales professional knows a lot about the lead at this point. They will know:

  • The lead's role within her organization and the size and the industry of their company.
  • Which content pieces the lead has accessed - what blog articles have they read? what content offers have they download? Which email have they opened and which have they clicked through?

This accumulated knowledge combined with the sales professional's lead intelligence sets the stage for meaningful conversations that lead to higher close ratios and shorter sales cycles.

Step 4: Converting your customer to an evangelist that promotes your business

By the time the stranger goes through your sales process and becomes a customer, you really have a lot of good information that helps you understand their wants and needs. Rather than confining your lifecycle marketing automation data to your sales and marketing functions, share it with your customer service teams to help them understand the customer and give them a fantastic service experience.

You can also use website data to optimize your customer service delivery. For example, if a customer for a management consulting firm downloads an eBook entitled, "The Conflict Resolution Guide", your customer service team can proactively address a potential need.

For example, the consultant calls the customer and says, "I saw you downloaded our Conflict Resolution Guide - is there something specific you need help with or did you just want to learn more about conflict resolution?" This proactive customer service approach will uncover pain points and potentially identify opportunites for a deeper business relationship.

You can also segment your customers in your marketing automation software and offer them customer loyatly awards like discounts on future purchases or exclusive content offers. By using data to proactively address customer needs, you'll create evangelists who will refer you within their circle of friends and colleages.

Use your lifecycle marketing automation to continually improve business performance

We've discussed some ways you can use lifecycle marketing automation to optimize your business performance. For example, dividing your lead/customer database into meaningful segments will allow you to customize your message to each segment and improve email open rates and lead conversion rates.

Another way to use data to improve future performance is to look at processes like lead nurturing to see where performance can be improved. Let's say you have a lead nurturing process for one of your segments that includes 3 emails sent over a 1-month period. The open rates for emails 1 and 2 are 40%, but drops off to 10% for the third email. This is a signal that the third email needs to be optimized. You can conduct a series of experiments with that email to learn how best to improve open rates.

Once you've set up a process that serves as your control, you can introduce variations and use A/B testing to find what works best. For example, you can change the headline on a landing page or try a second call-to-action and measure results to find which works best. This process of constant experimentation will allow you to optimize performance over time based on real marketplace feedback.

Summary

Big data isn't just for big business - SMB companies can benefit from affordable outsourced lifecycle marketing automation that makes you grow faster by optimizing your sales process. It seems like a bit of a contradiction, but a well-designed marketing automation process will seem more human to your audience. By customizing your message based on data analytics, you'll sell more and create satisfied customers that compound your growth capabilities.

Schedule a free inbound marketing consultation with Rapidan Strategies  
 

Topics: Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation

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