Activate your business by automating, now!

According to an ISG study, containment has increased corporate interest in intelligent automation solutions. The promise of an alternative, digital, less vulnerable workforce for tasks usually performed by humans is all the more attractive in this context. These companies are gearing up to face the crisis, and potentially others.

Companies that digitize and automate today will emerge from the crisis one step ahead of their competitors. Others place themselves at a competitive disadvantage and increase their risk in the event of another global event.

Marketing is no different. If each operation is defined solely on the basis of the talent of the marketing manager, his teams and agencies, it may work well when you have the right people, but it's not sustainable or scalable. But in exceptional crisis conditions, it's a disaster.

On the other hand, those who industrialize their marketing see it as a company system, just like a production or logistics chain. They have access to a qualified , up-to-date database, enabling them to tailor their customer relations to their needs. Consistent messages, personalized content and availability are all part of the equation. You have useful data that can be activated by automation.

More than ever, your customers need to hear from you.

How can you avoid cluttering up the e-mail inbox and still be relevant? That's what we'll be looking at in the rest of this article, through a few marketing automation best practices and concrete examples of automation scenarios.

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Re-qualify your database

Example of automating an e-mail campaign

Calling up every contact manually is too time-consuming to be profitable. As you can imagine, automation saves a lot of time.

Imagine what automating an e-mail campaign could mean.

Let's take the example of Citizen Call, a telemarketing agency with around 46,000 contacts to qualify in their database, in the small business segment alone. How long would it take them to manually send a complete e-mail sequence to a list of 46,000 contacts, then segment it according to response and action levels, then follow up with personalized follow-up? Even if they had superpowers, it would be a huge waste of time.

On the other hand, by combining automated campaigns, as they were able to do with our Webmecanik Automation solution, all synchronized with their CRM, they create content associated with scenarios and triggers. Then, they let the system take care of it!

In 3 waves of nurturing based on a white paper dedicated to SME managers, they verified the interest and contact details of 52% of the CRM base, obtained 5 appointments and signed up 1 new customer who more than repaid the overall cost of the campaign.

The benefits of marketing automation

Marketing automation has many advantages, in addition to freeing up your time to focus on more important tasks:

• You streamline tasks so you can do more.
  
• You generate more leads and increase qualification rates by following up faster.
  
• You increase sales conversions by focusing on the hottest prospects and matching them with the best sales people.
  
• Improve customer satisfaction by dealing quickly with customer service issues. Keeping more customers can increase your profits.
  
• Qualify your contact bases 24/7.

"Emailing activity and customer engagement increase when relevance and personalization are present. An inbox is a place where people can interact with the companies they like and choose to interact with."

Jonas Fischer of MailerLite.

More and more people are subscribing to mailing lists. You can still benefit from the overall increase in e-mail marketing engagement by finding new ways to interact with your customers, following industrialized processes that work.

Reactivate your suspended projects

"Use marketing automation to bring cold business back from the dead."

Joe Crestuk, CEO of webSURGE.

Has your sales pipeline come to a halt, or have you heard nothing from the people with whom you were in the process of doing new business? Re-engage these contacts to qualify the quality of current business and enter - or not - into a new negotiation phase.

The trigger condition for this scenario could be a period of time that has elapsed since a contact last submitted a form, visited your website, opened an e-mail or interacted with your content after a free trial has expired.

The exit condition is if the project is postponed (you put in the nurturing segment with notification in the CRM for a sales action), the project is cancelled sine die (you just put in the nurturing segment waiting for an engaging action), or the prospect has made a competing choice (you put in the Lost Customer segment with activation of a scenario to take up the project again with the competitor in a while).

Example of a generic re-engagement workflow

Re-engagement uses historical data collected on a contact to try to rekindle the relationship and reintegrate them into the customer journey using special offers, exclusive content or even a short survey to find out how best to meet their needs.

Determining the length of time before a contact is defined as inactive is essential, and will vary according to your business model. If a lead remains inactive even after the re-engagement workflow has been launched, it may be time to remove that contact from your list to avoid SPAM complaints and improve your e-mail reputation.

The re-engagement e-mail can take a number of different forms, which you can alternate or combine according to your strategies.

