Lead generation is key to keeping a business running, but it’s a challenging task when carried out manually. It’s time-intensive, easily open to human error, and even with dedicated team members it’s hard to invest enough time to actually scale.
Thankfully, there’s a way to address all these issues and make lead generation both efficient and rewarding. What do you know about automated lead generation?
Why use automation for lead generation?
Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of automated lead generation. This guide is here to tell you everything you need to know to nurture leads better and increase conversions with automation.
Main benefits of automated lead generation
Automated lead generation is the future. Sure, manual lead generation and nurturing are still possible, but why ignore new methods when the benefits of using ScoreApp and automation are so clear-cut?
Let’s start with efficiency. ScoreApp’s automation capabilities can be put to work on the likes of data entry and analysis – both of which are extremely time-consuming, not to mention dry.
Automation removes human error. It never gets bored of data entry and lets its mind wander, so your sales team can always rely on the CRM being stacked with all the relevant data and reliable insights. And the more you use AI and automation tools such as large language models (LLMs), the quicker and more efficient they become.
Lead segmentation is vital to efficient resource management, and it’s a matter of course with automation. Once a lead has completed a ScoreApp quiz, for example, their answers will give them a lead score. That score, along with their captured preferences and behaviours, makes enhanced personalisation possible. Just set up the necessary email sequences, and ScoreApp will handle the rest thanks to its seamless integration with email marketing platforms.
And because automation doesn’t keep office hours, engagement and responses are improved. Follow-up emails from webinars can be sent immediately to keep leads engaged. Chatbots can field questions based on FAQs and direct the highest-quality leads to the sales team to pick up. With automation, lead generation is a constant process. No wonder 80% of businesses using automation saw leads increase.
Strategies for automated lead generation
Sounds good, doesn’t it? But how can you make automated lead generation work for your business and encourage scaling at speed? Time to take a look at a few important strategies.
Take advantage of lead scoring tools
ScoreApp automatically scores and prioritises every lead, with a higher lead score awarded to anyone showing desirable behaviour. You can even set your own scoring criteria in most CRMs. For example, any lead who has completed a quiz, opened and interacted with follow-up emails, and signed up for webinars or waitlists will be scored automatically by ScoreApp.
This all happens as part of the automation process, leaving sales teams with incredibly strong data to base their resourcing decisions on. Lead scores show who is most likely to convert and who isn’t, which dramatically increases efficiency and conversion rates.
Use automated email campaigns
ScoreApp integrates with the most widely used email marketing tools to make automating email campaigns simple. Create workflows that automatically respond to event sign-ups, quiz completions, abandoned carts, and more to keep leads engaged and moving down the funnel.
Emails are already a strong engagement tool, but paired with the personalisation that comes from quiz results, they become even more powerful.
Share knowledge with webinars and automate the follow-up
Webinars are your chance to show your target audience – your ideal client – you know your stuff. They give businesses authority and a chance to be extra engaging. They’re the perfect content to snag warm leads, especially when you can create a landing page with automated sign-up in moments with ScoreApp.
What happens behind the scenes might seem daunting, but automation takes the strain. Automation can trawl registration data to send out reminders and follow up with email sequences containing recordings and related content.
Grab attention with interactive quizzes
ScoreApp quizzes are effective lead magnets, because leads actually want to complete them. Even better, you can build your quiz in no time, with questions easily tailored to target certain areas and pre-qualify leads.
With the right questions, quizzes can give businesses an incredible amount of data to work from. You can get to know your leads’ priorities, budgets, contact details, pain points, and more and use them to personalise your marketing.
Integrate the most popular tools
Automated lead generation tools such as ScoreApp don’t operate in a vacuum. Businesses and their sales and marketing teams rely on multiple tools, such as CRMs and email marketing platforms, and the process can easily get messy.
ScoreApp integrates with the most popular CRM, workflow, email marketing tools to keep things streamlined. It saves time, too, as any data that comes from ScoreApp quizzes is automatically added to the CRM without the need for manual intervention.
Keep improving your funnel with the data
Automated lead generation is an ongoing process, which means you have to keep it working at its best. Analytics will show you what areas need improving, whether that’s content, email frequency, or something else. Making those changes is the best way to keep the funnel optimised and conversions at their peak.
ScoreApp comes with dedicated dashboards that show you the metrics for keeping things running smoothly, including:
- Lead quality
- Engagement rate
- Conversion rate
- Referral source
Don’t worry, we’ll be looking more closely at these metrics further on in the blog post.
