Marketing Automation and Email Workflows

Marketing automation is the best way to convert prospects into leads. Marketers should be creating email workflows that nurture leads through the buying cycle until they purchase. Nurturing will build stronger relationships with your leads, send higher quality leads to your sales team, and save more of your time as a marketer or business owner. 38% of marketers surveyed reported a 20% or greater increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured prospects, and another 21% reported a 10% increase in sales opportunities. Purchasing decisions aren’t something that happen on the spur of the moment like in the B2C market. The B2B buying cycle starts with the interest, moves to education, weighing the best options and then finally the purchase.

 

Marketing automation is the best way to convert prospects into leads. Are you using it properly? Click To Tweet

 

So, what’s an email workflow?

 

“An email workflow is series of automated emails that will be sent — or not — based on a person’s behavior or contact information. With workflows, you can trigger actions based on any information you have about your leads, allowing you to send the right message to the right person at the right time.” -Hubspot

 

Email workflows are created around the ‘if this then that’ logic. For example: you might have a series of emails that welcome a new purchaser, or an email to send when someone abandons their cart, or emails designed to encourage your social media contacts to share your content. Workflows go way beyond simple marketing automation. With workflows, you can send emails, update contact information, add or remove contacts from lists, and trigger email notifications.

Now that I have proved why you should be using email workflows, I am going to tell you how to do it. I’ll even include the tools I use!

Define Goals

Anytime you are starting a new marketing initiative you should always determine your goals. Your goal is most likely to increase sales! B2B marketers who implement marketing automation increase their sales pipeline contribution by an average of 10% according to a report by Forrester. If you don’t know why you are creating a workflow, then there isn’t a reason to do it.

 

Plan Your Steps

How will you achieve this goal? Think about each email workflow like a mini sales funnel. You want to bring your users from awareness to interest to desire to purchase. There will be some differences in each workflow depending on your goal, but this is the general formula you should follow. It’s best to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. If you hadn’t heard of your company or its products how would you get the information you need to become a customer?

When mapping out your workflow, think about every possible way a user could respond to your emails. I like to use LucidChart so I can visually see and map out all instances. You should set different emails as responses. No matter what you do, make sure that while mapping out your workflows you take into account all possible contingencies. You will also need to determine the amount of time that will pass between each email. Again, put yourself in the person’s shoes and thinking about how you would react when receiving the email.

 

Think about each email workflow like a mini sales funnel. #EmailTips Click To Tweet

 

Write Your Emails

Once you get your workflow planned out you should write your emails. At Red Branch Media, we like to keep our workflows to 4-6 emails long. This doesn’t mean that yours can’t be any longer, but we like to test different sales cycles to see what resonates with our audience. By the way, we created a workflow sheet if you would like to use it.

 

Test and Adjust

As with any other marketing campaign that you implement you should always test out the success of your email workflows. See what’s working and what isn’t. Test out different designs, copy, CTAs or subject lines. By doing this you will be able to find the formula that works best for your business.

 

Marketing automation and email workflows are crucial to your success. If you’re not managing your leads properly, you are wasting your time, marketing resources, and money. It’s time to take your marketing automation to the next level.