Most of us know that spending money on earning more from current customers is a better use of funds then spending budget on generating new clients. Similarly if you have a lot of leads that have never converted, its money out of the window if you don’t squeeze every account possible out of it. Lastly, the money we spend on advertising is a lot better spent if we can somehow get more information on the sources of best quality leads and customers.

So, ideally we have a system in place that communicates the right message at the right time, prioritizes Sales staff to spend time on leads and clients with the highest potential for additional earnings and generate the data needed to figure out where your best leads and customers come from. Enter stage right Marketing- and CRM Automation.

Marketing Automation systems like Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot and others allow a financial services company to send out emails based on a set schedule (think decision trees) and customer behaviour. So if for instance we see through their browsing history a lead is interested in a certain product, we can send out a series of emails giving more information about that product. If a client starts trading less compared to historical levels, we can shoot them a series of emails designed to get them active again. And so on.

These Marketing Automation (also called Lead Nurtering) systems don’t just send emails. They also gather data on promotions responded on, emails opened, source of advertising and more. This wealth of information can be used to provide a near perfect feedback loop on advertising. Compared to just knowing how many leads came from what source, we now are able to produce an ROI figure, score leads based on quality and generate qualitative input for future campaigns.

When combined with a CRM system like Salesforce, SugarCRM or Microsoft Dynamics, we can now also provide this information to Sales people. Information like what product leads are interested in or if an inactive client has started to browse on your site again can be very useful in the sales process. In addition, most of the Marketing Automation products allow us to Score leads based on certain parameters (think where they are from, how they respond to communications, if they tried your product, if their name is Donal Duck or a real name etc) and prioritize leads based on this information. When your sales people open the CRM system at the start of the day, they know who to call first.

This is just scratching the surface of the type of things a marketing department can do with the right systems, but hopefully this will get you thinking about the need to move beyond just acquisition. In such a competitive industry as Financial Services, every potential percent of additional revenue is needed.