In a small marketing team in a growing business, you’re often performing a near-impossible balancing act – trying to drive proactive campaigns and strategy whilst providing more reactive support to the wider business. Your time is a premium resource, and any methods or tools you can get more are certainly worth exploring. I have been in an in-house role with and without marketing automation, and let me tell you, it’s preferable to be “with”. With that in mind, let’s take a look at 3 ways automated nurture programmes make your life easier.
Set it and forget it
…this heading might be a bit of a misnomer, because you should definitely not set a campaign off and running and then forget about it, but I like rhyming, and hopefully you’ll understand the point I’m trying to make.
Scheduling email sends, creating list segments, and organising follow-up campaigns are fiddly marketing admin tasks that when you add up over time, end up being pretty time-consuming. Using marketing automation and nurture programmes, you can plan out a whole campaign from start to finish, schedule it ahead of time and let it run. This gives you much more time to reactively focus on the more engaged leads from the campaign, review progress and adjust the course should you need to. If you’re – for the want of a better expression – making it up as you go along, you’re playing catch-up and just trying to get campaigns out the door. You end up saying things like “these engaged leads haven’t received an email in nearly 2 weeks, we should probably get something out to them”. If you’re running a well structured nurture programme, this doesn’t happen. Contacts are loaded in either manually or when they meet some sort of criteria (even less hands-on for you), and segmented as they move through. When you’ve got engaged leads moving smoothly through your funnel, you’ll thank Past You for being so dang organised.
Your salespeople will love you
As I’ve explored in previous blog posts, the relationship between sales and marketing in some businesses can be traditionally quite tenuous. Usually it’s due to lack of communication – one doesn’t know what the other is doing. There can also be some tension around leads – marketing gleefully passes leads on to sales that they proclaim are “really interested, honest”, only for the salesperson to find that they’re really not that bothered. Or, a salesperson gets a sniff of a lead that a marketing person still wants to nurture – and you lose their interest by going too hard too soon. Using automated nurture programmes, you have much more control over the lead’s journey through the funnel. By carefully planning at the activity and each stage of the funnel, you can ensure that by the time the lead reaches your sales team, they are super engaged and very receptive to a call. You’ll be closing deals in no time – so you’ve got a happy marketing team and a happy sales team skipping off into the sunset together.
Measure success more easily
Using a more “traditional” approach to marketing campaigns, reporting and measuring can be tricky. Sure, you can look at the number of leads generated, and by extension the number which were converted into customers. But when you’ve got a variety of activities, some of which are reactive, piece-mealed together under the umbrella of one campaign, how do you truly measure success, and attribute the value of the various channels and messages? I’ve been there – getting numbers from that tool, from that email, from that form, and smushing them together in as positive a way as possible to report into the wider business. Using a nurture programme, you can set out a campaign from start to finish, and whichever tool you’re using can report on the success of both individual activity and the campaign as a whole. This gives you much more visibility over the different aspects of your campaign, and which particular blends of activity deliver success.
Need some help and advice on setting up automated nurture programmes that’ll make your life easier, get your more leads and keep your customers happy? Get in touch – we can help you design and execute amazing campaigns that get results.
