By: Lisa J. Cramer, President & Co-Founder, LeadLife Solutions

There are certainly a lot of capabilities within marketing automation. As such there are a variety of best practices to be followed in order to maximize the use of these systems. Below are some of the best practices we have found within our customer base that helped drive success with marketing automation.

Improve Lead Interaction with Good Segmentation

The technology can only do so much – starting with a segmented, clean lead list is important. Segment your database by demographics, such as: industry, job titles, or product/service interest shown. It would be great if you can move towards the development of buying personas – so you can model what segmentation has been most profitable.

Optimize Lead Nurturing Through Personalized and Relevant Communications

While nurturing, test different facets of your email communication – which subject line attracted the most interest per segmented list? Which content provided the desired lead interaction for which segmented list during which stage of nurturing? Relevant content is not just about the content the user cares about, but also what is important to them at the phase of the buying cycle they are in. For instance, is it about thought leadership or feature comparisons?

Use Drip Marketing Based on Triggers

Drip marketing gives marketers the ability to automatically send communications based on a series of conditions. This helps a company automatically meet the buy cycle phase that the lead is in. Triggering the drip based on actions of the lead, help ensures that the lead receives more relevant communication to what they have shown interest in or explicitly expressed interest in.

Automatic Scoring Prioritizes Leads That are “Sales Ready”

Nurturing leads is one thing, but the end result marketers want is to move more qualified leads to sales. Scoring enables marketers to ensure leads that demonstrated certain behaviors (can include answering questions, etc.) and met the specified criteria will move to sales at the right time. Obviously the foundation of prioritization and effective scoring is the definition of a “sales ready” lead; and that’s something marketing and sales need to sit down and do together.

Maximize Revenue Attainment by Re-nurturing Leads

What do your sales reps do when they speak to a lead and they don’t move it into an opportunity or further down the funnel? Is the lead dead? Is the lead every “touched” by sales again? Often leads that don’t move down the pipeline or leads that are disqualified at some point in the funnel are left for dead (often referred to as lead leakage). It’s amazing how much more revenue can be surfaced if these leads were re-nurtured.

About the Author

Lisa Cramer is president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of on-demand lead management software with embedded best practices that generates, scores, and nurtures leads for B2B marketers. In 2009, Lisa was recognized as one of the top five “Most Influential People” in sales lead management. For more information on lead management or best practices, visit www.leadlife.com, call 1-800-680-6292 or email info@leadlife.com.

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