Intro

Growing a business depends on personal interaction, but scaling these interactions can be expensive and complicated. Automation can dramatically increase lead generation while reducing the cost-per-lead.

This guide will discuss how to generate high-quality leads using automation.

How Does Lead Automation Work?

Leads have traditionally been acquired by cold-calling, renting email lists, or personally manning a chatbot on a website.

Lead automation uses step-programming to automate part of this process. The business creates a flow chart of desired outcomes and then programs a chatbot to flow through with the customer to the desired end.

Pop-ups, email campaigns, and auto-generated coupons are other forms of lead automation.

With all types of lead automation, customers are assigned tags. These tags trigger different streams within the automation flow, depending on client actions. The result is a client who receives the correct answers fast.

Key Advantages of Automating Your Lead Generation

There are cost-saving advantages to automating lead generation, but clients like them, too.

• The chatbot quickly delivers answers, links, and helps with purchasing or starting a return.
• The chatbot often negates the need for live customer service.
• A chatbot isn’t emotionally invested in the outcome, so potential clients feel less pressured by the interaction.

Automated emails and coupons help to keep your business top-of-mind and often result in the first purchase, subscription, or inquiry. Best of all, drag-and-drop programming means anyone can automate their lead generation workflow.

10 Steps System for Generating High-Quality Leads Using Automation

Not every lead is a good lead. When automation is deployed, tags and filters qualify incoming leads, delivering better leads for follow-up.

Step 1: Define and Get to Know Your Target Audience

Who are your potential clients? What type of questions do they ask? What reassurances do they need? All of these things get automated into the chatbot and triggered automatically.

Use touchpoint mapping to understand where your clients engage your company, what they do there, and what happens after leaving. This information is vital for creating a client acquisition and retention strategy.

Step 2: Focus On Content Optimization

Optimize your content to rank well in SERPs. This also includes keywords, but more importantly, it must provide real value to real people. It’s technically organized for crawling and prioritizing on a SERP. You can use a SERP checker too.

The days of creating keyword-loaded content to rank in Google are long gone. Google prioritizes well-structured content that provides serious value to searchers.

Step 3: Create a High-Converting Lead Magnet

A lead magnet can be a high-quality e-book, cheatsheet, high-value coupon, access to a valuable catalog of previously-published resources, or a fun contest with good odds of winning.

The client submits a name and email address to access the high-value item. This information is routed to the automated email sequence.

Step 4: Have an Attention-Grabbing Landing Page

Your landing page is the most important, so focus on word value and aesthetics. Hire a professional to make sure the wording is correct and error-free.

Potential clients may never click further into your site than your landing page. Make this page as engaging and helpful as possible. Your best information and sales pitches are on this page.

Step 5: Put Your Email Campaigns on Autopilot

If you rely on personal time and effort to move potential clients through your email funnel, you’ll inevitably wonder where your funnel is leaking. Once your fantastic email funnel is built, it must be automated, or potential clients will leak out the seams.

When your leads are automatically moved to the top of the email funnel, the marketing happens without any attention from you. You can then engage personally as needed with clients who inquire further or make it through the end of the funnel and buy into your business.

Step 6: Offer a Referral Program

When you provide an excellent product, service, or customer service, your clients will happily refer friends, family, and colleagues to your business. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing strategy there is.

This is why social media marketing is so powerful. Though it happens online with people they may not know in real life, a social media referral feels like a personal endorsement.

Offer extremely valuable incentives for current clients to refer new clients. This can be done through referral push notifications that trigger valuable coupons when used, free services for both parties, or exclusive product add-ons.

Step 7: Automate Prospecting On LinkedIn

The next step in how to generate high-quality leads using automation is to use bots to send automatic invitations and messages on LinkedIn. The key with LinkedIn is trust. The more people that use LinkedIn for inappropriate marketing and casual conversations, the less professional it feels.

Use filters to be sure you’re sending invitations and messages to the right people on LinkedIn, giving your business the appearance of professionalism. Using the right automation service can help you look like you’ve done your research.

Keep on top of LinkedIn automation. Businesses frequently set LinkedIn on autopilot and fail to follow up with leads generated or update automation based on business changes, such as the closure of a job opening.

Step 8: Create a Facebook Lead Ad

Facebook is the first platform to use automated chatbots, and it revolutionized how people could do business on social media. Today they have a service called Lead Ads.

Use Facebook’s audience selection and optimization AI to create lead ads that speak to your potential clients. These mobile-friendly ads pre-populate with information that the client has uploaded to Facebook, so all they have to do is look it over, and press send.

Best of all, Facebook leads can be sent straight to your CRM, which creates a seamless client relationship.

Step 9: Chatbots Are Now a Necessity

Chatbots are at the forefront of getting your potential clients the information they want, when they want it, with no delay. Chatbots can route clients to your customer service team or CRM exactly when needed.

Use a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) provider to integrate all of your telecommunications, chatbots, SMS/MMS, conference calls, live chat, file and screen sharing, and whiteboard demos into one place.

This saves large companies a ton of money and helps small companies to scale up with a minimal cost.

Step 10: Personalize, Personalize, Then Personalize Some More

Every step of your sales funnel, email automation, tagging, and chatbot flows should be updated as you learn more about your clients. AI chatbots can learn to answer more complicated questions, but there’s no replacement for thoughtful programming.

For example, if multiple clients ask a question that the chatbot doesn’t have an answer for, instead of continually routing them to wait for a customer service rep, update the chatbot to answer the question or provide the link.

Conduct customer research to determine what your clients want, expect, and feel they deserve from your company, then update your offerings and automation to meet client expectations.

Conclusion

There’s no substitute for excellent customer service, incredible product and service offerings, and intelligent marketing. However, learning how to generate high-quality leads using automation just makes sense.

It takes less time, gives each potential client access to valuable information, and routes the highest quality leads into your personal care.

(Custom image made by the author)

About authors:

Maria Mladenovska is a Content Manager at ThriveMyWay - a one-stop resource for learning how to make money online on your own terms. She is passionate about marketing and her curiosity to learn is ever-evolving.

She focuses specifically on writing and editing engaging articles, blog posts, and other forms of publication. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.