A KUNO CREATIVE EBOOK How to Get Started with MARKETING AUTOMATION
So you have a database of a few thousand contacts. Every month you send those contacts a nice email newsletter with little bits of information in it. Maybe when you re going to a tradeshow, you decide to send out an email that invites current and potential customers to your booth. All great touches, but guiding the buyer s journey in our content-driven world isn t as straightforward as scheduling occasional emails. Instead, there s a courtship that needs to take place between buyers and sellers. This is where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation is a cold term for the very warm notion of making your marketing more people friendly. Just the phrase gives way to images of complex algorithms and communication workflows that are more robotic than human. And while it s predicted that, by 2020, 85 percent of customers will manage their relationships without talking to a person, that doesn t mean getting started with marketing automation has to be aloof or complicated. www.kunocreative.com 1
A great marketing automation system enables you to do those things as painlessly as possible. For example, HubSpot requires only three basic tools to make marketing automation work: Lists, workflows and email. CONVERT Convert Website Visitors Into Leads NURTURE Nurture Leads With Helpful Content Until They Are Ready to Buy MANAGE Manage Simple or Repetitive Aspects of Very Human Relationships Marketing automation can do all sorts of amazing things for your organization. And there are any number of scenarios where a one-size-fits-all approach won t work. However, this ebook is intended to help you put your best foot forward as you develop your strategy for using marketing automation. Each section includes additional resources that will provide deeper insight or tutorials on how to better utilize the tools as you move forward. www.kunocreative.com 2
CONVERSION Converting Website Visitors Into Leads www.kunocreative.com 3
SEND SMARTER EMAILS Marketing automation isn t just about email, but email being one of the top customer acquisition channels means that you should focus on doing it better. With marketing automation, you can automatically create highly segmented, constantly updated lists based on database properties or actions taken in order to better communicate with your contacts. For example, you can create a smart list that is updated every time someone downloads your most recent vertical guide. The next time you have information about that vertical, be it a new piece of content or a product announcement, you can use that list to send the new information to contacts who ve shown interest in that vertical. Similarly, if you have a database property for something like number of employees, you can have a smart list that is updated every time that database field is updated on a contact profile. The next time you need to send something out to companies with more than 100 employees, you already have the list for it. Create smart lists for every new download you make available on your website as soon as you make it available so they are ready if and when you need them. Tutorial: How to create a smart list www.kunocreative.com 4
PERSONALIZE EMAILS WITH FAMILIAR SENDER Each contact in your database probably has an associated salesperson. If you re using a CRM, this may automatically be created with a Lead Owner field. If you re not using a CRM, it s easy enough to create this database field and add the information to the database. Having this information takes that old send it from a person idea in email marketing and makes it send it from a person that the lead is talking to. Marketing automation enables you to get away with creating just one single email for every sales person using dynamic sender information rather than duplicating the same email for all of your sales reps. Not every contact may have a lead owner in the database, so be sure to set the default sender information to another high-profile individual in your organization. This will appear for any user without a lead owner. Tutorial: How to personalize the sent from name and email address www.kunocreative.com 5
REACTIVATE DORMANT LEADS As your contact database ages, leads may stop interacting with your content for one reason or another. Maybe you ve sent too much irrelevant information in the past. Or maybe they are no longer looking for a solution like one you provide. One way to know for sure is to attempt to reactivate your dormant leads. You can set up a workflow that automatically sends an email out after 90 days without engagement from a lead. If you include a valuable piece of content, you can hopefully lure that lead back into your funnel in a meaningful way. Have leads that just won t reconvert? Create a smart list with those leads that haven t engaged with your brand in a long time and suppress them on any email sends. This will at least improve the conversion rates on your emails, and at most prevent your messages from being marked spam. Read More: How to Use Email to Re-Engage Sleepy Subscribers www.kunocreative.com 6
NURTURE Nurture Leads With Helpful Content Until They Are Ready to Buy www.kunocreative.com 7
SEND DRIP EMAIL CAMPAIGNS Marketing automation s most common function is the drip email campaign. Using a smart list and a workflow, you can send a series of automated emails to a contact after they download a piece of content or provide you with a relevant piece of information. One of the best ways to execute a drip email campaign is to consider the emails part of the content that kicks off the workflow. When you are writing that new piece of content, write four to five lead nurturing emails at the same time. This way you can create a narrative marketing story from email to email rather than sending generic marketing or sales messages that lack context. Let your drip email campaign do its work and suppress active workflow contacts from general email sends. This way you won t interrupt the story you re telling. Remember, you can always send them another update once they ve finished the campaign. Tutorial: How to set up lead nurturing campaigns using workflows www.kunocreative.com 8
