Half of all companies use automation to improve their lead capture processes.
Not automating your lead capture process? Slow manual data capture processes holding you back?
Even if you’re currently working in dispersed teams due to the COVID-19 pandemic, automation is the name of the game if you want to stay on top.
The last thing you want is to miss out on the opportunity to increase the quality and quantity of leads entering your sales funnel.
Never fear. Thanks to the simplicity of today’s lead automation software, it’s easy to automate your lead capture processes.
This guide can help you create a robust, automatic data capture process that will segment your audience and enable you to personalize future marketing campaigns — resulting in more targeted sales and higher conversions.
Pro-Tip
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What is automated data capture?
Data capture is the process of gathering personal data from prospective customers so you can put them into your sales funnel.
You can then use this data to send marketing messages to these leads in order to nurture them toward a sale.
To capture the greatest number of high-quality leads, you need strong automated data-collection mechanisms.
It doesn’t hurt to have mobile collaboration tools, either, since more and more employees use their phone to work and collaborate on projects.
These data-capture software tools and data-collection techniques must convert and qualify your audience from random customers to segmented groups with similar attributes.
With segmentation, you’ll be able to personalize your marketing content, which has been shown to increase conversions by 202 percent.
This is where automated data collection beats manual data entry every time.
If you understand your audience well enough, you’ll know where, when, and how to capture them. This means you’ll be able to automatically qualify these customers at the data-collection point.
As Aaron Hayes, CEO at Loganix, puts it, “Understanding the intricacies of your target audience enables you to use a holistic automated inbound lead capture approach that qualifies your leads well enough” to easily personalize future marketing.
Using automatic data entry mechanisms, you can accelerate the speed at which you generate leads and increase the quality of those leads.
More leads means more conversions.
Better leads means a higher conversion rate.
You can do this in an affordable way using data-capture software.
Check out how agricultural app Cropin automates its lead capture and qualification procedures in one simple landing page.
Using a combination of automated data-collection mechanisms, the farming app captures various data points. Simultaneously, dropdown menus qualify leads by location, land size, number of farmers, type of agricultural company, etc.
By offering a free demonstration of its software, Cropin automates lead capture while proving the value of its solution.
On this lead capture landing page, Cropin features the following automatic data-capture mechanisms:
- A data-capture and qualification form
- Multi-language lead capture support
- A direct call to action for a phone meeting
- A direct call to action for a product demo
- A live chatbot tool to answer questions, qualify leads, and collect customer data
1. Lead capture pages
While the average landing page converts at around 2.5 percent, properly optimized landing pages convert at over 11 percent.
Put simply, effective landing pages automate data capture. Customers enter their personal data in return for information from your company.
In some cases, you create a landing page to get customers to sign up for a mailing list. In others, customers give personal data in return for a promotion or a free demo. It’s your job to create a follow-up email sequence to seal the deal.
The more automated data-capture landing pages you use, the more conversions you’ll get. Companies that increase the number of landing pages they have to 10–15 see a 55-percent increase in leads.
To best automate your lead capture process using landing pages, your landing pages need to qualify your leads.
You should capture contact data for future marketing efforts, like email addresses and phone numbers. However, you should also capture names, preferences, and company information to better personalize the marketing content and promotional offers you send.
This way, your automated lead capture landing pages are more effective at funneling prospective customers toward the right sale.
When using web pages to capture data
- Use analytics tools to understand who your target audience is, how to reach them, and what they like
- Start a new blog and create educational and shareable content, free guides, and pop-ups to capture data specific to each segment of your target audience
- Build a series of short data-capture landing pages that feature automated data-collection forms
- Offer free content or a demo in return for this data
- Feed all your marketing efforts to your landing pages to capture data from all platforms
Check out how invoicing software, FreshBooks, uses multiple landing pages to capture data.
The homepage is a landing page with an automated data-collection form aimed at all potential customers.
A “free trial” landing page targets customers who are concerned with the platform’s efficacy.
