How automation helps nurture and manage leads

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify its efficiency.” – Bill Gates once wrote. This statement is obviously suitable for lead nurturing and management – right?

Over the last decade, a plethora of technological advances have attempted to address the problem: How can businesses acquire, develop, and retain new clients in this hypercompetitive digital era?

Today, the buying cycle is complex. According to research, leads experience five to 10 marketing interactions before making a purchase. It’s extremely difficult to encourage leads to go through the sales funnel—from being qualified to becoming prospects and then customers—while keeping track of their engagements and touchpoints across many channels.

Thankfully, lead management automation has some built-in magic. Automating lead nurturing can boost efficiency and keep leads and current customers connected with businesses by reducing the need to duplicate or manually enter data into multiple marketing systems.

How can automation help manage and nurture leads?

Maintaining the flow of leads requires numerous manual interventions and is frequently an arduous work. There are so many moving elements, including forms, CRMs, email marketing lists, and eCommerce platforms, to mention a few. Even the most experienced marketing expert can become overwhelmed by switching information across different apps. But by integrating lead sources with lead management platforms, automation allows businesses to streamline lead generating activities.

Manage leads from forms and registrations

Dealing with the multiple sources of leads is one of the stumbling blocks in lead management. To locate new potential consumers, most businesses combine various channels like web forms, ads, eCommerce transactions, and events. The best way to track those leads is through a CRM.

Apptivo provides a wide variety of sources which includes campaigns, call log, Email and and still more, also includes various methods for getting and managing leads from a webform Integration, Manual filling, Import, Email to Lead, Developer APIs etc.

Use surveys to nurture leads and customers

Using a drive-by form or registration, one might gather some fundamental demographic information. The challenge is to know the intent and reason a certain lead came to the website, what might influence their purchase decision, or the value of the deal at stake.

Businesses need to learn as much as they can about the new lead in order to create a great customer experience. Surveys assist in moving the lead generation process beyond the data collection stage and into the realms of nurturing through this genuine customer engagement. Surveys are an effective means of discovering more about customer needs. Automation can help transfer that rich, segmentable data wherever needed, whether that’s adding extra data to a shared spreadsheet or updating a record in a CRM tool

Nurture mailing list subscribers

As soon as the lead is received, it’s vital to get them into the right email marketing list. In addition to making sure the leads are engaged in a timely manner, it is important to ensure the messages are in line with what prompted the initial contact.

Maintaining systems up to date can be challenging, unless the business uses a CRM to track contacts, prospects & deals, and that has options to automate marketing emails. Automation can ensure that every contact added to one location is also added to the other.

Follow up with event attendees

Attending conferences, trade shows, and symposia either as attendees or as participants generates a lot of qualified and unqualified leads. It is important to add the leads generated and tag them individually with source, nature, and quality.Targeted communications can be automatically sent to tagged leads with tailored messages and nurtured.

Automate email responses

It is only human that customers expect businesses to treat them so. They always value the efforts businesses take to show a personal interest in them. However, it’s challenging for the team to create unique responses for each and every person who reaches them. With automated emails, based on triggers, leads progress through the marketing funnel seamlessly.

Scale lead nurturing and lead management with Apptivo CRM

In order to make each customer feel recognized and appreciated, businesses must find a means to nurture an ever-increasing volume of leads from multiple sources. With Apptivo CRM, create automated email sequences, direct campaigns, and email triggers for various events and let the CRM manage the relationships leaving teams to concentrate on high-touch opportunities.

Here’s another perspective on the issue. If each new contact actually needed 10 interactions before making a purchase and the goal is to convert 7,000 leads a year, the team will need to manage, migrate, update, log, etc. around 70,000 interactions in order to do this. The best chance may be a magic wand if automation is not an option.