When we type a search term, search engine will attempt to return relevant results in response to our search query and sort search results by the relevancy of the results to the search term. Search engine succeeds in performing this task by assigning each result a score of the degree of relevancy based on the search engine’s pre-designed algorithm. This saved human beings from this tedious and previously impossible mission.

You can notice this computing technology in other areas too. For example, online dating site Okcupid matches potential mates using its own algorithm to calculate the match percentages of two persons. This is the very highlight and competence that make it stand out.

In what other fields do you notice this modern technology? StatCounter has a great feature called “Visitor Paths” to track each individual visitor’s activities on your website. However, to figure out which visitor is the most prospective customer, a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the statistics data is still needed and it’s actually time-consuming and also confusing!

Wouldn’t it be ideal if the statistics data can assign “score” to all the visitors and the highest score winner would be the most potential customer? Actually it’s no longer a dream but a dream that comes true. This marketing technology is called “marketing automation“. Violà. I studied it a little bit and the following is a brief introduction to give you an idea:

Let’s say, as a sales representative, you contact potential customers regularly and even have an excel file to store all the information of those prospective customers. You might be able to sort those customers by ages or locations etc.; however, to determine who’s your next most prospective customer, you have to analyse those data in an integrate way instead of isolating any of them, and after all those hard guess work, you still cannot be sure that you make the right decision to follow up with the right potential customer, and you’ll find that the result can be so random.

Here comes marketing automation, the novel technology to make your life much easier. As search engine assigns a score of the degree of relevancy, the marketing automation assigns a “lead score”  calculated based on a visitor’s activities such as message read, file download, and page browsed etc. This reminds me of Google’s new personalized search results.

The interesting part of marketing automation is that it’s beyond that. While search engine can neglect irrelevant results, or you can only date one girl, marketing automation technology even takes care of those far future customers for you. Those potential customers are put onto a nurturing track and nurtured but not ignored. When they re-visit your company’s website and when their activities show interest again, their scores will increase and a sales representative will be automatically notified to follow up with returned potential customers. How fascinating!

Do you know any other field that implements the technology of this kind of ranking algorithm? Share it with us!