8 Thing Marketers Should Automate to Drive Leads & Revenue

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8 THINGS MARKETERS SHOULD AUTOMATE
TO DRIVE LEADS AND REVENUE
Many marketers are struggling to provide the personal touch today’s buyers want.Given the
challenge of scaling individualized communications across dozens, hundreds or even thousands
of prospects, that’s understandable. Perhaps counterintuitively, the solution lies in automation. But
simply automating processes won’t cut it – you have to use automation to understand buyer intent,
engage in your prospects’ interests and allow them to self-move through their journey.
Depending on your needs, you can use automation to acquire, convert, grow, retain or reactivate. Simply find a business
problem, begin collecting behaviors (Web, email, social and more), and use these to create a unique, personable
communication experience across touch points. Here are 8 things you can automate to help invigorate your marketing
programs and drive more revenue:
CoreMotives
1Data Enrichment
The database is the heart of a
modern-day marketing program,
so it’s necessary to regularly breathe
new life into it by providing updated
preference, demographic
and behavioral information.
Automation can help achieve
this by facilitating the “getting to
know you” process.
For starters, you could use a basic
email campaign to encourage
or incent prospects to update
their records, leading them to a
prepopulatedWeb form where they could
update their information and provide additional
preference and demographic details.
2Nurture Programs
What’s your story? Nurture programs enable you to
educate prospects who aren’t yet ready to engage
a sales resource and gently guide these buyers through the
purchase process by delivering relevant content such as
white papers, articles, and event andWebinar invitations.
With marketing automation technology, you can set up
programs that gradually help you collect data, build the
relationship and are responsive to prospect interests
and behaviors. Easily build nurture campaigns that route
prospects down numerous different paths based on whether
they opened your email, downloaded your content and/or
shared it with their social networks.
As an added bonus, robust automation platforms offer
integrations that enhance sales and marketing alignment.
These systems give sales visibility into a lead’s behaviors
(site visits, downloads, link clicks, form submissions, video
plays, etc.), which salespeople can use to have
more effective conversations with prospects,
and enable sales to drop contacts into a
nurture program.
3Welcome Programs
Sending a personalized,
automated welcome email is
an excellent way to quickly engage
prospects by educating them about
your value proposition, asking them
to tell you more about themselves, and
providing resources and helpful information
personalized to their point of entry or
interests. Depending on the business, many
savvy marketers are even moving beyond welcome
messages to activation or onboarding programs that guide
the prospect or new customer through the process of getting
the most out of your free trial or online services.
4Product / Service Reviews
andTestimonials
Asking for reviews of your products and services
can provide you with valuable content you can use to nurture
prospects and entice them to take the desired course of ac-
tion.Where applicable, follow a purchase, download or event
with an automated message asking for a review.
For best results, don’t just send a boring message request-
ing a review — show some personality and be helpful,
including links to:
• Related thought capital
• Customer service info
• Owner’s manual, knowledge base or forums
Once you’ve built up an archive of reviews and/or
testimonials, you can include these peer reviews in your

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content, which can be a powerful way to drive conversions.
Even better: Use dynamic content to populate your messages
with testimonials aligned to the prospect’s interests, behaviors
or position in the buying cycle.
5Ordering
If you have a large product line, offer dozens of services
and/or have a large sales team, moving to a more
automated ordering process may be beneficial. In many cases,
automation can enable you to free up valuable sales resources
that can be reallocated to moving leads through the funnel.
For example, if you have a large enterprise sales team tasked
with personally delivering new-product updates to business
clients and collecting orders, you can use automation for
seasonal product order reminders, product relaunches for items
that were previously out of supply, refill orders and more.
Bottom line?Automation enables you to create an ongoing
dialogue with business customers without creating additional
work for sales representatives.And as an added bonus,
automation makes it easy to send a thank you confirmation.
6Transactional Emails
Does your business engage in transactions that require
order status receipts, service request updates, and
shipping notices or confirmations? In this instant-message
age in which waiting days or hours to get a transactional
confirmation is unacceptable, delivery is the single most
important aspect of a transactional email.A robust marketing
automation platform enables you to set up your system so the
transaction triggers these emails immediately.
A well-branded transactional message sent within minutes is
great, but don’t stop there. Go beyond the basic transaction
or receipt information and provide additional content that
provides value.This might include product usage tips,
answers to frequently asked questions, delivery tracking
information or links to community forums.This is also a good
place to invite recipients to connect with you socially via
LinkedIn,Twitter or Facebook.
While transactional content should make up the bulk of these
messages, you can also use these emails to cross-sell or upsell
other products and services. Use dynamic content to populate
these messages with info specifically related to the buyer’s
purchase, industry or stated preferences.
7Events
For many businesses, events are a critical part of the
nurturing process. From initial invite to post-event
message, automation enables you to easily respond to how
prospects interact with your communications and events.
For example, you might use your marketing automation
platform to set up three messaging tracks for an event as
follows:
• Invitation: Initial invite followed by messages
depending on whether they opened but didn’t click
(reminder), clicked but didn’t register (reminder with
alternate resources) or actually registered for the
event (move to confirmation track).
• Confirmation: Send event details and reminder pre-
event, then follow up afterwards based on whether
they actually attended (thank you note, survey, related
resources and/or invite to set up a call with a sales rep)
or didn’t attend (route to “Did NotAttend” track).
• Did Not Attend: Send “sorry we missed you”
message with option to view slides, download the
recording or watch a video of the event, plus related
resources and alternate calls to action.
8Lifecycle Messages
The same foods you love to eat for dinner might
not be so appealing first thing in the morning.
Likewise, buyers crave different content at different times
in the buying cycle. So, consider segmenting campaigns by
stage of the relationship, specifically tuning different email
messages and offers based on both explicit and implicit
indicators of your customer’s readiness to purchase. For
example, messaging might change throughout a customer
lifecycle as follows:
• “Interested” Phase: Welcome messages,
educational and best practices content, promotions
for first purchase
• “Engaged” Phase: Reminders of upcoming events,
targeted content based on website page visits, pric-
ing and feature comparisons, testimonials
• “Lapsed” Phase: Surveys to gain a better
understanding of the buyer’s needs, incentives to revisit
website, promotions to encourage re-engagement
By “listening” to buyer cues and delivering the right
content at the right time for each prospect, you’ll nurture
more relevant dialogues and build stronger connections.
For more tips on marketing automation and all things digital
marketing, check out our blog and Resources page.
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8 Things Marketers Should Automate To Drive Leads and Revenue