Marketing Automation workflows are one of the most powerful tools available to digital marketers which you take you to the next level of digital marketing. Lead nurturing helps you nurture leads over a period of time. If you do not take care of your leads, they will soon turn over to your competitor and you will be set to lose money, resources and potential customers.
Marketing automation workflows essentially help you build better personalized relationships with leads based on their behavior or contact information. Workflows help nurture leads , which in turn ensures that only the best leads are handed over to Sales.
Workflows in a Nutshell
A series of automated actions that can be triggered based on a lead’s behavior is a marketing automation workflow.
Workflows include automatic emails, contact information updates, addition and removal of contacts from lists depending on the behavior of visitors.
How do Workflows Work
Workflows help you set the rules for scoring and nurturing leads, save time and automate all the actions in between. For example if a prospect downloads a piece of gated content like an eBook from your website, you may want to transfer the lead to your CRM system because it is sales-ready.
You want to increase your lead’s score to make it more qualified depending upon their user activity and that is where workflows come in. Workflows will help transform your lead to an opportunity using personalized CTAs. Workflows can trigger action based responses depending on the lead’s information.
You might have an immensely successful website and blog along with a loyal subscriber base but it is better to have marketing automation workflows to help leads move further down the sales funnel.
Sometimes it is difficult to nurture leads and sometimes even qualified leads do not become an opportunity. Taking a look at the process of how you are taking care of your leads will answer a lot of your queries. You will also save a lot of time if you have an automated workflow in place.
Why should you use Workflows?
As you may have figured out, workflows may act as a crucial part of your marketing campaigns. Here are a few reasons why you should use workflows:
- Save Time: Since workflows employ automated actions triggered by lead behavior, you will not have to carry out these tasks manually anymore. These automated actions will save your time as well as precious resources that you can utilize for other marketing activities.
- Convert More Leads: Workflows help you in carrying out segmentation for better personalization of marketing communications. Your workflows will use closely targeted emails to nurture specific leads, by segmenting them into as many lists as possible. Smarter marketing automation tools will allow you to nurture your soft leads to become sales-ready faster than ever.
- Customization: Depending upon how close a lead is to become an opportunity, you can set up a workflow that will increase/decrease the number of mails sent as well as tweak when to send it. You can choose the content and set the workflow to customize it according to the lead’s behavior during that timeframe.
Things to know before setting up a Workflow
- Goals: Workflows are used to pique the general interest level of leads so that they can move along the sales funnel faster. But you should set goals to identify a starting point and an ending point for your workflow. The goal of your workflow may vary from converting more leads into a qualified lead to converting already qualified leads to sales ready leads. Establishing goals for your workflow will take you one step ahead the lead conversion ladder.
- Content: You should keep your marketing content organized. In a workflow, you need related funnel stage content to mail to leads. So it would be easier if you chalk out your content accordingly and document each content for every workflow that you want to use. You will have the option to personalize emails and use smart content, so make sure that you take adequate measure to collect the required data and make the workflow even more efficient.
- Educate: Educate yourself about the options that you have while setting up workflows. There are three types of workflows that you can choose from.
a. Standard: This workflow is triggered by enrolling forms, joining mailing lists and visiting specific web-pages.
b. Fixed Date: Usually this is triggered by fixed calendar dates and sends mails on that day.
c. Property-based: This workflow is triggered by property based dates, like the expiration of a lease.
Do you use workflows to automate your marketing? Share your experience with us at [email protected].