Close the Sales and Marketing Loop with Leadsbridge Integration

Guest Blog Post by Leadsbridge Most businesses today have one unique problem. It is the inability to align their sales and marketing teams to work together as one unit. Businesses spent a lot of money to generate leads they hope will convert to sales opportunities. But, sales are not always the result. At some point, no one can account for those leads. There is no record of the leads’ follow-up, the marketing activity that brought in the leads, and the marketing activities that turned those leads into sales.  This is a unique problem for businesses today. Forrester’s research revealed that only 38% of marketers have a holistic view of how customers interact with digital content along their purchasing journey. This means that the rest of the marketers are gambling with their marketing campaigns. This is the reason 69% of CEOs believe they are wasting money on marketing initiatives.  These statistics showed that a lot of marketers are not tracking their marketing campaigns from the beginning to the end. So how can you solve this problem as a business? You need closed-loop marketing to help bring profitability to your marketing campaigns.

What is closed-loop marketing?

Closed-loop marketing is tracking and analyzing your marketing activities to know which activities lead to the best ROI. To close the loop, you need to track and analyze your marketing activities from the beginning all the way to when you close the sale. This process enables you to connect your lead, marketing activity, and customer to the marketing campaign that generated the leads for the business. This information should guide the marketing activity to add to your website, content offers, blogs, SEO strategies, email campaigns, and many more to generate the best ROI for your business. How does closed-loop marketing work? HubSpot provided a visual to show how closed-loop marketing works in four stages: closed loop marketing Let’s take a closer look at the stages.

Stage 1:  Visitors land on your website from different traffic sources

Closed-loop marketing begins when visitors get to your website from different traffic sources such as a search engine, social media, paid advertising sources, or email campaigns through a specific URL. Your analytics software captures wherever they are coming from as their referral source. This data shows which channel is bringing in the best visitors and those that are bringing in less traffic. With this insight, you can optimize the channels for better performance.  To take this a step further, you can create a tracking URL for all your traffic sources so you associate a link with a marketing campaign or activity. This will enable you to properly track the traffic coming from the direct search.

Stage two:  Visitors interact with your website

When visitors get to your website, they interact with it by reading the content, clicking links, and viewing pages. This is where you should track what they do on your website. This includes the pages they view, the links they click, etc. This information shows the path visitors take before conversion and with this, you can better optimize your website for faster conversion.

Stage 3: Visitors find a call to action on your website that leads to opt-in forms

The profitability of attracting traffic to your website is in converting them to leads. This is where you need lead capture forms and lead magnets to entice your visitors to become leads. For example, if you are a software vendor, you can direct incoming traffic to a demo landing page where you collect their email address and relevant details for a demo of your software. This will give you relevant information about your visitor. You will have their email address, probably know who they are, where they come from, their phone number, etc. This information will help you to properly close the loop and associate them with where they come from (traffic source). 

Stage 3: Sales team follow-up with the lead, closes the sale, and tracks it with customer relationship management (CRM) software. 

This is the time to figure out how to turn the lead into a customer. You need to follow up with the lead either through email marketing, a phone call, or live chat to convert them into sales. This is the last stage where you want to close the sales and marketing loop and be able to track each point that led to the sale. At this point, you need to put in a system to make closed-loop marketing work. A marketing automation platform like ActiveDemand will track the lead’s touchpoints in the sales funnel. Also, having a CRM platform that integrates with the marketing software makes it easy to close the loop.  Good news! Use Leadsbridge to connect your ActiveDemand software to your favorite CRM platform. Leadsbridge integrates with over 360+ CRMs, lead generation, and advertising applications. Using Leadsbridge makes it easy to share data automatically between your CRM and the ActiveDemand platform.  Connecting your marketing software to your favorite CRM is very important. Harvard Business Review study revealed that salespeople who attempted to contact a sales lead within the first hour were 7 times more likely to qualify for the lead by reaching the decision-maker. That is not all. The study also found the average response time for lead follow-up was 42 hours and 23% of companies never responded.   When you connect your marketing software to your CRM, your sales team receives leads in real-time. If they quickly respond to the leads received, they have the opportunity to reach leads when they are most interested and this will lead to closing leads fast. When the sales team responds quickly to leads, it shows the company values customer relationships and they know what they are doing. The first impression is very important in closing the first deal. With Leadsbridge’s integration with ActiveDemand, you can connect, automate and sync your ActiveDemand leads with your favorite CRM, lead generation, or advertising applications. This results in closing leads fast and building a robust brand image for your business. Now that you know how closed-loop marketing works, what are its benefits?

The benefits of closed-loop marketing

Closed-loop marketing is essential and important for every business. The Working Planet implemented the Closed-loop marketing strategy for a client, and this increased the conversion rate by 36 percent, and decreased ad spend as a percentage of revenue by 34 percent.  Below are more benefits of closed-loop marketing:

  1. It shows you the most effective channels and marketing campaigns you should focus on. With closed-loop marketing, you don’t have to guess and gamble, wasting your hard-earned money on campaigns that do not work.
  2. Closed-loop marketing helps you to set the right goals and expectations. You know what to expect from your marketing campaigns.
  3. Closed-loop marketing reduces the sales cycle journey for leads. When you know the right points at which leads are likely to convert, it reduces the sales cycle journey.
  4. It reduces the cost per lead: Closed-loop marketing shows you the most effective channels and campaigns that work the most. With this, you focus on the high-conversion leads and reduce the overall cost per lead.
  5. Closed-loop marketing gives you more insight into your target audience. With these insights, you will know what kind of content, ads, and emails resonate with them.

Conclusion Closed-loop marketing works, especially when you use the right tool such as the ActiveDemand automated marketing software and integrate with your favorite CRM through Leadsbridge. The result? Quickly connect, automate and sync your ActiveDemand leads with your favorite CRM, lead generation, or advertising applications. This will close leads fast and build a robust brand image for your business.