TIME COMMUNICATION AROUND EVENTS There was once a time where you would have to individually send every email communication ahead of an event. Thankfully, marketing automation allows you to send date-based workflows so you can better communicate around events, holidays or special occasions. For example, if you have a tradeshow coming up in six months, you can develop three or four email communications leading up to the show at once and schedule them all in a workflow to go out 90, 60, 30 and 15 days before the date of the event. Then set it and only worry about checking performance rather than remembering you have to get an email out from week to week. Anything that has a date can be used in a time-based workflow. So if you have account renewal dates, start an automated workflow based off that renewal date to send reminder messages with increasing urgency as the date approaches. Read More: 5 Date-Based Workflows You Can Now Use for Nurturing www.kunocreative.com 9
ADJUST COMMUNICATION BASED ON ACTIVITY Are there popular pages on your website that you know indicate a person s increased likelihood to buy? Has someone visited your request a demo page and not filled out the form? Did someone mention your company in a tweet? Or has someone simply filled out a bottom of the funnel form? Almost any action that a lead takes on your site can be tracked and utilized in advanced marketing automation systems. Knowing what actions are meaningful here is key. There are common sense ones, like visiting a pricing page or downloading a case study or buyer s guide, then there are the less obvious ones, like visiting a specific blog post or a combination of pages. Still, this stuff that used to go unnoticed or unutilized can now trigger automatic communication thanks to marketing automation. If someone visits your request a consultation or request a demo page but doesn t fill out the form, you can set up a workflow to email them three days later reminding them to fill out that bottom of the funnel form. This can help move people who show greater interest in your product through your sales funnel more quickly. Tutorial: How to set up lead nurturing campaigns using workflows www.kunocreative.com 10
MANAGE Manage Simple or Repetitive Aspects of Very Human Relationships www.kunocreative.com 11
SCORE LEADS BASED ON DATA Lead scoring is another one of those standard marketing automation functions because it helps determine how you manage the communication with individual contacts. You don t need a complex algorithm to get started, though. Actually, over-thinking scoring at the beginning slows down the scoring process and doesn t allow you to learn over time. After a short period of data collection in your marketing automation software, begin scoring a lead s engagement, behavior and demographic information with what you know at that moment. After all, lead scoring isn t static. It needs to change as you know more about user behavior and as your market evolves. Trying to think of every possible scenario from the get-go will only prevent you from utilizing this essential marketing automation function. Lead scoring evolves over time, but only if you take the time to discuss the scoring with internal stakeholders. At the beginning, plan to meet with sales to go through lead quality on a bi-weekly basis at least. Then as your scoring matures you can reduce the number of meetings, eventually to once a quarter. Just don t ever let the scoring sit for too long without a review. Read More: 3 Types of Qualifying Criteria for Scoring Marketing Leads www.kunocreative.com 12
UPDATE LIFECYCLE STAGES Once lead scoring is in place you can more accurately reflect a lead s level in the buying process. The breakdown generally goes like this: LEAD: Converted at least once on your site MARKETING QUALIFIED LEAD: Reached a lead score threshold that indicates the right type of lead and level of interest SALES QUALIFIED LEAD: Requested specific information that indicates sales readiness, as agreed upon by sales OPPORTUNITY: Actively pursued by sales CUSTOMER: Closed on a deal with your sales team So when a user s lead score reaches a certain number, you might have a workflow that moves them to a marketing qualified lead, indicating they are a contract worth pursuing. If sales closes a deal, the marketing automation system may automatically mark that lead as a customer, or you can set up a workflow that s more specific to your organization. Make sure CRM fields like Lead Status & Opportunity Stage align with your Lifecycle Stages. You can set up workflows so when sales makes a change on their end, that triggers a lifecycle stage change in your marketing automation software. Quick Answers: How to use Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot www.kunocreative.com 13
SEND LEADS TO CRM One of the problems with marketing before automation was that every captured lead was dropped on sales and they had to dig through those leads to find the diamonds in the rough. With marketing automation, you can weed out many of the unqualified leads before they ever get to sales. If you re doing inbound marketing correctly, you re probably capturing a number of leads who are not ready to buy. You re probably capturing unqualified leads, too. The last thing you want is for those leads to go to your CRM. You can use lead scoring and lifecycle stages to determine which leads are qualified and engaged enough to be sent to your CRM for sales to pursue. Set up a smart list in your marketing automation platform that only allows marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, customers and opportunities to sync with your CRM. That way unqualified or uninterested leads aren t moving onto sales. Read More: Creating Lead Hand-Off Plans for Better Marketing and Sales Alignment www.kunocreative.com 14
NOTIFY SALES OF CHANGES IN LEAD S STATUS Even though a lead is connected with the CRM, that doesn t mean sales is paying attention to that lead every step of the way. Your marketing automation platform can help sales by sending reminders and other updates when an owner s lead does something new on your website. So if a lead in your CRM requests a demo, you can send an internal notification to the specific lead owner letting him or her know their lead wants more information. Or if a lead engages with specific, high-value content, you can notify sales. More than a simple revisit notification, these alerts can provide sales with essential intelligence on a lead s engagement level and sales readiness. Lead score changes can help sales prioritize their lead queue. Send notifications directly to the lead owner when a lead crosses an important score threshold. Quick Answers: How to set up internal email notifications in Workflows www.kunocreative.com 15
Are you ready to convert, nurture and manage leads with marketing automation? Kuno Creative can help put your plan in place. Contact Us Today 36901 American Way, Suite 2A, Avon, OH 44011 Toll-free: 800.303.0806 www.kunocreative.com 16