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#1. Identification of anonymous visitors
You will want to find out who visits your business or e-commerce website. However, some smart web-based marketing automation tools can help you get not only behavioral and demographic information about your anonymous visitors, but their contact information as well. The better you know your visitors and potential customers, the better equipped you will be to reach out to them in the most adequate way. Properly followed-up leads will also proceed down the funnel much faster and without any hassles.
#2. Consolidating and segmenting your leads
Your web-sales automation solution should provide you with a central database for all the leads you have generated, irrespective of their source – whether they come from a paid ad, your website, email campaigns, a trade show or any other source. You should be able to consolidate all your leads in the marketing automation solution.
With the help of this database and the sales intelligence you have gathered about each individual lead you can segment your prospects into groups and label them on the basis of their geographical location, industry, preferences, behavior, etc. This allows you to target each group with relevant content thus increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns. This will also lead to higher conversion rates, as proper targeting is one of the most crucial factors for successfully closing a deal.
#3. A tool useful for both marketing and sales teams
Marketing and sales teams do not work without any contact between them any more. Sales departments should use marketing automation with the same priority as the marketing teams. The platform you choose should be able to integrate with your CRM platform and offer the sales representatives a sufficient number of useful features.
In order to be able to run perfectly targeted sales campaigns, the sales department needs the entire lead history of each individual prospect. And they should have access to these intelligence sources without having to depend on the marketing team. Marketing automation solutions should have the capability to provide sales with daily reports about the hot leads that they will be able to follow up right away.
Tracking and monitoring each site visitor in real time can assist the sales team in optimizing their strategies and closing more deals, and that too a lot more quickly.
#4. Individual visitor profiles
A web-sales automation tool that has the ability to create and maintain a profile for each individual visitor of your website can go a long way in increasing the number of your sales closures. With the data gathered about each visitor, what pages they have viewed, what they have expressed interest in, etc. you can come up with a much more effective strategy for engaging those visitors and converting them into paying customers.
Not only that; these profiles also allow you to extend your cross-selling and up-selling opportunities as well as optimize your site’s content to perform better and achieve higher conversion rates.
#5. Integrating a proactive live chat into the website
A live chat would be a great feature to have in your marketing automation solution. However, some cleverly developed web-sales automation platforms take this option a step further by offering a proactive live chat. A chat window is triggered whenever the solution detects that the visitor is hesitating or has reached the checkout page but cannot proceed, for instance.
With your customer support’s real-time assistance the leads can progress down the funnel faster and you can get a higher percentage of conversions, as you will be able to prevent a large part of the abandonments. This will also cut down the expenses for phone bills and other costly customer support options that you would otherwise incur.
The bottom line
While reporting, lead nurturing and scoring are really beneficial features a marketing automation platform should possess without a doubt, it would be extremely useful if the solution you choose also has a few or all of the other features mentioned above. This will streamline your marketing and sales processes and will also help you close more deals successfully, thus leading to steady business growth.
Images: “business concept, automated business process digital touch screen interface/ Shutterstock.com“
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