(For an introduction to marketing automation, please see What Is Marketing Automation?)

Marketing automation offers tools that are highly valuable to B2B companies. That’s not surprising, because its anonymous web visitor tracking and behavioral based email automation features provide B2B companies with the opportunity to convert every lead that visits a company’s website.

In general, B2B companies use sales teams to sell larger ticket items to their markets. Because the cost of hiring, training and maintaining a sales team is so high, each deal made is very valuable. As a result, identification and conversion of every lead becomes essential.

In this context, the marketing automation service offered by Push Marketing and developed by SharpSpring includes several tools that can help B2B marketers identify and convert leads into sales.

Anonymous Web Visitor Tracking

Of the individuals who visit any given website, more than 97% are not yet ready to commit to filling out a form. Marketing automation allows you to identify these anonymous visitors, individuals would otherwise drift away from your website, unnoticed. Naturally, identifying and following up on these leads can generate a significant increase in lead volume. The most comprehensive marketing automation tools can even provide the lead’s phone number, email address and social connections, in order to help a sales team close deals more effectively and consistently.

Once visitors are identified, marketing automation can recognize the leads who are more engaged, allowing a sales team to focus on the leads with the highest probability of closing.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is one of the tools designed to measure a lead’s level of engagement. A lead score is based on performance of certain tasks by a prospective customer, such as visiting an important page, entering an email address on a form, etc. The prospect is given a certain point value for each task completed. For example, providing a name might be worth 1 point, while visiting an important page might be worth 15 points. Salespeople can be notified by email or even by text when a lead receives a high lead score (a “very hot” lead), visits the site or behaves in a way that suggests readiness to make a purchase.

Lead Nurturing

Similarly, leads who are not ready to make a purchase can be assigned to campaigns that automatically nurture their interest over time. This is done using email communication targeted specifically to the lead’s interests, rather than one-size-fits-all email blasts. Recent studies have shown that such targeted email communication generates a significant increase in qualified leads and sales:

• Organizations that nurture their leads see a 45% increase in lead generation ROI over those that don’t
• Poor lead nurturing significantly contributes to 79% of marketing leads never converting to sales
• Nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads
• Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rates as compared to email blasts
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads
• Lead nurturing through marketing automation increases qualified leads by 451%

If these results sound like they might be a good fit for your business, or you’d just like to know more, please check out these other posts in Push Marketing’s series on Marketing Automation:

What is Marketing Automation?
Push Marketing Introduces Advanced Marketing Automation 
The Benefits of Marketing Automation for B2C Companies
After the Click: Behavior-Based Email Tracking
Email Automation with Personalized Communication
Marketing Automation: Why It’s Essential to B2B Businesses