Artificial intelligence can be used for marketing automation and search optimization, among other things. Using AI for marketing automation can simplify your sales tracking and conversion funnel and can shorten your lead cycle.

From large enterprises to lean businesses, AI examples like marketing automation and search optimization are game-changers. Businesses use it to automate seemingly mundane tasks, create and schedule email campaigns, and simplify sales tracking right in the conversion funnel.

However, every marketing automation tool is not created equal, remove more redundancies and become an automatic process that generates leads, converts potential buyers into loyal customers.

Now, let’s talk about the ways marketing automation shortens your lead cycle and some of the features to look for in a marketing automation tool.

Valuable Marketing Automation Features

If you are becoming a virtual assistant and looking to structure your sales and marketing tasks, then you need a tool that provides the following basic features:

• The ability to tag a lead based on filters or qualifiers (industry type or business affiliation)
• The ability to create a trigger based on your category, such as customers who downloaded your ebook or signed up for your newsletter
• The ability to automate a web flow and free yourself from repetitive tasks

News on artificial intelligence recommends these features because they save you time and allow you to focus more on the important inbound marketing activities you need to do. Because of this, it shortens the lead cycle, increases leads generated, and more prospects convert to customers.

However, there is more to marketing automation than meets the eye. Here are some specific marketing automation features that will help your marketing and sales funnel.

Automate marketing activities in the prospecting stage

There is marketing automation software that can automatically record sales calls and send emails and save your sales team a huge amount of time. Typically, sales calls are logged manually and sales emails are printed, which created chaos if you couldn’t organize the documentation process.

Automating the recording and tracking of calls as well as emails during the prospecting stage is an important task that marketing automation software performs. Most of the work and its repetitive process can be set up digitally, drafting your email content, scheduling it in advance, and deploying it based on various triggers can simplify your lead generation process. This way your sales team can focus on:

• Set up calls with potential customers who are genuinely interested in your product or services
• Create documents like quotes, contracts and agreements easily
• Strategies of other marketing tactics to increase conversions
• Organize reactivation campaigns for inactive leads

When potential customers show interest in your product or service, being accessible to them through digital channels, providing them with a quote and a contract quickly is vital.

Nurture your existing customers

Customer retention and customer acquisition are equally important, and keeping customers is much less expensive than generating new ones. You can use marketing automation tools to foster a better relationship with your existing customers and build customer loyalty.

Comprehensive CRM and marketing automation tools help your CRM activities and interactions with your existing customers. Your transactions can be recorded and because of that, pattern reference and tracking is made easy. You can also run reports to help you determine your longest and most successful customer associations.

With this data, it can help you decide what types of businesses and industries you should focus your future marketing and sales efforts on. At the same time, with a marketing automation tool, you can monitor which online platform and marketing strategy can generate the best results.

Plus, it can help you identify which aftermarket services and product features they prefer so upselling and cross-selling is simple. You can set rules or triggers in your email automation to let your existing customers know about your new products or services, this way you can leverage your customer lifetime value.

Monitor progress and modify your strategy

The state of the market and trends in customer buying behavior and new technologies change dramatically all the time. Therefore, it is reasonable to modify your sales and marketing strategies accordingly.

Marketing automation apps allow you to monitor the progress of all your campaigns with ease, so you can get insights early on and act on them right away. Analytics built into marketing automation software help you understand where you need to modify or even stop your strategies if necessary.

With marketing automation, you can identify which digital platform to choose, how to reach your prospects effectively, and if your marketing strategy didn’t work. And this saves you from wasting time guessing and wasting your marketing budget.

Plus, marketing automation software helps you build relationships with prospects who aren’t ready to make a purchase yet. This allows the behavior of potential customers to identify how to persuade them to buy and when to do so. It helps you filter and rank leads so you can prioritize which ones to nurture and get the most return on your investment.