Strategy #1: show them what they're missing

Your prospects have come to you for a reason that you may have identified beforehand. Remind them of it to keep them on board your sales pipeline. A sales objective, a low acquisition rate, too high an attrition rate, the release of a new product or the launch of a new brand.

Strategy #2: Offer them something special

Depending on your business model, it may be a good idea to offer a special discount, bonus or gift to ex-prospects who no longer interact. An e-leaning program on marketing automation use cases offered for the first three months for all collaborators, for example?

Strategy no. 3: simply ask them what they want

Of course, you can get straight to the point and ask your prospects how they'd like you to proceed. Tell them exactly why they're receiving this e-mail. For example, you could say: "You're receiving this e-mail because we're in the process of updating our existing business with you. We want to make sure we're still relevant to you. If you'd like your expert contact to get back in touch with you at short notice, please suggest the date that suits you here (automated appointment setting call-to-action)".

Automate your webinars

According to Webikeo, a webinar platform synchronized with Webmecanik, while only 4% make a purchase after viewing a webinar, 75% of participants make a purchase within two years.

In fact, it's an information tool, and often a prospect participates in several webinars before making a purchase.

26% of future customers are after 2 webinars, 44% after 3-5, and 30% after more than 6.

The webinar then becomes a permanent video on your sites in replay mode. According to Webikeo, the live + replay engagement rate is over 50%. It's very profitable, given the low cost of organization. Especially if you automate!

Example of an automated webinar organization and follow-up scenario

source: "Marketing Automation, Faîtes plaisir à vos clients, accélélérez votre business", Editions 1 min 30 s Publishing

Before the event:

▶️ Don't hesitate to make a video teaser to promote the event - the scores are quite astonishing! From there, the online registration phase begins, via a landing page or even a form inside the teaser video. Of course, the number of points scored for registration will vary depending on whether the contact is a stranger, a prospect with whom you have a quote in progress, or a customer you want to retain.

▶️ Trigger a nurturing phase of 1 to 4 e-mails with rich content linked to the subject of the event: for example, statistics, an infographic, blog articles or videos you've done before, a business case you've done with a customer. Turn up the heat. Here too, you can refine the messages depending on whether the visitor is a new prospect or a customer.

▶️ A reminder of the event by e-mail a few days beforehand is useful to guide the registrant: a reminder of the date, subject and connection link are all reminders and elements that the person will add to their diary. You're helping them get organized, which is a positive anchor.

After the webinar :

▶️ Now comes the nurturing phase, or how to nurture the relationship after the event.

In the first case, the prospect doesn't connect to the webinar. Change of agenda or change of priority? You need to find out more by calling back to propose a new webinar date. A lead isn't lost until you've made sure it's cold and frozen.

In the second case, the prospect has taken part, is won over and quickly requests a meeting following your first reminder. This lead becomes super-qualified and benefits from high scoring. He's now a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and can enter the negotiation phase with the sales team right up to closing. A notification is sent via CRM or e-mail to the "mission accomplished" sales rep for marketing! In this way, sales reaps only qualified, hot leads... without having to follow up immediately after the webinar.

Third scenario: the prospect has come, but is not yet convinced or sufficiently mature in his or her decision cycle. This is the right time to assess their maturity in the project and any obstacles they may be facing, using useful questions and content. Depending on the results, a nurturing phase with content corresponding to their specific interests can begin.

The benefits of webinars

The three main benefits are

• Time saved on organization and post-event qualification. You divide the time needed by 3 to 4. Take the opportunity to work on new content!
  
• With replays of your webinars or conferences, you can double your audience and increase the quality of your SEO.
  
• Your sales force will concentrate solely on ultra-qualified hot leads.

See all software Marketing Automation

Conclusion

In conclusion, you can see that with just 3 pre-built marketing automation campaigns you can duplicate and customize as you like, you're ready to automate your entire customer relationship as quickly as possible. Not only will your database be updated regularly and automatically, but you'll also be regularly bringing your sales people qualified business opportunities, with contacts happy to be contacted so quickly and at the right time!

By industrializing and automating your marketing, you add value to your business, because you control your growth with processes that make it predictable.

Sponsored article. Expert contributors are authors independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.