Email workflows are the next advancement in automated email marketing and represent a giant stride forward in lead nurturing. Half of all leads may be “good” but not yet ”sales ready” when first contacted. Multiple follow ups are then necessary to “warm up” these leads and eventually produce sales.
There is a Problem
The problem is that there’s never sufficient time to manually stay on top of an extensive contact list, and a significant number of valuable leads are never nurtured. And, many recipients will receive emails that are of no interest to them. Your list is composed of different individuals each with differing interests, needs, and buying habits. Email workflows give you the ability to nurture your contacts on an individualized basis. Your list can divide itself into segments according to behaviors exhibited by the leads themselves. Research shows that organizations using marketing automation to nurture prospects experience an impressive increase of 451% in qualified leads.
Email Workflows – How They Work
Emails in a workflow system utilize an “if this then that” rationale. For instance, you could have a series of welcome emails to a new customer, to owners of abandoned shopping carts, or to social media contacts encouraging them to share content with their friends. Workflows then feed triggers into the system to assign contacts to the relevant email responses.
Email Workflows Benefit Marketers Because They:
- Allow true personalization.
- Produce many more qualified leads.
- Generate higher opening rates of emails by recipients.
- Improve the time it takes to produce a sale.
- Provide the ability to re-engage inactive contacts.
- Bring about more repeat customers.
- Help leverage the power of highly-engaged contacts.
- Make upselling easier and more effective.
- Increase cyclical purchases.
- Supply valuable data on customers and campaigns.
Best Practices
Getting the best value out of your workflows means designing content that always places your brand squarely in front of customers and encourages them to inform you how they prefer to interact with you. Here are some ways to accomplish this.
Design multi-email workflows: To turn a cold lead into one that’s ready for a sale will require sending out more than a single email. For example, sending one welcome email is a “no-brainer.” However, sending a series of welcoming messages will lead to an increase in conversions.
Recognize the importance of strategies: Always consider where one workflow ends and the next begins. The ideal should be for each customer to be assigned to two or more appropriate workflows simultaneously.
Set goals: Construct workflows the same way you’d build a user journey through the various pages of your website – each step should be its own small sales funnel contained within an overarching strategy.
Don’t waste your data: Analyze the information received from your customers to give you an understanding of what works and help create more targeted email workflows down the road.
Construct workflows around field updates: Many names on your email list will undergo a “field change” because of marriage, relocation, change in employment status, etc. Capturing these updates in your workflows will keep you on top of your customers’ needs and their changing relationships to your brand.
Add net promoter scores to post-purchase emails: Autoresponders constantly crank out post-purchase emails, but these messages can also be used to deliver significant marketing benefits by inputting Net Promoter Scoring (NPS).
Utilize the topical: Build your workflows according to your customers’ interests and encourage them to proceed down the sales funnel by sending them topical emails.
Make use of live events: Email workflows are great for promoting real-life or digital live events. You can profit from the before-the-event “buzz,” the attendance, and event-related materials that you can send.
Conclusion
Email workflow technology provides so many advantages that it deserves serious consideration by your business. Please contact us to see how we can help you.