About 49% of companies and 55% of B2B businesses are currently using marketing automation. Studies show that the demand for automation software, at an impressive rate, has grown significantly in the past few years.
From visitors to leads, then to buyers, and then promoters, your sales funnel takes time and effort to be created and a perennial endeavor to enhance.
A Market Sherpa survey states that 73% of leads are not interested in buying even though they give you their contact details.
Is this information supposed to intimidate you? There is an opportunity in every difficulty. Even if most of your leads are turning away, there are chances they would come back when buying becomes a necessity. What if they are oblivious to your existence when they get interested? To let yourself not get eradicated from a prospective buyer’s memory, you must practice lead nurturing. Even a regular buyer will forget you if you do not communicate with them in a timely manner because your competitors will take no time to fill the communication gap that, unfortunately, was created by you.
Another Marketing Sherpa study revealed that 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales due to the lack of lead nurturing.
One of the most effective ways of keeping the communication alive in the B2B space is by sending timely emails to your visitors, buyers, and prospective buyers. And this process in the marketing arena is termed as Email Marketing. An old yet effective strategy, email marketing is still considered best in the business because it assists customers at any particular point efficiently through the sales funnel.
According to Forrester Research, those organizations that take lead nurturing seriously produce 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.
Industrial Revolution has been a significant phenomenon transforming the ways of our living since its very first and all the subsequent editions in the respective times. We are in its 4th edition now with automation being a key feature. So, to succeed in our lead nurturing endeavors, how crucial is the confluence of email marketing and automation?
Research says by implementing lead nurturing strategies, you can get a competitive advantage since only 35% of B2B marketers are having a sound lead nurturing strategy in place.
Source: Demand Gen Report
$1 spent on email marketing produces an average ROI of $38, making email automation a worthwhile marketing effort.
Let us now enumerate five Email Automation tips to upgrade your lead nurturing campaign:
Table of Contents
No matter what your strategy is, you want to make the most out of automation for lead nurturing. Proactively schedule your emails to make the strongest impression in the minds of your subscribers. If you are running an email campaign two days prior to Thanksgiving, then pack up and go, you’ve already missed the train! Because one of your competitors is at the driver’s seat, which could have been yours only if, in addition to automation, you had cared enough to be proactive.
Being proactive is good, but without having sensibility, you will fall flat, anyway. You had been driving your campaign since two weeks before Thanksgiving, but the results are still nay. Did you send your emails when your prospective customers were fast asleep? Or B2B partners super occupied? Despite being powered with automation, your emails get buried in the customers’ inboxes, and this, my friend, is entirely unacceptable.
When leads are nurtured, they generate a 47% higher average order value (AOV) compared to the deals closed on un-nurtured leads. (~ Annuitas)
Companies all across the globe are spending huge amounts on Analytics. Salesforce acquired Tableau and Microsoft backs PowerBI in its conferences, not for no reason, of course. Automation has given groundbreaking possibilities in tracking customer behavior. Leverage automation to dig deep into how customers react to your emails—how many of them opened it? How many times did they open? Did they follow the link provided? Did they get converted?
Based on the answers to such questions, you can tune up your content centered on the insights you get.
Corporations enjoy a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate with established lead generation and management practices. (CSO Insights)
Source: ASCEND2
Personalization is much more than using your prospective customer’s name in the email. But enterprises often do not want to spend man-hours for personalizing. Automation allows dynamic content created from one email to be customized for several users in the segment. With dynamic content, you can get a competitive advantage by reaping opportunities based on users’ past activities.
It is interesting to know that only 39% of online retailers are sending emails consisting of personalized product recommendations.
Segmentation divides your users based on say age-group, gender, location, etc. Hyper-segmentation digs deeper with past activity, preference, total time spent, number of clicks, etc., and can go further deep getting as specific as you desire. Try achieving hyper-segmentation and then employ automation to it for achieving personalization. With a higher degree of personalization, customers come back and give you more opportunities to create more in-depth segments in a cyclic manner ensuring success at every level of your sales funnel.
Most of the leads do not become customers as soon as they visit a site. Therefore, a lead nurturing strategy must be in place. Email marketing, with its effectiveness in the marketing realm, is highly used for lead nurturing. We have discussed five tips viz. hyper-segmentation, dynamic content, analytics, and scheduling that mixed with email automation ensures effective lead nurturing.