Put AI to work
Automated lead generation has already been revolutionary, but introducing greater AI usage could be the next game-changer.
AI increases efficiency and reduces the need for manual intervention. And the best thing is, the more it’s used, the better it becomes at both. AI systems such as LLMs are always learning, and because of that they get better at the tasks assigned to them in rapid time.
The more data it has access to, the better AI becomes at making predictions and forecasts based on what’s come before. What’s more, this analysis happens in real time, so powerful insights are always available to help your sales team make data-driven decisions.
A/B testing becomes immediate, strategies become better informed, and your sales team will spend less time poring over the numbers.
Well-implemented AI can also improve the experience for your leads. Tools such as ChatGPT can help generate ideas for tailored content that hits certain beats and pain points. That content can then be spun off into other mediums, such as social media and blog posts, webinar topics, or video scripts.
ScoreApp already uses AI to help users build effective quiz lead magnets and optimise questions. Our quizzes help bring in higher-quality pre-qualified leads, while AI gets to work absorbing the data. You get a better idea of who you’re talking to and what makes them tick before targeting them directly.
One final recommended use of AI is to set up chatbots. Chatbots can be loaded with data such as answers to FAQs, and placed on landing pages to give relevant answers to questions as they arise. They can operate at any time of the day or night, effectively determining which high-quality leads should be passed to your sales team.
Chatbots are also extremely useful data harvesters. They capture relevant details from any conversation and feed it into the CRM, giving you more data and ever more reliable insights.
Common mistakes in automated lead generation to avoid
To get the best out of automated lead generation, it’s worth knowing what the most common mistakes are and making sure they never rear their heads in the first place.
Here’s what you need to avoid:
- Target audience misalignment
If you’re not talking to the right people in the right way, then you’re not going to make conversions. Your target audience needs to be crystal clear, and your offering must be obviously beneficial.
- Weak or generic content
If you want to keep leads engaged, then your content needs to be engaging. Make email copy, landing pages, quizzes, webinars, and more stand out and give the reader/viewer something for their time.
- Lack of personalisation
Leads want to know you see them. Speak to their problems and put forward solutions that are relevant to their pain points and behaviours. Get specific and as individual as possible for stronger nurturing.
- No clear CTA
If a lead doesn’t know what action you want them to take, they’re not going to do it. It’s that simple. If you’re aiming for webinar sign-ups, waitlist sign-ups, or purchases, be specific. Otherwise, you’ve only got yourself to blame for missed opportunities.
- Lack of follow-up nurturing
It’s not enough for a lead to land on a lead magnet and fill out a quiz or attend a webinar. In fact, that’s just the start. From that first contact, leads need to be nurtured and kept warm. Follow up with content, special offers, and relevant resources to keep them moving down the sales funnel towards converting.
- Poor landing page experience for leads
Leads come to a landing page with certain expectations. If those expectations aren’t met, then they’re likely to go elsewhere. Being mindful of landing page best practices will keep them on track.
- Ignoring analytics and feedback
Analytics are your window into your leads’ minds – your way of measuring the success of your content – and should not be ignored. Only by looking closely at the analytics can you pinpoint what’s working, what isn’t, and what could be working better.
- Neglecting mobile optimisation
Not everyone will be using a PC when they land on your lead magnet. Optimising content and actions for mobile devices makes sure no lead is left behind.
- Underusing A/B testing
Pressing ‘go’ on your automated lead generation process isn’t where the work ends, but starts. Frequent A/B testing will show you any weak spots and allow you to make corrections that strengthen the sales funnel.
This is a fairly brief overview of how businesses can optimise their automated lead generation. Luckily, we’ve already written a blog post that goes into more detail for you to get stuck into.
Step-by-step guide to setting up automated lead generation
It can be hard to know where to start if you’ve never used automation to enhance your lead generation. It’s not necessarily a hard process, but it can be quite involved. But, hey, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t get the same level of results.
It’s best to go through the steps for building your automated lead generation process one at a time.
Use strong lead magnets
Lead magnets are your way of snagging the data for evaluating leads and moving them towards a purchase.
You have to give the audience something they’re interested in for them to engage with it, though. You won’t get their contact details and behaviour data for nothing.
While you can include a downloadable resource with a submission form, the data that comes back is often pretty limited. ScoreApp quizzes, on the other hand, give you the means to pre-qualify leads with carefully selected questions.
Answers to a well-made quiz let you in on a lead’s budget, pain points, priorities, and expectations of your service. That kind of insight is invaluable for personalised marketing activity.
