Have you considered how you’re going to nurture leads that are/will be coming through your inbound marketing efforts onto your website, or how to target accounts through Account Based Marketing that you want to engage over a period of time. How do you move contacts further down the sales funnel? How do you deal with hot leads that need to be acted on by sales immediately. The best way is by setting up workflows with a marketing automation platform.

According to Forrester, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads and according to Marketing2Lead, prospects nurtured in automated workflows have a 23% shorter sales cycle.

Workflows are such an important tool in the marketers toolbox, it's vital that you set them up correctly, and keep them updated ... so is the effort worth the return? You better believe it. Here are some reasons to get it right.

Impact Conversion Rates

Prospective customers will rarely make an immediate purchase when they first visit your website. The modern buyer wants self service information ... generally they research ideas and possible solutions, they are highly self-directed. If you do not consider the buyer's journey in the first place then applying marketing automation without mapping out this journey will seriously affect conversion rates and the quality of leads being passed to sales. The buyers journey should be mapped through brand awareness, consideration, the purchase decision, and customer loyalty.

Churn Prevention

Having spent a lot of effort attracting prospects or engaging with key contacts in target accounts, it is really important to prevent churn. Prospects can churn for various reasons; they could lack the time to stay up to date with your brand, your products are not of interest, your content is not engaging.

It's simply not possible to manage lots of contacts manually, and so workflows and marketing automation is vital in the process of preventing churn. Good design at the outset is vital, but you need to fully understand and analyse your workflows on an ongoing basis, so you can identify the areas where churn is common, and then make the necessary changes. 

Improvement in customer loyalty

Some customers want to be left alone to use the product they've purchased. They will typically only communicate with the company when they experience problems or need help. If companies only communicate with their clients when they want to up sell, or solve problems then this can create a huge customer loyalty issue ... customer churn is even more expensive that prospect churn!

Maintaining communications and keeping your finger on the pulse ... understanding the ongoing needs of your customers can be helped using workflows and automation. Customer satisfaction surveys, social media, and email announcements can help you maintain a direct connection with your clients, and workflows can also be used for internal alerts as well as keeping customers engaged with your brand, values, products and services.

How to ensure your marketing automation workflows are delivering for your business? Here are some quick tips; 

1. Map out the buyers journey 
2. Set out your workflows with a goal in mind
3. Understand fully what conversion assets you have and where they fit in the buyers journey 
4. Map out the workflows before committing - use paper, whiteboards, yellow stickies
5. Fully understand the capabilities of your marketing automation system 
6. Understand fully how to measure the effectiveness of your workflows
7. Seek expert guidance  

Interested in finding out how workflows and a marketing automation system can increase your sales pipeline, improve sales conversion and help fuel growth in your business? 

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