Every business today is seeking more effective ways to nurture prospects and acquire new customers. A 2016 Gartner Report suggests that Marketing technology spend is now higher than advertising spend for companies. However, companies are still grappling to accelerate their sales pipeline. The reason for this is disjointed marketing and sales efforts. So, how can companies tackle this challenge? Marketing automation is the answer. Marketing automation essentially gives a business the ability to generate quality leads using a software to automate many of the marketing and lead generation tasks. Just like how a CRM software centralizes all the customer-centric data, marketing automation tools centralize customer behavioral data from email campaigns, website, landing pages and social media interactions. In fact, CRM systems and marketing automation tools can be synced to enable a two-way flow of communication between the systems. This facilitates the marketing teams to identify when a lead has performed some behavior that indicates purchase intent and lets the sales team to flag when a prospect is ready to be nurtured.

Here’s why your business needs to adopt marketing automation:

• Get more control over your audience
  Instead of spamming people with an email blast, marketing automation gives you deep insights on prospects and helps send targeted emails. It improves your understanding of the prospects, thereby aiding in sending emails that engage them, appeal to their interests, and helps you increase conversions.

• Provides better reporting
  It helps analyze number of leads in the pipeline, cost per lead, cost per opportunity, and understand where your most valuable and least valuable leads are coming from. It also aids in recognizing when prospects are easiest to convert and where they get lost in the sales funnel.

• It is more effective
  With marketing automation you can automate repetitive tasks like sending out nurture communications and monitoring prospects. You can instead focus on important tasks that can’t be automated such as developing new lead generation strategies.

70% of marketers say converting leads is their top priority. (Source:…
Click To Tweet

However, bear in a mind that a successful lead gen program must be backed with powerful content. Quality content is a vital tool to generate customer interest. A well-written emailer that addresses any possible customer concerns might just be the push required to generate a lead. Create content that feels natural, and is not pushy.  For instance: think about how you check your inbox every morning. Do you go by the chronological order and decide if it’s good content, and then check the next mail? Or do you delete all the insignificant emails and then read what sounds interesting and important? It’s likely that you do the latter. This pretty much explains the importance of good content. In your fight to be heard, one sure shot way to be noticed is to tell a story that is appealing with a strong narrative. Remember your customers don’t want your product. They need your product to get what they want.

Let’s now look at the application of marketing automation:

Email Drip Campaigns

Like the name suggests “drip campaigns” are email campaigns that typically involve sending emails in spaced intervals, which resemble a faucet drip. This is a primary mechanism in marketing automation to nurture leads. This method involves database segregation by channel, industry, geography, lead position in the sales funnel, and other important distinctions.

Drip email campaigns provide relevant content that guides the customer’s journey. It involves supplying consistent useful resources, and thereby enable leads to develop an affinity for your brand. This helps establish credibility, so that when those prospects are ready to make the purchase, they think of your product/ service and your brand.

Here’s an example of a drip campaign – the first mailer leads to a blog.

This is the second mailer in the drip campaign that aims to nurture prospects who showed interest in the previous mailer. This leads to a product brochure.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are a vital component of a lead nurturing campaign. It involves inviting prospects to the landing page to confirm their interest in the product or service. The content offered to them is gated and requires prospects to input their name, email id, contact number, company, etc. into a form to confirm download.

These prospects receive targeted, relevant communication and hence decide to download another piece of content, which often indicates a buying intent.

Here’s an example of a landing page to download gated content resources.

Personalization

Personalization in marketing has proved to be very effective. Personalizing campaigns involve targeting a market segment and sending content that is relevant to them. It’s important for an email campaign to touch on the pain points of the buyer and send them personalized emails.

Marketing automation tools offer personalization using tags, and can pull personal information from individual profiles and display the given information when the prospect opens an email or visits a landing page.

This is an example of personalization in mailers

A well-thought-out digital marketing strategy backed by quality content is key to the success of any lead gen program.

Here’s a glimpse of various content types that contribute to the success of your marketing automation.

Managing your online marketing activities and having a marketing automation tool in place need not be a daunting task. All you need is the right partner who provides an effective content and digital marketing strategy and executes it seamlessly. A content marketing partner not only helps manage email campaigns but also measures marketing effectiveness. At Yorke Communications, we provide a tailored strategy that is focused on your business.  We use the latest marketing automation tools to help you manage leads, measure results and optimize your marketing efforts to improve conversion rates and create an enhanced customer experience.

At Yorke Communications, we integrate our unique content strategies with the automation capabilities of LeadSqaured, a customer acquisition platform to create outcome-based content and digital marketing campaigns for our clients.