As a marketer, are you generating leads but not looking after the ones who are not yet ready to buy? Or maybe your sales team is not completely happy with the quality of the leads that you are passing to them. Or maybe your poor marketing team is trying to follow up every lead by sending out individual emails manually. If any of these is the case then your business could definitely be benefiting from marketing automation workflows.
The good thing about workflows, is that they can be applied to your business gradually. So you don’t have to automate your entire marketing department functions in one fell swoop. A sensible way to approach it is to identify what major process within your sales and marketing function would bring you the most return on your investment.
Once that first process is in place and tweaked and optimised over time, you can look for another process to target and improve.
What is a Marketing Automation Workflow?
If, like me, you have ever tried to map out the logic of a computer software program in a diagram, the chances are you have already produced something akin to a marketing automation workflow. It is simply the logical steps that are part of whatever process you decide to define.
This is being widely used for marketing automation because marketers are becoming more aware of the benefits of automation. Not only can we save ourselves time in generating, tracking and nurturing leads, but once a process is automated it becomes readily scalable, so more leads can be looked after with little extra effort.
Designing marketing automation workflows often involves a lot of planned email communications within those flows. And this is quite natural, as email is the one medium through which most people are happy to receive marketing messages.
It’s important to note that marketing automation workflows can also include manual steps. We are working with a company that produces a great way for children to start learning writing. When a teacher requests a trial of the system, it has to be manually shipped out to them, which should then trigger the next “trial nurturing” email sequence in the workflow. So, workflows can include manual interactions, emails, phone calls and more besides.
Since workflows should really be about what exactly the process is, they do not need to be tied to a specific Marketing Automation System. If you are already using HubSpot or Infusionsoft then this is undoubtedly where it will end up. But you can very happily put workflows together before you invest in your Marketing Automation System (in fact we would recommend it).
What can Marketing Automation Workflows do for my Business?
Marketing Automation workflows are a great way to help your customers along their buyer’s journey. They will enable your organisation to look after your leads better, and move them along their buyer’s journey more quickly, convert more leads to customers, and provide better leads to your sales team.
Workflows are always triggered by something. Exactly what that trigger is, can vary, but each trigger will be based on either timing of some sort:
- It is exactly one week before the event that the visitor has signed up to
- One hour after seeing the product offer at the end of a webinar
- Two days after purchasing a product from your website
Or it can be triggered by some sort of behaviour, which could be any of these and more besides:
- Leads who have visited a particular page on your website
- Leads from companies in a given industry with more than a certain number of employees
- Leads who have downloaded a particular ebook or whitepaper from your website
Once triggered any number of steps may be a part of the automated process. Take a look at this simple process. The trigger is simply that someone has signed up for our webinar:
Want to get e better understanding of how inbound marketing and automation can work for you, download our e-book
