Adapt

November 28, 2015

Marketing automation step one: ID your new contacts

Implementing marketing automation can dramatically increase sales efficiency … and results.

It begins with a unique number.

When we set you up with marketing automation, you’ll track every new contact, automatically in the case of website visitors, even anonymous ones. Then record phone calls, cards picked up at trade shows, etc., with a contact ID assigned to mark their very first step on the buyer’s journey.
marketing automation
For digital visitors, you’ll know important pages they visited, what device they used and the source they came from. Later in the sales cycle, should that visitor become a great customer for you, you’ll be able to trace every interaction along the journey, all the way back to that first touch point.

Don’t underestimate the value of knowing the source. Did they first come from social media? Google? A referral? An AdWords or Facebook ad? You can measure the ROI of every marketing tactic when you attribute the sale to a cause or chain of causes. Unmask that visitor as a first step to hard numbers: a more scientific approach to cost-effective marketing ops.

How many touch points does it take you to turn a suspect into a prospect into a lead into a hot lead into a transaction into a brand evangelist? Are you guessing? C’mon. Wouldn’t you rather know?

Which tactics efficiently speed up the cycle? What marketing activities are less effective? What messages hit a hot button? Maybe most important of all, which tactics are a pointless waste of your budget?

We have often suspected, for example, that cold calling is a zombie from the last millennium, staggering around undead. Can it be cost-justified? We could debate that on an abstract level, but the way to settle the issue is with data. If you cold call X people and get Y openings to deliver Z proposals that lead to 1 sale, what’s the total cost of a sale? Versus?

Versus tagging a visitor, gathering useful info on dynamic forms, automating responses based on prospect behavior until a lead score indicates the now-hot lead’s specific interests, then turning it over to Sales for closing. This ain’t philosophy – it’s arithmetic.

So, if we agree web automation is a start to the process, let’s move on to
MA102: Nurturing leads. or
MA103: Gain insight into prospects or
MA104: Coffee is for closers or
MA105: Know the ROI of every marketing tactic.


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