Thinking about how you can use Marketing Automation workflows for your own business? There are multiple ways that automation can contribute to your B2B success. At Constant Contact Lead Gen and CRM, we have summarised some of the most common cases of Marketing Automation Workflows for day-to-day B2B processes and visualised it with ready-to-use templates, so that you can easily apply it to your own business!
Did you know?
80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software, and 77% had an increase in conversions.
Source: Invesp 2018
1. Automate Lead Follow-Ups
A follow-up is an email or sequence of emails sent in response to the actions or behaviours of your leads. In a B2B industry, follow ups are essential in ensuring that your leads set up a meeting with a sales representative and ultimately converts into a paying customer.
However, follow ups can be tricky and inconsistent as sales representatives are often occupied and will not be looking at form submissions throughout the day. Marketing Automation workflows work great in facilitating the follow up process as it automatically sends out follow up emails consistently. Building your Marketing Automation workflow, you need to define the appropriate timing and the chain of actions which follow after a lead has shown interest (e.g., by filling in a form). Once you set up a sequence of follow-up emails to cover a particular scenario, it will be sent out by the software automatically so that your team can focus on other more high-value tasks.
2. Automate Sales Notifications
Sales Notifications alert your sales team when leads take an important action so that they can follow-up. This will help your sales team facilitate the administrative tasks that keep your business running smoothly, and, most importantly, shortens your sales cycle.
Did you know?
63% of surveyed businesses are too slow to follow up on their leads, meanwhile being the first responder can give you 30-50% sales from the contacted leads.
Source: SalesManago 2020
Responding to leads at the right time can bring in successful sales, whilst any delays may lead to missed opportunities. So, how can you alert your sales team about leads that require further attention? Marketing Automation solves this challenge by tracking user activity and issuing alerts for actions which you consider significant.
For example, when a potential customer re-visits your website for more details, the workflow automatically alerts the sales team and creates an actionable task:
3. Schedule Meetings Seamlessly
Booking meetings involves a load of back-and-forth iterations in synchronising commitments, individual schedules, and timezones. While a meeting itself is a high-value activity which may end in closing a deal, the arrangement itself is a low-value task that consumes a lot of your sales representatives’ time and energy.
Before Marketing Automation tools appeared, there was no other way than just to arrange meetings manually. Now, whilst you can use special meeting-scheduling applications, not all applications are synchronised with your customer’s database and their behaviour history, unless integrated with Marketing Automation software.
By using Marketing Automation softwares like Constant Contact Lead Gen and CRM, leads can easily book meetings with your sales representatives based on the available time slots allocated. Additionally, you can also create workflows to cater to both types of leads, the ones that schedule and don’t schedule meetings
4. Set up Emails based on Behaviour
Emails based on behaviours are automated emails sent to your leads based on their interactions with your company across various channels, including a page visit on your website. This can increase your chances of engaging with your leads, and even closing a sale!
Did you know?
29% higher unique open rates shown by personalised promotional mailings and 41% higher unique click rates than non personalised mailings.
Source: Experian (2014)
Without Marketing Automation softwares such as Constant Contact Lead Gen and CRM, there is no easy way to know when potential customers interact with your digital assets. Meanwhile, using such a solution gives you transparency on data of customers’ behaviour and opens a whole new world of lead nurturing.
Let’s take a look at Marketing Automation workflow when leads have shown an interest in a particular product by visiting its webpage:
5. Use Lead Scoring in Email Marketing
It may be easier to just apply the same approach to all potential customers without considering how deeply they are already engaged with your brand (i.e., whether they’re leads or actual customers). However, categorising them according to their likelihood of conversion could greatly help in the conversion process. This is where Lead Scoring comes in handy!
Lead Scoring is the process of assigning numerical values to your leads based on their engagement with your company and conversion potential. With Lead Scoring, businesses can better manage their resources so that they can prioritise leads that have the highest probability to convert into customers. Learn more about Lead Scoring in our White Paper: Lead Management.
View the Marketing Automation workflow you can use with lead scoring in our Guide: Automation Templates to solve B2B Challenges.
6. Customise Emails Based on Buyer Personas
Did you know?
Using buyer personas in your email program increases click-through rates on emails by 14% and conversion rates by 10%.
Source: MarTech Zone 2021
Determining your target audience and creating your buyer personas is the first (and most crucial) step in planning your digital marketing strategy. How do buyer personas help in email marketing? This semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, drawn from marketing research, can be used to craft and refine your marketing messages.
Discover how to use personas in email automation by downloading our Guide: Automation Templates to solve B2B Challenges.
7. Automate Your Newsletters
Newsletters allow you to share valuable information with your contacts periodically: promotional messages, important account information, product updates, and other informative content. It may drive traffic to your website and ultimately get customers to think about purchasing from you again. However, many companies struggle with arranging newsletters: from content creation and its customisation to scheduling and analysing. There are just not enough resources to proceed this process consistently. Here is where Marketing Automation can help you by simplifying the process of newsletters arrangement. Learn more about it by downloading and reading our Guide: Automation Templates to solve B2B Challenges.
8. Nurture Cold Leads
Did you know?
8% CTR generated by lead nurturing emails compared to general email sends, which generated just a 3% CTR.
Source: Hubspot 2017
Cold leads are potential customers who haven’t demonstrated any interest in your business but fit your ideal customer profile. Nurturing cold leads may be especially challenging due to the low response rate therefore it requires consistency and dedication in your approach. So how do you turn cold leads into prospects, considering that they are the most difficult leads to convert?
Find out how you can effectively nurture cold leads with Marketing Automation workflows in our Guide: Automation Templates to solve B2B Challenges.
9. Don’t Miss Out Hot Leads!
Hot leads are the most desirable leads as they are those potential customers who have shown an active interest in your products or services. They might request a free demo of your product or contact your sales team. But it doesn’t mean you can take it easy from here! The main challenge with the hot leads is that their interest may fade away when a response is delayed. How can Marketing Automation help you to respond to your hot leads before their questions will find answers from your competitors? Read it in our Guide: Automation Templates to solve B2B Challenges where you also will find a template which you can apply right away.
What's next for you?
Marketing Automation opens a new way for you to increase efficiency of your sales team and shorten your sales circle via lead nurturing. With this guide you should be able to easily automate your manual processes fostering efficiency in your workplace!
Interested to know more about Marketing Automation and how it can benefit your business? Reach us for free consultation and trial of Constant Contact Lead Gen and CRM All in One Marketing Automation tool.
