Activate your business by automating, now!

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

Companies that are digitalising and automating today will emerge from the crisis one step ahead of their competitors. The 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 his agencies, it may work well when you have the right people, but it is neither sustainable nor scalable. But in exceptional crisis conditions, it's a disaster.

On the other hand, those who industrialise their marketing see it as a company system in the same way as a production or logistics chain. They have a qualified , up-to-date database that enables them to tailor their customer relations to their needs and react quickly. Consistent messages, personalised 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 any further and still be relevant? That's what we're going to look at in the rest of this article, through a few best practices in marketing automation and concrete examples of automation scenarios.

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Re-qualify your database

Example of the automation of an e-mail campaign

Reminding each of your contacts manually is too time-consuming a task 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 VSE and SME segment alone. How long would it take them to manually send a complete sequence of e-mails to a list of 46,000 contacts, then segment them according to response and action levels, then follow them up in a personalised way? 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 synchronised 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 a number of advantages, in addition to freeing up your time to concentrate on more important tasks:

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

"Email activity and customer engagement increase when relevance and personalisation are present. An inbox is a place where people can interact with the companies they like and have chosen to interact with."

Jonas Fischer from MailerLite.

More and more people are subscribing to mailing lists. You can still benefit from the overall increase in email marketing engagement by finding new ways to interact with your customers, following industrialised 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 been halted, or have you heard nothing from the people you were in the process of doing new business with? Re-engage these contacts to assess 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 email 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 for taking 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 and 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 depending on 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 email reputation.

The re-engagement email can take a number of different forms, which you can alternate or link together depending on your strategies.

Strategy No. 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 this to keep them on board your sales pipeline. A sales objective, a low acquisition rate, too high a churn rate, the release of a new product or the launch of a new brand.

Strategy no. 2: offer them something special

Depending on your business model, it may be a good idea to offer a discount, bonus or special gift to ex-prospects who are no longer interacting. An e-leaning programme on marketing automation use cases offered for the first three months to all employees, 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 want you to proceed. Tell them exactly why they are receiving this e-mail. For example, you could say: "You are receiving this e-mail because we are in the process of updating our existing business with you. We want to make sure that we are still relevant to you. If you would like your expert contact to get back in touch with you at short notice, please suggest a date that suits you here (automated appointment booking call-to-action)".

Automate your webinars

According to Webikeo, a webinar platform synchronised 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 buying.

26% of future customers do so 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 organisation. Especially if you automate!

Example of an automated scenario for organising and monitoring a webinar

Source: "Marketing Automation, Faîtes plaisir à vos clients, accéléléz 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 emails 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 new, a 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 to get organised, which is a positive anchor.

After the webinar :

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

The first scenario is that the prospect does not connect to the webinar. Change of agenda or change of priority? You need to find out more by contacting them again to propose a new webinar date. A lead isn't lost until you've checked that it was cold and frozen.

Second scenario: 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. They become a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and can enter the negotiation phase with the sales team right up to closing. A notification is sent via the CRM or an e-mail to the "mission accomplished" sales rep for marketing! In this way, the sales team only recovers hot, qualified leads... without having to follow up immediately after the webinar.

In the third case, the prospect has come but is not yet convinced or sufficiently mature in their decision cycle. This is a good time to assess their maturity with regard to the project and any obstacles they may have, 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 organisation and post-event qualification. You can 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 staff will focus 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 that you can duplicate and customise as you wish, 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 generating qualified business opportunities for your sales people, with contacts who are happy to be contacted so quickly and at the right time!

By industrialising and automating your marketing, you're adding value to your business, because you're controlling your growth with processes that make it predictable.

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