What are the most used Marketing Automation techniques?

Source: The State of Email Marketing 2017
Sample Size: 2,510 Email marketers
Recommended Resource: Email Marketing Guide

Chart of the Day: Don't forget your Lead Scoring

We all know about Email Marketing Automation, but what is Lead Scoring?

In the chart, we can see that Email Automation is the most popular at 65.50%, which is expected. The chart also shows how little people either know or use lead scoring, as it's only at 11.80%.

Lead scoring is an excellent way of ranking prospects using a scoring method. These scores will help sales teams to prioritise leads or which should be nurtured by marketing more.

In the beginning of the process, marketing and sales need to work together to decide on what their ideal prospect is and what we want them to do on your site. And then assign or detract points from the prospects score for doing those activities. For example:

Visited Pricing Page = 20 points
Visited Blog = 1 point
Visited Careers Page = -20 points

Each time a prospect visits one of these pages, those points will be added to their score. (You notice the -20? If someone visits the careers page, they generally wouldn't be interested in buying. So we detract points.) If they reach a certain number of points, for example, 100 and also reach other criteria they could be ready to transact with you. This is what we call a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Then marketing passes them over to sales to follow up and hopefully, they will become Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). Please bear in mind this is a very simplistic explanation, but you can get more detail on MQL and SQLs here.

Lead scoring is hard and they take a lot of work and tweaking, which could explain why so few people use it. But once it's working correctly it can increase your revenue exponentially. You can click on the chart below for a larger version.