Marketing professionals spend much of their time generating leads. It can be accomplished through search engine optimization, pay-per-click, display advertising, retargeting, and email. A great way to source qualified prospects is to buy leads from third-party vendors, particularly in the technology and service industries.
Lead vendors, such as HomeAdvisor and BuyerZone, provide pre-qualified leads to a select group of clients who rely on a steady stream of leads for sales. When these leads are exported to your inbox, they are not converted to a form capture like those from PPC or other ad channels. If you manually enter qualified leads into your CRM, it can be tedious. Sadly, many small and mid-sized companies are burdened with this burden of data entry. However, there is an easier way.
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With an email parser and a webhook, you can improve the flow of leads into your CRM or marketing automation tool. One application (the email parser) can send data to another application in real-time (your CRM) using a webhook. You can forward or move the emails you want to be parsed to a mailbox where the parser will save them. Using templates, you can choose the parts of those email messages you want to extract. Using this process, you’ll be able to submit structured data via webhook into a form (or form handler) into your CRM or marketing automation system.
For processing your lead emails, using email parsing and webhooks together has the following advantages:
#1 Cuts down on copying and pasting
Depending on your lead volume, it can be impractical and time-consuming to copy and paste lead data into your CRM.
#2 Reduces errors in data entry
The elimination of data entry errors that could occur during manual transcription is one of the benefits of parsing text directly from the source. A marketing automation platform such as Pardot also uses a prospect’s email address as a unique key to create or update records. A prospect who returns to you will have their record updated instead of a duplicate made.
#3 Manages structured data
When data is entered manually, short-cuts tend to be taken by ignoring fields that are not critical. Parsing makes it unnecessary not to extract everything you have a corresponding CRM field. By keeping an accurate record of your prospects, you can better score leads and segment your audience.
#4 Accelerates response time
Leads can always be parsed and posted faster than a new record can be manually created. Due to the payload being posted to a form, you can set up an autoresponder to notify prospects that you’ve received their request and let them know what’s next. Lead assignment rules can help you automatically route these leads to the correct department or sales representative. It reduces your reach-out time from when they submit their request to when you follow up, potentially putting you ahead of the competition for their business.
#5 Provides a platform for marketing automation
After capturing the lead, sending an automatic response, scoring, segmenting, and assigning it, you are now ready to sell. A platform for further communication and follow-up is now set up using triggers based on your natural workflow or other automation rules that you define.