As if generating quality leads weren’t tricky enough, nurturing those leads throughout each stage of the buyer’s journey can be even more of a challenge, especially if you’re doing it all manually. The fact is that most prospects who become leads or show a strong interest in your offerings are not ready to buy right away.
According to Adobe, 96% of your website visitors aren’t ready to buy quite yet.
Why? They may be comparing your brand with your competitors, deciding whether the investment is worth it, evaluating your ability to solve their problem, or something else.
Even those 4% who may be “ready” to buy aren’t likely to pull the trigger right then and there without having interacted with a human representative of your brand.
While your leads are trying to figure out what they want and need and whether your brand can deliver that, it’s essential to continue to remind them that you exist—without being overly pushy and unintentionally turning them away.
One great way to do this is through automated email and text marketing campaigns, specifically those designed to nurture buyers through each stage of their journey.
Manual Vs. Automated Communication
For many smaller businesses, communicating with prospects via individual emails and texts may seem more economical or, at least, more authentic. As such, we often see business owners or their sales and marketing teams attempting to manually stay in contact with every potential customer.
They do this for a variety of reasons. Some believe an utterly personal approach to sales is best. Others might not think purchasing an automation application is worth the time or investment. Some just don’t know how to integrate automation into their business.
Of course, there are many instances where it makes sense to send a completely personalized communication to a prospect, but often, a pre-written, automated one will suffice. Leveraging marketing automation tools allows businesses of all sizes to streamline their communication efforts, nurture leads, and foster lasting connections with clients, all while minimizing the tedious task of sending manual emails and texts every time.
How Can Marketing Automation Be Personal?
The word “automated” leads some business owners to believe there’s nothing personal about this type of communication, but that isn’t necessarily true. There are ways to ensure automated communications are tailored to each contact’s needs.
We recommend segmenting your contact lists based on what triggered the lead to fill out a form, call you, schedule a consultation, download a PDF, etc.
- For example, if a potential buyer requests information about how your product or service works, you can set up a campaign that discusses that topic over a series of emails or texts.
- Or, if a prospect is looking specifically for pricing information, you might create a sequence that discusses the different services and packages available, the value of your product or services, and payment options.
- Another prospect might download a case study, indicating they want to hear stories about other customers you’ve helped successfully, warranting an entirely different campaign.
While each request may warrant a different response, creating a unique response for everyone who reaches out or fills out a lead form may not be necessary.
Saving Time With Automation
Imagine having to respond manually to each of these inquiries mentioned above. At first, it might not seem very time-consuming, and you might even enjoy this aspect of communicating with prospects. In each of these scenarios, your follow-up communication will be slightly—or significantly different, and it should be. But over time, you’ll likely see a pattern, and you’ll find yourself repeatedly writing emails and texts that you’ve already written dozens (or hundreds) of times. Not only can this get tedious, but it also might get to the point where it’s unsustainable.
By setting up segmented and automated nurture campaigns, your brand can deliver targeted and personalized messages to its audience at the right time—without manually sending each communication. These campaigns can be customized to various customer journey stages, from initial contact to post-purchase follow-ups, ensuring consistent and meaningful interactions.
Of course, you’ll want to monitor the effectiveness of these campaigns over time and make adjustments as necessary. However, once you set up the automation, you can focus on other business areas, such as closing sales, providing exceptional customer service, and providing an extraordinary customer experience.
Setting Up Automated Nurture Campaigns
Before diving into automation, you’ll need a strategic plan for handling every new lead. Here’s a simple automation strategy to get you started:
Segment Your Audience
Start by categorizing your contact list (and any new leads) based on demographics, interests, and/or how they interact with your brand. This will allow you to deliver highly targeted and relevant communication based on each segment, increasing engagement and conversion rates. Various tools are available to help you manage your contact lists, which we’ll discuss below.
Build an Automation Workflow
For each segment of your audience, map out the prospects’ journey, outlining the sequence of communications and triggers based on user actions and/or time intervals. You may start with a welcome series to introduce new subscribers to your brand, followed by nurture sequences tailored to specific goals or actions.
For example, if someone subscribes to download a PDF, the welcome email or text may simply do just that—welcome them and deliver what they requested. From there, you’ll want to have a series of emails or texts ready related to the content they requested, but that also informs them of other ways you can provide value.
Create Purposeful Content
When communicating with prospects, resist the temptation to ask for a sale with every contact. Instead, take the time to craft compelling and valuable content that resonates with each segment of your audience and where they’re at in their journey.
Answer their most pressing questions. Show them how you can solve their problems. Whether it’s educational resources, product updates, or exclusive offers, delivering content that addresses your client’s specific needs and interests is key to building trust and loyalty. If you don’t give them what they asked for, they may go elsewhere to get it.
Infuse Personalization
Where possible, personalize your emails and texts with dynamic content, such as using the recipient’s name, mentioning recent purchases, or recommending relevant products or services. Show your contacts that you know who they are, what they care about, and that you want to provide value. This humanizes your communication while also making clients feel valued and understood.
Additional Benefits of Automation
There are multiple benefits beyond just time savings when you implement automation practices in your marketing efforts, including:
Increased Consistency
Automated campaigns ensure consistent communication with prospects and clients, preventing missed opportunities and maintaining a strong brand presence. When done manually, email or text communication may not always be prompt and, therefore, is often less effective than it could be if automated.
Effortless Scalability
As your business grows, automation can help you scale your efforts, allowing you to communicate with a larger prospect and client base without sacrificing consistency or personalization. It’s almost impossible to keep up with manual emails and texts as your contact list grows.
Insights and Analytics
Implementing automation into your customer communication allows you to track and analyze behaviors and campaign performance, enabling you to gain valuable insights into client actions and preferences at different stages of their buying journey. This data can also help to identify necessary improvements and opportunities for optimization in future campaigns.
Cost Efficiency
While setting up an automation strategy for your business may require some investment, it will absolutely save you time, resources, and money over time.
Pivot Recommendations for Automation Platforms
At Pivot, we use several automation tools internally and for our clients. There are seemingly endless options, but we highly recommend the following:
Known for its robust CRM and automation features, Keap allows businesses to create customizable workflows and campaign templates to streamline client communications and optimize lead nurturing efforts. While email marketing automation is a big part of their offering, Keap provides an expansive list of solutions for automating many different areas of business operations.
Specializing in e-commerce, Klaviyo provides powerful segmentation and automation tools tailored to online retailers. The platform is designed to help retail, e-commerce, wellness, and restaurant businesses drive sales and increase customer lifetime value through email, SMS, mobile apps, reviews, and more.
A user-friendly email marketing platform suitable for businesses of all sizes, Mailchimp offers automation features such as abandoned cart emails, welcome series, and product recommendations to enhance client engagement. It also plays nicely with most other apps, making integration with your other digital marketing tools easy.
Offering a comprehensive suite of marketing, sales, and customer service tools, HubSpot enables businesses of all types and sizes to create seamless automation workflows that align with their entire customer experience strategy. Users can create the appropriate messaging and deliver it at the optimal time, maximizing each interaction with leads.
Ready to Start or Amplify Your Marketing Automation?
Automating some of your marketing and sales efforts can free up valuable time to allocate to other strategic initiatives, allowing you to focus on growth and innovation. By implementing and leveraging the capabilities of automation platforms like Keap, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and HubSpot, you can more easily stay top-of-mind with clients, build trust, and ultimately achieve long-term success in today’s competitive digital marketplace.
Want to get started with marketing automation? The Pivot team is here to help. Contact us today to get started.
