Lead Scoring and Marketing Automation: the Buddha Funnel

Marketing automation lead scoring whiteboard session
Mac McConnell, partner and founder of BlueBird Strategies. Video by the Marketing Automation Software Guide.

Email marketing is increasingly becoming integrated in a cross-channel and event-driven marketing strategy. As readers of this blog will now, I’m a firm believer in customer-centric holistic marketing. OK, I know that’s a few expensive words in one sentence but that’s how I call it.

When you talk about cross-channel marketing, integration and email you’re really talking about marketing automation. And when you’re talking about marketing automation, you’re really talking about lead management in many cases.

One of the topics when it comes down to lead management is obviously lead nurturing (and boy, am I glad content is crucial in it, if not I would be out of a job). And when you talk about lead nurturing, you inevitably have to talk about lead scoring.

Defining the entry points of your funnel, attributing scores to them and your leads or prospects (yes, terminology still depends a lot on who you’re talking to) and lead scoring through the funnel is simply a must when you want to work in a customer-centric, data-driven and holistic way (oops, again expensive words).

Read more

Getting Started with Marketing Automation

Marketing_automation_goldlasso It’s not very likely that the number of channels consumers use to gain information and interact with brands is going to reduce anytime soon. In fact, quite the opposite is likely and that means marketers must contend with and plan for a moving target. When you consider this new reality, marketing automation and integration solutions become not just a “nice to have”, but a “must have”.

US-based GoldLasso has released a whitepaper which hopefully will help corporations get a handle on automation and what they need to do to plan and implement it correctly.

The report: “Marketing Automation for Everyone Explained and Implemented”, is just 8 pages and it’s a great starting point for your company as you consider the power of automation.

Read more