Marketing Automation: How to Nurture Leads Episode 4

The main purpose of marketing automation is to automate the touches necessary to A) keep your company top of mind with a prospect with personalized content when the sales/marketing teams don’t have the resources (Nurturing), B) automate prospect qualification & escalation (Lead Scoring), and C) provide powerful prospect conversion analytics.

So how does it happen?

Since we help companies with Pardot and we use it internally, we will use Pardot as an example. In Pardot, lead nurturing starts with Engagement Studio. Each program is designed around a specific or purpose. As a rule of thumb, the more segmented you can get with programs, the more personalized experience for prospects. After all, you are automating “personalized” communication.

In the drip program, you will set emails to send at different times. Then, if action is taken, such as a click, you can program it to notify sales in Salesforce.com, automate a task, or something else using automation rules.

At Redpath, we have drip programs set up for various stages of the sales cycle. When a new prospect is created we add them to a Nurture drip program that will send them weekly emails that talk about us and what we do. After that, we can send them to an Unqualified Drip Program if we find they are not a good fit.

• Nurture Drip Program
• Unqualified Drip Program
• Re-engage Drip Program

As they go through the drip programs, the are automatically scored through Pardot’s Lead Scoring, and notifies sales if they’ve interacted with the programs. Additionally, if we find that they are unqualified, but come back to our site, we have a program that will notify us if they come back to our site and mark them as “Re-engage” in Salesforce.com.

We have some additional drip programs that teach the prospect about salesforce.com. We have one for the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud:

• Sales Cloud Drip Program
• Service Cloud Drip Program
• Marketing Cloud Drip Program

See for yourself! Head over to the Pardot Nurturing Lab by clicking here.

Here’s another example. Let’many sources including social, Web, and events and yof different services. You acquire customers from many sources including social, Web, and events and your marketing team does a good job of promoting your business. However, there is often a disconnect between marketing and sales teams.

Marketing will produce a list of leads to send to sales, but they do not know how qualified they are. Sales will call on prospects who are not warm enough and the prospect loses interest because Sales called prematurely. Marketing also struggles to segment messages further to those who seem interested and those who don’t in a timely manner.

Enter: Marketing Automation. The marketing team can now segment and organize prospect into highly personalized drip programs. Sales is automatically notified of qualified leads who meet certain thresholds such as a certain lead score or a specific action. Each program will have these automated triggers built in so marketing won’t have to send updated lead lists from their CRM.

They create one drip program for each of their services:

• Service A
  
• Service B
  
• Service C
  
• Service D
  
• Service E
  

Each of these will evaluate which pages they have interacted with. So if a prospect goes to the Service A page and then the pricing page, it will make sure they send an 25% off offer email sooner than prospects who didn’t travel to a pricing page.

The marketing team also set up programs for strategic uses:

• Long-term Nurture: send a monthly email talking about what is new with their
• New customers: Sends emails to help someone learn how to use the software and will notify support if they are viewing a lot of support articles.
• Upsell Drip: sends emails to customers who have been using the service for six months or more.
• New Prospects: Sends overview emails about the company and all the services they provide. If a prospect clicks on one, they will automatically get added to the service drip they clicked on.
• Unqualified drip: This drip is for people who are not interested. It is programmed to send messages based on the reason why they weren’t interested such as too expensive, chose a specific competitor, or not ready to buy yet.

Key takeaways

• Marketing automation can save your sales and marketing teams time with escalating and qualifying leads.
• Drip programs are highly customizable to react to prospect actions.
• Sales and marketing won’t have to constantly run reports on who to follow up with because the Lead Score will automatically sort high priority leads for them.
• Prospects can receive automated, real-time messages and offers as they are interacting with your marketing.

Read the other episodes:

Episode 1: Auto What?
Episode 2: Salesforce.com + Marketing Automation
Episode 3: Pardot + Gmail
Episode 4: How to Nurture Leads