Want to increase your qualified leads by 451%? Start using marketing automation to automate your processes.
Marketing automation is helpful for all businesses, but it’s particularly impactful for small businesses, where time and budget are often limited. By automating repetitive tasks, small businesses achieve a level of efficiency and effectiveness that was previously unattainable.
It’s no surprise that small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are the fastest-growing segment in the marketing automation space.
Given this trend, here are four ways you can use automation to transform your lead nurturing strategy:
1. Personalize at Scale
One of the biggest advantages of marketing automation is the ability to personalize communication at scale. 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messaging. Simply put, you’re losing sales if you’re not personalizing your messages.
Instead of one-size-fits-all, generic messaging (which rarely gets opened or responded to), automation helps you tailor your messages to fit each lead. This often includes segmenting your leads by interests, demographics, or stage in the buyer’s journey and using merge tags to include specific info from your CRM.
2. Engage Across Multiple Channels
The buyer journey isn’t the same for every lead. Leads might interact with your brand across various channels – email, social media, text message, website, etc. Each of these touchpoints is an opportunity to engage and nurture leads further.
Marketing automation helps you integrate these various channels into one cohesive strategy. By connecting these touchpoints, you provide a consistent brand voice across all platforms.
Using multiple channels also helps keep your brand top-of-mind and builds a stronger, more unified connection with your leads.
3. Automate Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are a series of automated messages delivered or “dripped” to leads/customers over a set period. Typically, the goal of drip campaigns is to guide recipients through the customer journey toward completing a desired action.
Lead nurturing drip campaigns can be customized based on where a lead is in their journey. For example, a new subscriber might receive a welcome series introducing them to your brand, while a returning visitor might get content that addresses their specific pain points.
You’re likely already doing some sort of lead nurturing drip campaigns, but automating the campaigns makes them even more effective and easier to manage.
Automation makes sure these targeted marketing sequences drip out automatically, keeping leads engaged without any extra manual effort on your part. This consistent communication helps guide leads through decision-making, providing valuable information and resources at each step.
Related: What is an SMS Drip Campaign?
4. Follow Up in Real-Time
Every minute counts when following up with leads. The odds of successfully contacting a lead drop by over 10x in the first hour and the odds of qualifying a lead when you call after 5 minutes versus 30 minutes decrease by 21x.
If you want to actually convert leads, contact them as quickly as possible! To do that efficiently, automate your follow-up. This helps you engage with your leads in real-time as you respond almost immediately to their questions.
Real-time engagement significantly increases the chances of moving leads further down the sales funnel, as it takes advantage of the moment when they are most interested and engaged.
Automate Your Lead Nurturing Today
As a small business, using marketing automation often levels the field and helps you compete with larger companies.
The easiest way to start automating your processes? Sign up for Skipio! Skipio automates the time-consuming but necessary outreach and follow-up that turns leads into sales — all from local numbers that can text and call. You connect with leads sooner, capture customer attention, and schedule appointments in less time.
Start automating your lead nurturing today. The benefits are clear: increased efficiency, less time wasted on manual tasks, and more leads closed.