When we’re getting started with a new client, it seems people generally are quite familiar with most of our areas of focus like Web Design and Development, Digital Advertising, SEO, and Email Marketing. But when it comes to Marketing Automation, we often find that clients have some more questions and can be uncertain about what exactly marketing automation is capable of and how it works.
In this article, I hope to cast away some of the uncertainty you may have about marketing automation by providing some examples.
Lead Nurturing
One of the most common and effective applications of marketing automation is lead nurturing or fostering relationships with leads that are not yet ready to buy. To demonstrate, let’s pretend you have a lead who filled out a form on a landing page of your website. Forms can be an ideal way to gather lots of information about each lead so they can be properly nurtured further based on their interests.
Here’s where automation starts coming into play. At MINDSCAPE, our first step after a potential lead fills out a form is to put that new contact into a workflow automation to assign that contact as a potential lead.
This workflow is actually a part of a series of workflows we have that assign a user’s lifecycle stage based on the form they have filled out or action they have taken.
Now that the contact is assigned as a lead, you can add them to any other future lead nurture campaigns. Campaigns should be highlighting a deal or event your company is offering – if you send too many bad offers or emails then your leads will stop opening them.
Here’s a simple example from MINDSCAPE of a recent email automation campaign that went out to all of our HubSpot contacts promoting a webinar we were running.
Notice how automation let you set up emails to send days, weeks, or months in advance without the need for anyone to be sitting at the computer to send them.
Sales Enablement
For sales enablement, some common applications of marketing automation include deal assignment and triggering starts and stops to sales sequences based on the actions of the user.
Without marketing automation, deal assignment is a tedious and laborious job. A recent client we’ve been working with offers an airplane cleaning service on the tarmac at airports. During their sales process, they assign deals assigned to many different sales representatives based on which airport the plane will be cleaned at.
As you can see, there are lots of airports for each salesperson. The person assigning the deals used to have a difficult job of making sure all the deals were going to the right place. With marketing automation, this became a much simpler task. All sales representatives have to do now is type in the airport code while initially filling out the deal. The workflows will do the rest to make sure the deals are assigned in the right place.
Marketing automation can also be used to set starts and stops in your sales process.
In this example, we’re working with the same aircraft cleaning company. Another problem this company was facing with their sales process was workers forgetting to assign an aircraft to a deal but continuing along the rest of the sales process for scheduling cleaning times. This meant deals were being created with specific cleaning times without any aircraft assigned for the team to clean. This was causing confusion and generating bad data.
To stop this, we set up a workflow so the deal would stop progressing and the person working with the deal would be notified if it was moved to a deal stage where it should have an aircraft assigned.
Service
With service, the main appeal for marketing automation is to get notified immediately when one of your customers is having an issue. Customers usually submit service requests when they are experiencing some problem. A swift response is needed to mitigate any frustration on the customer’s end.
Here is a typical workflow we set up for the form fills on our website. An email is sent to our internal team to let them know about the form submission, and a task is made and assigned to a sales representative to follow-up with the user.
Marketing Automation at MINDSCAPE
At MINDSCAPE, we’re constantly toying with HubSpot workflows and learning the latest techniques beyond the common examples we showed you today. When you really start digging your teeth into marketing automation, it feels like possibilities and potential with the software is endless.
Yeah, we do that.
