Do you need marketing automation? It doesn’t matter how big or small your organisation is, maximising the conversion rates of each and every enquiry is an ideal. But how do you make sure that every inward contact is followed up? Every one of them is qualified and nurtured until sales ready? You could try a manual system of follow up calls and emails, but that’s not very scalable is it? It can be very resource heavy.
This is where marketing automation comes in to its own. As an enquiry comes in to the organisation, then the enquiry is serviced. If they are not ready to move over to sales, then you put them into a lead nurturing programme.
The prospect journey
By using marketing automation you can take the prospect on a journey. A journey that they control by their actions (opening the email, any click throughs) which then define the next communication. Before any email is uploaded to the system, the journey variations need to be drawn up so that you know what each email is designed to do and what you are looking to achieve which each email. These plans are referred to as waterfalls as one drop at the top can take various paths down to the base of the waterfall.
The emails are there to move the prospect closer to ordering your type of solution and to ensure that it is your organisation which is top of mind, not your competitors. Stats tell us that over 80% of enquiries buy your, or your competitors’, solution within 2 years. So, the emails should make sure that they are moving through the qualification process. The marketing automation software packages tend to call this scoring. If an email is opened that has a score. If clicked to an asset is recorded then that adds to the score. An asset can be a brochure, a case study, a webinar recording, a white paper, a landing page, a demo video or something else. Different assets have different scores. If the prospect delete emails without reading then the score can be reduced and different actions taken.
When the score is at a certain level then it is passed to sales for follow up and further qualification if the prospect hasn’t got in touch proactively.
Below you can see a simple sample waterfall to show how different actions lead to different paths.
If you want any help on designing your marketing automation waterfalls to make sure that every enquiry is followed up, then please drop us a line, we’re very happy to help.
[originally issued 18/3/21; edited 14/3/24]