7 Tips to Save Time with Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is one of the latest business buzzwords. This isn’t because it’s a cool word to use in the B2B industry, it’s because it’s a heck of a tool. Automation makes it possible to market more efficiently—and efficiency is the key.

According to an Emailmonday survey, 49 percent of companies regularly use marketing automation. That number is increasing. Fast. Compared to 2011, there has been an almost eleven-fold increase in the number of B2B companies using automation; and more than 40 percent of the businesses are integrating their CRM with marketing for a seamless workflow.

Here are seven marketing automation tips that will help boost efficiency:

1. Create Personalized Email Campaigns in Less Time

Marketing automation allows you to create multiple email campaigns with personalized and specific messages for more engaging email. Customized automation will schedule and send emails with company details to individuals in no time. You don’t have to waste your hours on emails. Instead, you can automate and optimize your campaigns.

2. Schedule Social Media Campaigns

Many marketing teams dedicate too much time to social media updates and messages to connect with their audience. You’re better off automating. Schedule social media ad campaigns, tweets, Facebook status messages, and LinkedIn updates without losing the personal touch. All marketing automation tools provide social media management application like Buffer, Hootsuite and more to ease your social media management. You can also analyze the engagement and impressions of your campaign using automation.

You’re better off automating. Schedule social media ad campaigns, tweets, Facebook status messages, and LinkedIn updates without losing the personal touch. All marketing automation tools provide social media management application like Buffer, Hootsuite and more to ease your social media management. For example, you can use their tweet scheduler to automate your twitter posts as well as threads, and also manage your DMs and mentions.

3. Qualify Leads Using Lead Scoring

Lead nurturing is a crucial task of a marketing team—it also takes the most time. But there are workflows that you can automate to improve this process. One is to qualify leads in the sales funnel based on the scoring given to them. The most appropriate and basic criteria required to qualify leads initially is company-related. These criteria can be general or target market, company size, budget, and sales territory.

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Based on this, the initial scoring is given, and whenever the lead is pushed from one sales level to another, other sets of criteria are used to score them.

4. Prioritize Leads Based on Lead Scoring

Another workflow tactic that will benefit from marketing automation is prioritizing leads using lead scoring. This automation tool allows the marketing team to score the prospecting leads based on their web behavior, buying pattern, and product interest. This score helps them to contact leads based on a high- to low-score preference.

This narrows down the leads that are primarily interested in buying the product and stands high on the deal close graph.

5. Reduce Lead Conversion Time

Qualifying and prioritizing leads based on lead score can be very helpful in reducing the conversion time. Usually, converting leads into customers can be a long process because marketing team needs to filter leads and send them to the sales team for purchase nurturing. Automation reduces this time through lead scoring.

6. Automate Lead Follow Ups

Every marketing team juggles multiple tasks and often forgets to send follow-up emails to prospecting leads. Marketing automation solves this issue. A lot is dependent on follow-up emails because any delay might result in a lost lead opportunity. So, automation tools help by scheduling timely follow-ups for all prospecting leads, ensuring no lead falls through the cracks.

7. Reduce the Number of Cold Calls

Using definitive processes such as lead scoring and timely follow-ups will provide more sales-qualified leads. As a result, using automation ensures that there are relatively fewer cold calls.

When you understand your focus points better, it is easier to narrow down the tasks you want to automate. These tips will help you target tasks that take up more time and also help automate them to save those minutes / hours for other more important tasks.