OPINION: Nurturing your leads with marketing automation

By Bec Newman, creative director and co-founder at INSIGNIS.

How many times have you heard the term, “marketing is dead” or that there’s no point in doing marketing because customers will find you by themselves? It seems like everyone is talking about the rise of marketing automation and how companies should focus on nurturing prospects instead of directly selling to them.

However, many organisations continue to underestimate the true value of marketing automation, with many business leaders having the same mindset, that it can help to automate lead generation by distributing email campaigns. But it is so much more than that as marketing automation software can work across the board to simplify many solutions within your business.

It’s also one of the most effective ways to nurture prospects, from as soon as a lead enters the top of the funnel until they become a loyal customer, efficient marketing automation can help to ensure consistency in providing a service that’s tailored to their needs.

Also, you have the flexibility to engage with your target audience in different forms such as emails, messages and notifications, encouraging them in the right direction when it comes to making the purchasing decision.

Automated communications can help to deliver the correct message to the customer at the right time. For example, more and more companies are using live chats or chatbots driven by AI and machine learning to answer the most common questions about the product/service. The chat has the capabilities to then notify the correct team member that someone has been in touch.

Businesses can stay in touch with customers and keep them engaged with minimum effort. Everything can be scheduled and programmed to save time and resources. Automated messages on emails have the ability to nurture every prospect at every stage of the buyer’s journey until they become a paying customer.

Content can also be personalised to create a better connection, where it has been found that this leads to a 20% increase in sales. Personalised content can be delivered in many different digital formats such as messages, pop-ups and personalised offers and it can be optimised to meet the needs of the customer.

The best way to get the most out of your marketing automation system is to integrate it within your business’s CRM. Organisations can view the entire customer journey on activities from their CRM and this will give you access to vital data, ready to view from a single database as well as allowing you to keep track of all customer interactions. From this, insights can be tracked to identify key trends within the market. As a result, nurturing becomes more efficient.

How to get the most out of your marketing automation

Marketing automation tools can help you to nurture leads without coming across as too salesy. Use the automation platform to categorise leads and develop a database of targeted clients.

Consistency is key to nurturing relationships. Everything should be done to ensure your brand’s message gets across to the audience without confusing them. Marketing automation tools can help you schedule interactions beforehand and keep the audience engaged with the brand.

Also, use emails, blogs, posts etc. to showcase content and make it relevant to your target audience. Email marketing is still one of the best ways to nurture and engage potential prospects, so make sure content is personalised and keep track of all customer interactions as this will help determine where leads are within the sales funnel.

Nurturing prospects has become an integral part of lead generation and although setting up a Marketing automation system that’s integrated within the company’s processes can take some time, it can help your company to automate nurturing processes and provide personalised and meaningful content for your target audience.