Is my business ready?
Yes. Even with a small marketing team on a shoestring budget, you can implement some of these tactics today. The great thing about marketing automation is that you can always expand your efforts and build on what you’ve done before. The data you have collected will only become useful as you move forward and your team grows.
Marketing automation is a great way to close more sales, market your business more effectively, and keep your prospects engaged, but don’t feel like you have to dive into it all at the same time. It’s better to start with small steps than to wait until you can launch the perfect cross-channel strategy.
We hope these examples help you explore your options. Now you can meet your team and start matching your goals with new ways to truly engage with your subscriber base. And if you want to explore more workflow options, be sure to check out the entire MarketingHub automation library.
Recover sales that would otherwise be lost
If you’re running an ecommerce business, a simple abandoned cart workflow is a great place to start. You can use it to contact customers who have added a product to their cart, started the checkout process, and then walked away for some reason.
It’s a simple way to increase your conversion rates. Think about it: would you rather try to close a sale with a completely cold lead, or someone who’s already almost done the checkout process?
You can experiment with different techniques to see which one is the most effective. Maybe sending a discount code will work better for your customers. Or, the email might just remind them of what’s in their cart and the benefits of your product. If you want some inspiration to get started, Sleeknote offers a roundup of eleven abandoned cart emails with a breakdown of their copy and design.
Welcome and engage in conversation with new prospects
No matter what type of business you run, you can probably benefit from email marketing. Building a simple journey makes it easy to welcome new prospects to your list and reheat them for future offers.
If you already regularly email a newsletter, you might be wondering if setting up a series of emails like this is a good use of time and energy. . The answer is yes – these emails serve a different purpose than your usual promotional or informational emails.
The idea with onboarding emails is to:
- Orient prospects and give them an idea of what type of email they can expect from you, how often you will send emails, and share a more detailed description of the assignment / products / etc
- Share something of value with them to build goodwill and create positive associations with your business
- Depending on the sale of emails, you can use social proof or other principles of psychology to establish that your business is trustworthy and that your products are worth buying.
Warm up cold prospects
If you have an existing mailing list, but haven’t been consistent in sending messages, a re-engagement journey may be the way to go. This workflow would also be useful if, for example, you collected leads at an event six months ago and never had the time to incorporate them into your marketing automation tool. The idea is to reach out to people who are currently cold prospects and remind them who your business is and what types of products you are selling.
Re-engagement can be tricky. You don’t want to be too strong and make people feel like they’re being spammed by a newsletter they can’t even remember. It is best to acknowledge that it has been a while since they heard from you and explain why you are contacting us now. Are you about to launch a product? Getting ready for an event or the holiday season? Talk to them!
As with most marketing communications, the best thing you can do is give them something that is really useful and valuable. This is very important if you are reaching out after a long period of silence. It’s a good idea to have a coupon code, spreadsheet, or other free download, or something else that will be of interest to people you email.
Create an experience using multiple distribution channels
If you use multimedia content on your website, you can create a lead series that triggers when someone watches a specific video on your site or in an email series.
It’s a great way to get started with cross-channel marketing and personalize your prospects’ marketing experience across different channels.
The only thing to keep in mind is that the follow-up sequence is only triggered if you already have the prospect in your database. That said, it’s still a great way to tailor content and drive engagement for the leads you have. You can even create a different tracking series for different videos.
One way to implement this strategy might look like:
- Collect emails through signup forms on your home page, about page, blog, etc. and put them on a general prospect list
- This list receives a follow-up sequence of three emails, which contain links to videos.
- People who watch video 1, but not videos 2 and 3, get a different tracking sequence than people who watch 1 and 2, but not 3, or people who watch all three emails
- You can segment and change the tracking sequence based on their activity and engagement.
- For example, people who watch all three videos through to the end may be tagged with “warm leads” or receive a lead score that indicates they’re very engaged.
You can also change the tracking sequence based on the topic of the content they interacted with. For example, prospects who have participated in videos about managing large teams may be suitable for enterprise-level products. In fact, there’s no reason you can’t combine the level of engagement and the type of content they’re interacting with. This way, you continue to engage your warm prospects with the content that is most relevant to them.
Use data to drive better marketing results
At this point, you probably have enough leads in your database that you can use automated A / B testing. The idea here is to send two different versions of an email. For example, you’re testing personalization and want to see if it’s more effective in the subject line or in the body of the email.
Automation will send the two different versions of the email to a small segment of your list and then send the winning email to the rest of your list. It’s a great way to improve your marketing results over time using data.
Communicate effectively with prospects
For marketing teams who work closely with sales, an advanced CRM-based lead management workflow might be just right. With this, you can assign scores to prospects as they move through the workflow. He can also create tasks in a CRM based on the actions they take and their lead score. With this knowledge, the sales team can focus on the most engaged prospects and close more deals.
Identifying loyal customers and customers who are likely to become repeat customers is a huge profit center for any business. Marketing automation can also help. A retention workflow can create scores and tags for prospects in your database and assign them based on activity. Once prospects have walked this type of journey, they will be assigned both:
- A score for prospects
- An “active”, “loyal” or “unresponsive” tag, depending on their activity
From there, you can create even more personalized tracking sequences. Try to create workflows based on the combination of their customer tags, lead score, or other user data you have about them.
