What if I told you that you could turn your company’s website into a sales machine that worked 24 hours per day, 7 days per week? Would that be an exciting proposition?

Well, it’s absolutely possible.

Whether you’re an Internet entrepreneur or bricks and mortar business owner who wants to generate consistent sales and revenue from your website—you need to know about these two words: marketing automation.

Now, in order to fully understand how automating your marketing strategy would work, you must realize that every visitor to your website is a potential client or customer. And it’s likely that you invest a great deal of time, energy and money into sending that traffic to your website, including: pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, SEO content marketing, social media advertising and social media posts.

So, it’s important to not let your resources and efforts go to waste.

Unfortunately though, many businesses don’t optimize their website traffic because they don’t have a systematic method in place for turning their site’s traffic into revenue.

Here’s where marketing automation or funnel building comes in. Marketing automation is also known as lead management or demand generation. Simply put, marketing automation is a strategy for converting leads into paying clients and customers. It is accomplished through software platforms offered by companies around the world.

There are several software solutions available that offer various features and tools. From Infusionsoft to Ontraport for small to medium businesses and enterprise companies — there are solutions for every budget and sales objective.

The primary aspects of marketing automation are:

Lead capture and nurture – Your database or email list is the lifeblood of your online marketing ecosystem and it is built by automating your marketing. When a visitor comes to your site, one of your objectives is to have a call to action. Examples of call to actions would be, an invitation to buy or to join your email list. Either of these actions would add the prospect or customer to your CRM (which is a part of your marketing automation software through a vendor such as Infusionsoft).

Marketing and Sales campaigns— Once leads and customers are in your marketing funnel, you can build campaigns that are initiated when a specific action is triggered in your funnel. Part of building campaigns includes segmenting your database/list, which begins in the lead capturing phase.

Both of these elements must be tested, measured and configured for maximum effectiveness of your marketing automation strategy.