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5 Ways Closed-Loop Marketing Improves Sales Effectiveness

5 Ways Closed-Loop Marketing Improves Sales Effectiveness

I know you already keep track of plenty of statistics for your inbound marketing and website:

  • How many website visitors you get each day, week, month or year

  • How many visitors convert into leads

  • How many leads become closed sales

  • How many social media followers you have

  • How many email subscribers you have.

Now imagine you could track each individual visitor from the first connection with your website as they convert into leads, interact with your site, and eventually become customers.

How could you use the information gained through that kind of tracking?

You would know which source yields not just the most visitors, but the most leads and customers.

You would know what secondary actions on your website are most likely to lead to a sale.

And you could put that information to use to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing and sales.

Stop imagining, and start doing it, by implementing a closed-loop marketing system.

 

How Closed-Loop Marketing Works:

The basic concept behind closed-loop marketing is using url tracking tokens and cookies to record a visitor’s interaction with your website, which allows you to see each step of the way and attribute customer acquisition to a visitor’s original source. (Check out an overview of the four-step closed-loop marketing process here.)

What You Need to Implement Closed-Loop Marketing

In order to set up closed-loop marketing, you need to map marketing activities to sales. This requires connecting the information gathered through your website (with the use of cookies and url tracking tokens) with the information your internal team has gathered on those same people and recorded in your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Closed-loop marketing relies on integrating everything you know about your prospective, current and former customers.

When your two systems—CRM and marketing—are aligned and in communication with each other, you can gain the following insights and use them to improve your sales-marketing alignment.

Sales Assignment Rules

Tracking how leads enter your system can help you identify how best to assign them to your sales team. Did they become leads through a campaign focused on a specific industry? Assign them to the sales person in charge of that industry. Were they directed to your site by a PPC campaign focused on a specific geographic location? Assign them to local sales contact.

By using the information gained as they access your website to assign new leads appropriately at the beginning, you foster quicker relationship-building opportunities than if you shuffle a lead from one sales team member to another to get the right fit.

Lead Scoring and Qualification

While the information needed to fully develop a lead scoring and qualification system won’t be gained automatically, the use of closed-loop marketing will help you collect the data needed to create an effective lead scoring system. Once a sale is recorded as “closed/won” in your CRM, work backward through that customer’s journey to assign point values based on that lead’s demographics or actions taken on the website.

Those characteristics, especially once seen multiple times in different customers’ journeys, are indicative of a lead’s probability to become a customer.

Once you’ve set point values for various lead qualification categories, determine the total value that qualifies a lead to be sent to the sales team for direct contact.

Lead Nurturing

Along with providing data to establish a lead scoring system, your closed-loop marketing will provide input into how to structure lead nurturing efforts. Leads whose scores are low can be filtered into a targeted nurturing system, receiving a series of emails with offers designed to draw them into further engagement with your company.

By looking back over the paths of successful sales, you can identify the offers that provided “assists” to guide leads toward closing and focus on those offers when they are relevant to the lead’s initial contact with your company and website.

Custom Lead Scoring

Those same offers that are typically indicators of a lead that is ready for a sales call could be established as a trigger point to move a lead on to sales through custom lead scoring. Or leads who download multiple offers indicating a high level of engagement, even if they are all at the top of the sales funnel, might be given a high score. You could also use certain qualifying questions on your landing page forms to calculate a custom lead score.

 

Setting Monetary Goals

Marketing should start with goal-setting, and goals that are agreed upon by the sales and marketing teams together have the greatest chance of success. By tying marketing software to your CRM system, you can also set goals for individual campaigns that are based on sales or revenue. (More on unifying your sales and marketing departments.)

Rather than measuring your marketing impact only through website traffic and leads, you can focus on the actual customers gained through each channel and campaign. Because your executive suite wants more concrete numbers than most marketing metrics provide — they want to know figures like customer acquisition cost.

Closed-loop marketing isn’t just about gathering “big data.” It is about putting your marketing data together with your CRM system’s lead intelligence to create a complete picture of your leads and customers and then using that picture to improve your marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

Learn more about implementing closed-loop marketing, and how HubSpot can make it simple, by downloading our Introduction to Closed-Loop Marketing or requesting a HubSpot demo. It’s time to find out how much more you could know.

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