Go Beyond Email Marketing, Start Automating ...
In this article we will explain the ways marketing automation can enhance your marketing campaigns compared to other email marketing platforms. So what are some of the major reasons marketing automation outperforms email marketing?
Ability to Connect Your Email Campaigns All the Way to a Sale
With e-marketing systems, you can track your open rates, clicks, and responses to help you discover how well your messaging, subject lines and overall campaign is working.
The problem: Email systems can't track post-click activity, which translates to what that user does on your website. You know they opened your email and clicked a link, but you do not know what pages they visited, or if they contacted you or purchased a product. Sure you can dig through all of your Google analytics and try to find details, but who has the time to search and compile all of those results?
A marketing automation platforms connects your email from the opens, clicks and downloads to all of the pages that a user visits now or in the future and saves it within their profile, which now allows you to send more targeted and personalized content to them based on their page visits, interests and behavior.
Working Intelligence to Connect with Prospects That Are Sales Ready Via Contact Scoring
Not every contact on a manufacturing website is ready to talk to your sales team, which is where contact scoring comes in play. As a contact visits your website, you can choose which elements of their visit are important and apply points to each. For example, if they visit important pages, download data sheets or case studies, a point value is assigned to each activity and begins to tally for that visitor. As their score grows, you and your sales team can determine a score number total that best reflects when a contact is ready to be contacted by the sales directly, or a threshold number for a cold lead that may never convert. Scoring allows you focus on opportunities that are clearly interested in what you have to offer and reduce wasted time on those that are not.
Staying in Contact Through Multi-Stage Automated Campaigns
Creating and sending out email campaigns can become time consuming depending on how many industries you serve, products or services you offer and complexity of your sales process. Marketing automation allows you to skip a lot of that by setting up a series of industry specific, targeted and personalized emails that automatically respond to website requests as they come in and then applies an automation workflow to continue touch points with each contact over longer periods of time based on links they click in your campaigns, pages they visit, or literature downloads they have.
A great example of an automation workflow would be:
An email is send out from the marketing automation platform. The lead clicks through your email to a landing page on your website that shows them exactly what they need to see, and they fill out a Request a Quote form on your website. This request triggers a series of responses from your automation platform which:
- Immediately sends a confirmation that you’ve received their RFQ.
- Immediately sends the sales person for that territory a message to notify them that they’ve received an RFQ.
- Sends the new contact an email from the designated sales person five minutes after the RFQ was submitted. This email introduces the sales person and tells them they should receive a call shortly.
- Adds the contact to a drip marketing campaign that now automatically sends them a case study or promotion once a month or any other timeline you deem appropriate.
These are just a few of the ways that marketing automation is changing how we work, and how we nurture and manage our sales contacts and opportunities.
Stay tuned for our next installment titled Part 2: Campaigns to Generate and Track Opportunities with Marketing Automation.
