Pipeline marketing is a strategy that incorporates marketing and sales data to convert leads to customers. It’s focused on the narrow end of the funnel.
Why is pipeline marketing important?
Pipeline marketing strategy has enormous potential to grow your business and drive sales. It combines marketing and sales data to connect it to your future conversions and revenue. Instead of merely generating new leads, marketers do their best to keep existing customers engaged.
Based on the latest HubSpot lead-conversion statistics:
- 61% of marketers state that traffic and lead generation is their top challenge;
- lead generation, nurturing, and sales are the top main objectives for marketers;
- for 39% of marketers proving the ROI of all marketing activities is one of the most challenging task;
Almost 80% of marketers don’t think lead generation strategy itself is effective, and 25% of marketers don’t know for sure whether their lead generation activities have contributed to closed sales.
Pipeline marketing is more effective than a simple lead generation. It focuses not on gathering as many new email addresses as possible for future marketing campaigns but puts efforts to make the most out of your existing customers. It implies nurturing them to craft personalized and targeted offers. This approach is not just more effective, it’s also more cost-efficient for the overall project since you don’t have to reinvent the wheel looking for new lead generation methods but work harder with existing clients.
Lead Generation vs. Pipeline Marketing
Lead generation and pipeline marketing are two completely different approaches that have the same end goal, though. Whereas lead generation focuses on attracting as many new leads as possible, pipeline marketing concentrates on getting as much revenue from the existing leads as possible.
The main goal of lead generation is to get more email addresses and other contact information for further marketing activities. Pipeline marketing works on converting leads by nurturing, educating, and providing valuable offers.
How Pipeline Marketing Works
Pipeline marketing strategy is focused on selling a product or service to a particular company or person and, respectively, is more individualized. This strategy concentrates on the narrow bottom part of the sales funnel. The main goal of pipeline marketing is all about the conversion of an interested lead into a customer.
Pipeline marketing always begins with goal setting. Only after that, a company may think about possible ways to hit those targets. Cost per opportunity lies in the heart of the process. A business should continuously evaluate the critical metrics and develop new approaches based on the results. Here is how it looks systematic.
Setting Goals
What should be the result of your marketing efforts? When setting the goals for your campaign, make sure they are:
S – specific
M – measurable
A– achievable
R – realistic
T – timely
You can analyze the record of sales. It might give you a clue about where to move in the future. This is a great idea to add specific numbers and figures to your goals, like a certain percentage of ROI you expect to gain.
What is the most effective way to hit your objectives?
The main task is to review all of your prospects and work only with leads who are interested in your products to increase the chance of a conversion. Follow up regularly and send automated emails and reminders to keep your audience in the know. Monitor pipeline metrics regularly, review them to improve the overall pipeline strategy and sales techniques as well.
To achieve your goals with a pipeline marketing strategy, we recommend you use a CRM system. It helps maintain relationships with customers and manage sales. SendPulse offers a free CRM system to automate sales and communicate with contacts effectively. It allows you to accept orders, control the sales process, discover the stages at which your leads are stuck and you lose revenue, keep all the information about them and deals, and send marketing campaigns to your clients in one place. This will provide you with a clear picture of your sales team's performance. Find out more about our CRM in the Knowledge Base.
You can rely on the efforts of your team, or you can give your product a boost and reinforce pipeline marketing activities with professional services such as SendPulse.
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Control and Evaluate
You should keep in mind several important metrics that matter in pipeline marketing. They include
- revenue by channel;
- lead volume;
- deals closed;
- marketing return on investment;
- revenue by lead source;
- opportunities by channel.
Final thoughts
As you can see, pipeline marketing is an effective marketing strategy that allows you to generate real customers instead of merely growing your lead base. Now, as you understand its potential and importance, you can feel free to elaborate on your pipeline marketing strategy and benefit from professional services to achieve tangible results.
References
- That is a complete guide to pipeline marketing.
- In this article, you’ll find a comparison of pipeline marketing and lead generation marketing.
- Find out the meaning of pipelines in sales and marketing in this article.
Last Updated: 22.03.2023
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