If you want your business to flourish in today’s competitive market, you need to leverage sales funnel automation.
An automated sales funnel helps in creating a repeatable pipeline, so you can generate revenue on auto-pilot. Additionally, a systematized process makes it easier to track each step of the customer journey to identify weak points and optimize your funnel to convert more leads into paying customers.
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What is sales funnel automation?
A sales funnel is a theoretical representation of the customer journey: from them knowing your brand to them actually purchasing your products or availing of your services.
Your company’s goal is to generate leads and convert them into paying customers. Since this is a time-consuming process, you can automate some of your marketing activities with sales funnel automation. By using specialized software, you can automate anything from pipeline management to workflows to lead scoring.
What are the benefits of sales funnel automation?
One of the great things about automated sales funnels is that it responds to your prospects’ activities on your website with highly-targeted and well-timed messages. This gives you the ability to hook potential customers at every stage of the sales process. When used correctly, it helps improve sales velocity and revenues. Additionally, it can also:
Personalize the customer experience
With automated sales funnel software, you can send personalized emails and messages to your leads and customers at each stage of the sales process, prompting them to continue moving toward a sale. Craft your messages carefully and make them as relevant as possible to the user. By using sales automation software combined with customized messaging, you can convert leads at a lower cost.
Streamline nurturing activities
You can also automate parts of lead engagement. Set up automated sequences based on user actions that give you an early warning for prospects who are ready to buy or those who might need more nurturing before they become customers.
Organize your leads
When you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of leads, software can help you sort leads according to categories that are relevant to the nature of your business. Real estate leads can be grouped according to geographic area, price level or buy/sell categories. Insurance leads might be organized by the prospect’s age or marital status. Another way is to organize them based on the type of insurance the prospect is considering whether home, auto, life, or business insurance.
Improve conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of audiences who completed a desired action divided by the total number of audience, multiplied by 100. The desired action can be clicking an advertisement, completing a form, or booking a demo. Sales funnel automation helps improve conversion rates since you can send highly targeted messages that take into account the behavior of buyers.
Provide meticulous tracking and reporting
With automation in place, you can track every detail of your campaign activities as well as individual customer interactions. You can build customized reports based on whatever key performance indicators (KPIs) are important for your business.
Connect sales teams to interested prospects
With sales funnel automation, the connectivity between interested prospects and the sales team becomes more seamless. Automation allows you to funnel the leads interested in your product or service to the sales team for further handling and qualification. This helps improve lead response time and increase the number of qualified leads that reach the final stage of the purchase process.
Reduces cost per acquisition
Sales funnel automation can help reduce cost per acquisition because fewer staff members are needed to focus on laborious tasks. For instance, you can automate retargeting campaigns in order to follow up with your customers. Sending automated thank you emails or abandoned cart notifications can help you generate the most sales revenue while keeping acquisition costs low.
Boost the company’s bottom line
Having an automated sales funnel in place creates a system that brings in more sales on autopilot. Thus, it can lead to a significant increase in your company’s revenues by allowing you to have a consistent revenue flow.
How can you use sales funnel automation?
Setting up an automated sales funnel requires key steps such as conducting market research, selecting sales automation software, and developing a strategy to gain prospective customers. If you wish to maximize your sales, here are a few crucial steps for leveraging an automated sales funnel.
Automate lead prospecting
Automate your lead prospecting process to find even more leads. Select the right software that is capable of extracting key information from your site’s visitors to identify interested prospects who may be ready to buy.
While in the process of collecting leads, build a database and segment contacts properly. Since your leads are in different stages of the funnel, segmentation will help you customize your approach, making sure that they get the right marketing message at the right time using automation.
Automate follow-ups
The longer you delay responding, the more likely prospects will end up with your competitors. Use chatbots to respond in real-time to interested prospects who are new to your site or have visited it recently. Prevent follow up fails by sending messages that will be sent automatically based on the actions of the prospect.
Configure the system to send the response that you want, and it will send the message immediately to any interested prospect 24/7. As captured leads pass down the funnel, your sales automation platform can be used to send messages and content showing how your products and services can be useful and can add value. Sending the right information at the right time can help ensure that the lead gets converted.
Automate lead scoring
Set up a lead scoring system based on your buyer persona. Each lead is assigned a score based on their demographics, how they interact with your business, and how likely they’re going to convert into a customer. CRMs let you enter your lead scoring criteria and point values, so it can automatically calculate your leads’ scores based on the actions they take.
By doing this, your sales team can identify which leads are hot and ready to buy so they can reach out to them right away and greatly increase their chances of closing the deal. By automating this process, you can potentially shorten your sales cycle and increase your business’ ROI.
Automate lead nurturing campaigns
Lead nurturing is the process of building trust with your leads so that they’ll convert into customers. The key to an effective lead nurturing strategy is providing the right content at precisely the right time. You can automate your lead nurturing strategy by setting behavioral triggers so you can automatically contact visitors based on the actions they take on your website.
For example, you can set up triggers to automatically send an invite to schedule a free demo if a certain prospect frequently checks out your services page. Set up additional meetings or calls, and do product demonstrations in order to move qualified leads toward conversion.
Automate your workflows
Workflow automation helps by ensuring that every lead is handled in the best way possible. Not only can you send out automated emails, but you also can configure marketing funnels to track your prospects’ activity over time. This gets you up to speed with where each prospect currently stands and how much more info they need before making a purchase decision.
Enroll your prospects in drip campaigns, which are sequences of marketing content that are sent automatically to leads. This ensures that they continue receiving valuable information even if they don’t immediately buy from you.
Automate repetitive tasks
Repetitive manual tasks can take up a lot of your time. Let the software do most of the work through automation, increasing accuracy and lowering your costs.
For example, uploading contacts to make sure they are stored in a central location within an automated sales funnel is much easier than updating them manually. It will also make this process less prone to human errors.
Pick the right tools for sales funnel automation
Sales funnel automation is key to maximizing your sales potential. You can save time, increase efficiency, and improve your lead generation workflows with sales funnel automation. If you want to boost your revenue generation, you can rely on sales funnel automation to help you get the job done.
Aloware lets you automatically enroll contacts to drip campaigns in order to nurture them further. It also lets you instantly call prospects as soon as they submit a form so that you’ll be in a better position to get better quality leads who might convert to loyal customers.
Book a demo to see how sales funnel automation can help representatives eliminate manual, repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on revenue-generating activities that will boost your company’s bottom line.
