You’ve heard about marketing automation – but what is it and how does it work?

Marketing automation uses software to personalise and automating marketing actions to nurture leads/potential clients as they move down the sales funnel to purchasing from your company. Marketing automation can automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. Marketing automation technology makes nurturing leads easier and at times quicker.

At its best, marketing automation allows companies to nurture prospects with highly tailored & targeted useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted advocates, typically generating significant new revenue, providing excellent ROI.

Lead nurturing automation works with a series of workflows, for example:

1. Hot Lead Workflow

Trigger: Lead score

Don’t let those hot leads cool down, even for one second! Set up a workflow that automatically notifies your sales team when a contact in your database reaches “hot lead” status – that is, when their actions lead them to hit a score that you’ve internally deemed to be “hot”, or ready to talk to Sales.

2. Closed-Lost Reason Nurture

Trigger: Lost opportunity indicated

When Sales sets an opportunity to “lost” in your CRM, don’t just let the contact(s) sit around and clog up your database. Set up a nurture program that will send them right back into the sales cycle (when they’re ready).

3. Re-Engage Notification Workflow

Trigger: Sudden activity

Have a few contacts that appear to be stuck in a stage of your funnel? Never fear – that’s what the re-engage notification workflow is for. If a contact is showing no signs of movement, set up a workflow that will nudge them to advance to the next stage in your funnel.

4. New Subscriber Nurture

Trigger: A subscription to your regular emails/newsletter

Looking for a way to improve your subscriber retention rate and move qualified subscribers through the funnel? Set up a workflow to nurture new subscribers to engage with more of your content and, ultimately, get the most out of their subscription.

5. Go-to Customer Marketing

Trigger: Customer status achieved

Think your job is done when an opportunity finally becomes a customer? Think again! Retaining a customer is far more cost effective than acquiring a new customer. And, according to Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.

At RIM we can help you choose the right automation software for your goals and set up your marketing automation funnel, together with a strong strategy to ensure that you are getting activity on your website to enable the marketing automation process to begin. Contact us now to discuss how we can help you nurture leads with marketing automation.