A “get offer’’ landing page offers interactive pricing to personalize the customer experience. This data-capture page is geared toward price-conscious clients.
Last, a payment landing page acts as a direct call to action while collecting personal data.
2. Automated targeted mailing campaign
Forty-six percent of marketers agree that email marketing is a vital lead generation tactic.
Email marketing automates your data-capture process by funneling your audience to the correct products and promotions.
If you segment your leads using the data collected from landing page forms, you’ll be able to develop target buyer personas that you can tailor your content for.
Use one of the top email marketing tools to organize your data, sorting your leads into relevant funnels.
See how Etsy automatically collects customer data and segments it into relevant, tailored mailing lists.
Notice how Etsy explains each mailing list to help customers automatically qualify themselves. Customers can also see how often mailing lists are sent out, which helps them decide what’s most relevant.
By doing this, Etsy can push the right content to the right people to increase open rates, click-through rates, and sales.
3. Data capture social media campaigns
Social media networks provide a range of audience and consumer platforms you can use to capture data from potential leads.
Luckily, there are plenty of tools to help you automate lead capture using social media.
One of the best ways to automate lead capture processes on social media is to use Facebook lead ads, which have a conversion rate of 12.5 percent.
Using the Facebook advertising platform, you can easily select the target audiences you want to capture data from, and if you create lookalike audiences, you can optimize who these ads are sent to for automatic lead qualification.
See how ActiveCampaign leverages Facebook lead advertising to collect email addresses from potential customers.
The Facebook ad directs customers to a simple lead capture landing page and automated data-collection form.
ActiveCampaign invites potential customers to exchange their personal data for a free 14-day trial.
Post the content that best appeals to your audience on the social media platform that’s most relevant to them. Try offering free educational content in return for personal data, such as
- How-to videos
- Tutorials
- Guides
- Podcasts
- Infographics
4. Chatbots
Chatbots collect data, qualify leads, solve problems, and enhance the user experience with a preprogrammed automated workflow and artificial intelligence.
Chatbots can automatically direct customers to appropriate solutions to convert leads into sales and collect data for future marketing efforts.
Integrate chatbots with your APIs to autonomously direct customers to data entry mechanisms, such as mailing lists, free demos, automated meeting scheduling software, and so on.
See how the popular website builder, Duda, uses a chatbot to capture qualified data from prospective customers.
With each option customers select, the chatbot leads prospective clients toward a solution that helps the customer and captures data automatically.
5. Automated meeting scheduling software
Automated appointment booking software saves up to 10 hours per week of administrative staffing and reduces human error. More important, however, automated scheduling software enhances automated data collection.
Since 70 percent of customers prefer to book appointments online, automated appointment setting software can speed up the data capture and conversion process.
To enhance the visibility of your automated appointment booking pages, try promoting them through social media, since 37 percent of potential clients will find your booking page through social media.
Consider using automated scheduling tools like Acuity, Meetingbird, Teamup, and Calendly.
With these apps, you can automatically send meeting invitations to leads at the point of data entry.
6. Timed popup data capture forms
The top 10 percent of popups have a 9.28-percent conversion rate. Popups are a simple yet effective lead capture mechanism.
There’s no magic number when it comes to timing. The best strategy is to check your Google Analytics time on page and divide that number by two. That ensures the most interested visitors have engaged with your content for a decent period of time.
Scroll triggers are also an effective way to delay your popup lead capture form. Try adding a scroll trigger to your lead capture popup. For best results, your popup should appear after customers have scrolled down 35 percent of the page.
See how sales software suite, Yesware, uses a delayed data entry popup to offer a free demo or send customers to an appointment setting form.
Conclusion
This guide provides six robust techniques to automate data capture in order to increase conversions through data-driven insights.
Remember that for the best results, you need to personalize your data entry fields and mechanisms to automatically segment your target audience. That way, tailored marketing becomes a whole lot easier!
Implementing personalized data entry fields enables you to scale like a lean startup.
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