So you set up your business and are looking to grow your customer base? The typical onboarding cycle for most businesses is the same. The marketing team devotes itself every day to driving visitors and turning them into leads. While their sales team spends its time collecting qualifying organizing and chasing those leads… The challenge is that this approach is often inefficient.
It always pays to allow the teams to play to their core strength. Marketing wants to get on with what they do best; building and executing creative campaigns. And sales wants to focus on what they do best; getting prospects to purchase your product.
So how do you make both teams happy? Well, the solution is marketing automation. By automating all the repetitive processes, you enable your team to focus on doing what they do best. Which is attracting new customers and making more sales. This can help to align marketing with sales and empower both teams to decrease their routine time on manual drudgery.
So how does marketing automation work?
To explain this I’ll illustrate with a sample business case. Imagine you’re selling a personal fitness plan package and a lot of people visit your website with various levels of interest. Unfortunately, most of those visitors won’t be ready or willing to buy right away so do you just let them go? Is it possible to gauge their true intent? And how do you capture their interest? With automated lead generation. Let me describe how it works.
When someone visits your website you can make them an offer they won’t refuse. Offer them something for free. Maybe a free download of your ‘top ten in morning exercise routines’. To download this free resource, all they have to do is give you their email address and a few other bits of personal information. And that’s it! You’ve just captured or generated a new lead. Simple right? Once you generate a lead and they match your specific conditions, they’re added to a personalized email drip campaign designed to gradually warm them up. From a ‘cold lead’ (someone uninterested in your business) to a ‘warm lead’ (someone who is sales-ready).
How to set up a marketing automation workflow
You might be thinking this sounds pretty simple and straightforward but how do I use the details collected to convert cold leads to warm leads? It is. I’ll describe this conversion below by illustrating a sample drip campaign using our initial business case.
Remember we started with offering a free resource to prospects who land on your website? One day after downloading your exercise routines, your workflow can be set to automatically send them an email with your free resource, “killer abs in ten minutes” video. Then two days after, it sends them a “your top ten healthy Fitness recipes” blog post. A few days later it sends “the creative personal fitness plan checklist” resource.
This step of sharing free valuable resources is called “leads nurturing”. By nurturing your prospects in this way you develop a relationship as well as engage them with your business and your product gradually warming them up as leads. Then you strike when the lead is warm enough, offering them what you know to be key to conversion.
For instance, you know that most people purchase your workout package after attending a webinar. This is what we call your “aha! piece of content”. So at this station workflow, your leads will be invited to register for your next webinar “How to plan your best workout routine”.
After attending the webinar, these leads are now tagged in a database as people who quote-unquote watched the “fit planned” webinar. And can automatically be sent some of your website content. If this content is even more personalized to them, it works magic. By now, your lead will likely be sizzling. This is the best time for the system to automatically import them into a customer relationship management (CRM) database.
Congratulations on the invaluable help of marketing automation workflows, you’ve just sold a fitness package. Does it end here? Nope! It doesn’t. Marketing automation has way more to offer. It can also allow you to turn this one-time customer into a loyal brand ambassador.
You can start by upselling on their first purchase by using email automation to promote the next version of the pro fitness plan package. Then you can cross-sell necessary or optional accessories like protein supplements and other food items to go along with their new clean diet.
And finally, you can offer a cycle based sell. For example, promote the “bikini training program” to your female customers. Your return on investments (ROI) just shot through the roof by automatically upselling, cross-selling and cycle selling. You’ve turned a one-time purchase into a lifelong customer.
So you see marketing automation workflows help you nurture, warm and ready your leads for a sale. As well as enable you to try to convert one-off purchases into a lifelong customer. And they do all of this while saving your team time and boosting customer happiness and of course, increasing revenue.