Email marketing is increasingly becoming integrated in a cross-channel and event-driven marketing strategy. The focus is shifting towards a more customer-centric and holistic or integrated marketing approach in which marketing automation serves to connect the customer and business goals across the customer journey with a growing attention for content marketing strategy.
When you’re talking about connected marketing automation, you’re really talking about demand generation and 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.
The folks at the Marketing Automation Software Guide sent us a link to the video below that shows an introductory whiteboard session on lead scoring.
It’s presented by Mac McConnell, partner and founder of BlueBird Strategies. Take a look at it, especially at what Mac calls the “Buddha Funnel” since that’s where many opportunities are (and if your lead definitions are too narrow in every level, there will be even more). In case anyone doubted: buying journeys, conversion paths and certainly marketing funnels are not linear as Mac explains.
