Automation is one of the most efficient ways to keep the lines of communication open when it comes to nurturing leads and onboarding new customers. Trying to balance personalization and automation is also a challenge in and of itself. In fact, automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.
This isn’t to say that you should put all of your efforts into just automation, but that the potential of generating revenue and being able to measure ROI.
Further, let’s layout some specific stats around email automation:
- Automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails
- Transactional emails 8x more opens and clicks than other emails and can generate 6x more revenue
- Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases
- 78% of marketers say that list segmentation is the marketing automation feature they can’t live without
- Customers who receive automated abandoned shopping cart emails are 2.4x more likely to complete their purchase
- 55% of all companies are currently using marketing automation
In today’s blog post, I’ll walk you through five B2B automated workflows to run now, so let’s dive in…
1. Subscribers
When visitors come onto your website, many won’t be ready to buy from you right away or even be ready to discuss your product/service with a sales rep. One of the easiest ways to capture contact information is to prompt these visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.
Make sure you are developing valuable content that will entice them to subscribe and then have a strong CTA that will trigger an action as well. With subscribers, you can keep them in their own bucket or even break it up even more with the following segmentation considerations:
- Understand the content they want to consume.
- Know the different times/days they want to receive communication from you.
- Understand the different personas that come in.
The key to understanding all of this will help you figure out how you should nurture these subscribers further down the funnel. The more information you can extract, the more personalized you can be while sending out automated emails.
2. Content downloads
Content plays a huge role with getting prospective customers to take action, convert, and finally set up a call with sales. In fact, content marketing costs 62% less than other types of marketing. So when you are able to couple up your content assets with a strong automation game plan, it’ll help fuel your chances for closing more sales.
More specifically, as I pointed out in my content marketing guide:
Buying decisions are often based on effective content.
Nowadays, prospective clients use content to reach a decision. They want to learn whether a product really works before they buy it. And they want hard facts and statistics to prove it.
This is where effective content comes in. For instance, a company can offer business white papers—i.e. in-depth guides that workably solve complex problems—to prospects.
Do they work? Certainly, because 78% of buyers read business white papers before purchasing a product.
3. Product/service inquiries
Automation around any actions that are taken with a prospective customer wanting to learn more about your products/services are way more exciting than any other action, right?
Of course, a more personalized response is also going to help because you can send an automated email acknowledging the request/inquiry, and then have a sales rep actually call.
It’s not about using automation to get lazy, but using it to foster your other initiatives and seeing how it’ll all come together in helping you do the following:
- The most engaged personas.
- The type of content that drives the best engagement.
- The type of messaging that triggers action.
- Where you need to be more efficient to shorten the sales cycle.
- Implement lead scoring to help build more data points.
4. Webinar invites
A single webinar can get you 1,000 leads and communication webinars have a conversion rate of 67%. In other words, webinars are highly effective and like any other content piece, it’s all about how much value you can provide. What I love most about webinars and why they work so well is that you have attendees who are engaged for the duration of your presentation.
This further gives you an opportunity to interact with attendees directly which can increase your chances of getting them into a workflow that’s going to be centered around your products/services, rather than top-of-the-funnel content.
As such, be cognizant of your attendees, test out different topics, present in an interactive and interesting way, and have a strong CTA at the end of the webinar. This will push your attendees to take some sort of action that continues the conversation, in conjunction with the emails they continue to receive.
5. Engagement-specific
Whether the goal is to drive more engagement or even just re-engage with a specific list in your database, it’s important that you understand exactly where they are in the funnel. This will ensure that the messaging is contextual relevant
The purpose of engagement workflows should be for the following reasons:
- To keep leads warm and move them from just being in an MQL status to SQL.
- To keep customers informed and engaged.
In order to maintain engagement, you have to add a touch or personalization. This means you understand the last action that has taken place and are able to properly segment so that people don’t feel you’re just sending out a generic email.
You can also gauge the level of engagement based on simple lead scoring which can attach some analytical insight beyond just clicks or opens of emails, but that you push to understand what pushes people to stay engaged.
Wrapping it up
Take the data points you collect as you implement automation so that you can continue to test where you need to and you can also see what’s really moving the needle. Not every lead or sale should be treated the same. Therefore, it makes sense to develop workflows that are contextually relevant.
Finally, know that the more you test and actually understand the buyer journey, the better you’ll be able to set up automated workflows that will align. Remember, valuable content is going to be instrumental to your success.
