Marketing automation might be one of those buzz phrases that you hear banded about in the boardroom. You wonder whether it’s just the next hyped up ‘blue sky thinking’, about its true value and whether guiding your staff to implement it will actually bring significant results.
Marketing automation is in fact the fastest growing area in the B2B world. When its potential is fully realised and it’s built into a fool and future-proof strategy, the advantages of marketing automation: understanding your customer lifecycle and knowing the impact of interactions across your marketing channels are endless.
What is marketing automation?
By definition, automation or automatic control refers to control systems for operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers, aircraft or other applications with little human intervention.
On the factory floor or in the clouds (the actual clouds, not the ones contending with Big Data) it’s intended to reduce labour, energy and materials while improving quality and precision. And it’s no different when applied to the marketing world.
Marketing automation basically serves to make companies lives easier by giving them not just an insight into their customer’s wants and needs, when they want specific products and services and when to launch new ones to satisfy those needs.
The most apt software and tactics are used to nurture prospects with personalised, useful content ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty resulting in bigger profits and happier, returning customers.
Current findings suggest that the majority of marketing automation investments fail because companies are targeting the wrong leads, not generating useful, original content and in too many cases, are getting caught up in spam filters and junk folders.
Don’t become too trigger happy
Triggering e-mails (setting up e-mails to be sent at a certain time on a certain day on a consistent basis) and analysing click through rates is all well and good, but realistically it doesn’t really ‘say’ much about your customer. You’re still at a loss with knowing what they want and need, what they’re interested in and when they’ll respond.
For the complete picture, you need to apply inbound marketing automation. That’s looking at every single one of your channels and picking up on every interaction and behaviour on an omnichannel platform to bring it all together and drive it home, using those same channels to deliver your marketing messages.
Up-sell, cross-sell, soft sell or hard sell?
Knowing your customer lifecycle increases your potential to up-sell or cross-sell since you’re contacting them and encouraging them when they’re ready and in need of your product or service.
Your CRM system can take the work out of what would usually be a pretty voluminous task by setting up automation workflows including scheduled phone calls and e-mails.
By automating the process consistently, your sales teams are then equipped with a steady stream of high quality customer leads. And remember, sales teams should already be on their way to closing the sale since consumers today have a wealth of information at their fingertips so your market should already be engaged.
Nurture don’t neglect
Personalising your communications and building a rapport to eventually secure your customer and drive a sale is the main goal of nurturing leads. Yet purchasing bulk e-mail address lists and sending scattergun campaigns won’t help you achieve customer satisfaction, loyalty or even interest.
You need to nurture the right leads and ensure that you’re targeting premium customers. According to a report by DemandGen, nurtured leads product, on average a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads?
Even more impressive is that according to The Annuitas Group, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
With that in mind, here are 5 tips on how to nurture your leads, without neglecting your customers:
1. Strike while the iron’s still hot
Make contact quickly and establish instant connections with your leads. Did you know that 35-50% of sales go to the company that responds first to an inquiry, and that response rates decline as the age of a lead increases?
2. Build thought leadership
Customers spend with the companies they know and trust. The first time someone converts on your website, the likelihood that they really know who you are or understand why they should do business with you is pretty slim. Lead nurturing is an opportunity to show that you are an expert in your field
3. Keep up your communications – Over half (66%) of buyers indicate that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organisations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider. Secure satisfaction and loyalty with an automated lead nurturing campaign.
4. Realise interest or pain points – Recognise what challenges your consumers are facing and what features or products are they interested in by presenting different questions or types of content and seeing who responds to what. Then qualify your leads and achieve better conversion rates.
5. Cross-sell and up-sell – Lead nurturing offers a way to broaden customer’s awareness of what you offer. Nurtured leads have a 9% higher average deal size, showing that there is potential to not only increase the number of sales but the size of sales using lead nurturing.
