You know those names and email addresses in your marketing database? They’re called “contacts” for a reason. You’re supposed to stay in contact with them in order to nurture your relationship with them, engage them with new content and keep them up to speed on the latest news, sales or products and services your business offers.
Unfortunately, managing contact lists and sending individual email messages requires a lot of attention including manual data entry other time- (and soul-) sucking tasks.
Thankfully, you can now turn to marketing automated workflows (with inbound marketing software like HubSpot) to do a lot of the work for you, saving your company time, money and headaches while also eliminating the potential for human error.
With automated email workflows, the old model of single blasts and static lists is replaced by multiple actions and triggered messages to active and engaged contacts – all while along keeping your sales team informed with notifications for interactions such as opens, clicks and page views. Here are the Top 5 must-have email workflows for your business.
1) Topic Marketing Automation Workflows
Depending on what products or services you offer, you should create workflows specific to the topics you have content for. Let’s say you run a local fitness club. You’re likely to be educating members on new health and diet trends, promoting membership deals, new classes and perhaps accessories, like workout gear, water bottles or jars of protein/kale powder (probably not your biggest seller).
Now you can compartmentalize your marketing offers (new membership sales or product coupons) and other content you create (blog posts, infographics, videos) into buckets, which will be triggered based on visits to web pages or downloads relevant to that topic. This ensures that your audience is receiving targeted, helpful content rather than being bombarded by mass emails they don’t want.
2) New Customer Welcome/Training Workflow
Have a new subscriber? Start the relationship off on a positive note with an automated welcome email that thanks him or her for signing up. This is also an opportunity to provide any other introductory information the subscriber may want or need to know.
You can also set up other “Welcome/Thank You” emails that trigger when your contacts make a purchase. And if their purchase requires any instruction the customer may need, you can use this workflow to introduce on-boarding or training materials as needed. These targeted, automated replies keep your new contacts engaged, increasing your chances of converting them into repeat customers.
3) Lead-Nurturing Workflow
The buyer’s journey is anything but a straight path. It’s unlikely a potential customer will learn about your product or service and run straight towards you while waving a credit card.
It takes time for a lead to become a paying customer, which is why you should add lead-nurturing practices to your marketing automated workflows with content that’s targeted to each stage of the buyer’s journey, from Awareness (building a rapport) to Consideration (sharing information) to Decision (highlighting your services). Only when they reach the ‘Decision’ stage should your automated emails pitch your products and services directly.
4) Event Workflow
The three rules of planning an event are: 1., invite the right people, 2., choose the right venue and 3., get the word out. When it comes to Rule #3, email workflows are your best friend, because no event can be promoted through just one email.
You need to announce the event, manage registrations, remind invitees, send updates about the agenda or guest speakers and of course send reminders as the date approaches (not to mention a Thank You email once it’s over). Orchestrating the content for these emails and programming who they should go to and when to send them out can be laborious. Email workflows will automate this process from start to finish.
5) Re-engagement Workflow
Like the plant in the corner of the room that you keep forgetting to water, an email list that’s poorly tended to will slowly die. It can take a few blast emails before you realize it’s happening. You notice there are fewer opens, and only handful of clicks. Re-engagement workflow is a perfect way to poke those inactive contacts and bring your email list springing back to life.
Just set the parameters that will trigger the email (e.g., the length of time since the contact’s last email click or website visit). Then use this workflow to send an incentive of some kind that will engage these contacts and remind them of why they subscribed to begin with (Advice: free kale powder is not an incentive).
Want to learn more? Contact Brainstorm and one of our lead generation and inbound marketing experts will get right back to you answer any questions you have about marketing automated workflows or other digital marketing tactics. We’ll also provide you with a free marketing assessment to help identify if inbound marketing is a good fit for your business.