Webinar landing pages are also strong lead magnets. An optimised webinar landing page (complete with snappy copy and attention-grabbing headlines) gives a business a chance to show its understanding of those pain points to eager leads. The webinar itself lets you show how you solve them.
Lastly, waitlists are a useful way to gather information and build hype for upcoming products and services. Anyone who signs up can be sent a follow-up quiz (the same goes for any webinar attendees), so you’ll gather even more data to use for segmenting and pre-qualifying leads.
Split and segment the leads that come in
It’s not enough to bring in leads – you need to be able to segment and prioritise them.
As well as using a lead score, leads can be categorised by demographic, interests, and behaviours. You’d be surprised at how much you can tell about a lead’s enthusiasm and likelihood of converting by the pages they’ve visited on your site, or the emails they’ve opened.
Including pre-qualifying questions in a quiz gives businesses the chance to dive deeper into a lead’s needs. Their score will tell you how aware of your brand they are. Are they a cold, warm, or hot lead? Each requires a different level of attention and resources to reach the end of the funnel.
By segmenting your leads, it’s easy to create a list of priorities. Who are the most likely to buy, and who should be left alone? It’s all about ensuring your time and resources have the biggest impact on your conversion rates.
Automate your personalised marketing campaigns
Automating your lead generation should also mean automating your marketing campaigns, especially email marketing.
We’ve touched on this already, but integrating ScoreApp with your email marketing tools makes personalising and sending follow-up emails simple. It’s a good thing, too. Following up on interactions with data gleaned from any lead magnet is the perfect opportunity to add value and foster a stronger relationship. The more you can prove you understand a lead and what they need, the greater the chance they’ll buy from you.
Check the data and make necessary changes
Automated lead generation isn’t a static process. You need to keep on top of the data and see what can be improved.
ScoreApp has analytics that show how well your lead magnets are working. Landing pages, emails, and quizzes can all be optimised from specialised dashboards.
Only by monitoring key metrics such as engagement and conversion rates, email opens, and drop-off points can you see if the process is working at its best. And if it’s not? Well, that’s what A/B testing is for. And with ScoreApp automation, A/B testing happens instantly.
Automated lead generation and personalised marketing go hand in hand
While you could certainly operate automated lead generation or personalised marketing separately, the fact is they work best together. It’s not hard to set up, and the result is a smoother, more powerful lead generation process with a higher conversion rate.
Here’s what you need to do to integrate automated lead generation and personalised marketing:
- Use interactive tools for better results
Interactive elements such as ScoreApp quizzes build stronger relationships with leads. Ask the right questions and you’ll collect valuable data that will help you speak directly to your leads’ issues.
- Use the data
Once you’ve collected the quiz data, make it work for you to help you understand your leads better – their views, their behaviours and their pain points. Now it’s just a case of reaching out.
- Get personal with automated campaigns
This is when you use what you’ve learned about your leads to create personalised content. By using the data in the CRM, you can direct blog posts, webinars, and more to leads based on their behaviours and quiz answers.
By engaging in what you know is important to them, you significantly improve the chance of a conversion. That’s why you should use automated lead generation and personalised marketing together.
How to track and measure automated lead generation results
ScoreApp quizzes, surveys, waitlists and webinars yield data that can be tracked and measured and used to improve the automated lead generation process.
Here are some of the most important lead generation metrics to keep on top of:
- Lead quality – How often do your leads match your ideal target audience? Are you pre-qualifying leads to keep the quality flowing?
- Engagement rate – Are leads interacting with your follow-up emails or other parts of the funnel? If not, where are they dropping off?
- Conversion rate – How many leads are following through to completion? How can you increase the number?
- Referral source – Where are your leads coming from? Are you paying enough attention to your most fruitful channels?
By tracking and monitoring these metrics, businesses are better equipped to improve their automated lead generation results.
Regularly review the data, interrogate what it shows against set goals and benchmarks, and share it with your whole team to build a stronger funnel.
Everything you need to know to get more leads with automation
That should cover it. By following this guide, you’ll have everything you need to build an automated lead generation process. It’s the strength of that process, and your work on it, that brings in more high-quality leads.
By using strong lead magnets alongside personalised marketing, integrating ScoreApp with essential third-party tools, and consistently measuring analytics for optimisation, you’ll build a strong sales funnel. You’ll also build stronger relationships with potential leads – leads who you’ll know better and know how to handle, thanks to the data the automation brings in.
Getting onboard with ScoreApp is your first step to getting more leads with automation. But did we mention that it’s free to try?
Try ScoreApp today for stronger leads and higher conversions.
