You are working in a sales team. Imagine a situation, you have list of thousand people with their phone numbers and email ids, you want to sell them your product. What options you have? Pick up the phone and dial all the thousand numbers or send bulk emails to all the thousand and wait for their response. You know how people respond to such bulk emails and phone calls. Is there any better way to accomplish this? Surely there is, with technology called marketing automation.
As a professional, MBA in marketing management, after distance MBA, you would like to reach more and more customers but in a most effective way and not through age-old method like just mass mailing. We know that in sales there is concept of pipeline or funnel created from qualified leads to closing the deal. The same strategy can be applied even for hunting the potential customers.
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost –Marketo
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refer to the software which can automatically do various tasks in marketing. It will help you put your focus on priority tasks and take care of all the repeated tasks itself. Simply put, marketing automation software would help you generate and manage your lead pipeline in the most efficient way.
Marketing automation can generate a pipeline of good quality leads which can be handed over to the sales team for further actions and closing the deal. As these leads are coming through many qualifying filters, chances of them getting converted as customers are very high.
Lead Nurturing and not selling
Concept of marketing automation is about good quality lead generation and not about selling. In the marketing automation approach, “hard sell” is avoided. Customers are given value based on their interest in a step by step approach to attract them. Instead of blasting bulk big emails, which anyone hardly likes to read, a more personalized approach is taken to reach a few qualified leads. With the help of technology, it is possible to deliver personalized contents automatically without human intervention.
Lead nurturing is the process of developing and strengthening relationship with customer at every stage of his/her buying journey. A customer may be at any stage in the funnel, lead nurturing takes efforts to listen to the needs of the prospective customers. Its aim is to provide more value to the customer by answering his/her query. By doing this marketing and communication effort, customers are pushed through the pipeline to make them more probable leads for purchase. Obviously, nurtured leads are not only relevant but also would have higher probability to get converted as buyer.
Nurtured leads makes 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads – The Annuitas Group
Let us see how an automated email workflow can save lot of time and effort for us. Here is the sequence of emails we can send in our lead nurturing endeavor.
- Email about your new product or service to all the addresses in your mailing database.
- People who opened the first email, send your latest white paper related to the technology/process and its applications. (Your product also uses the same technology.)
- After a week, send a success story of your customer who was using your product to the people who downloaded the white paper ( in step 2).
- When someone downloads this success story, your sales team knows that this person might be interested in the purchase and sales team takes over.
Here the chances of success are much higher as the lead is nurtured. As the lead is consuming more and more content of his interest, he is more likely to do purchase.
Why Automation?
When you plan many such marketing campaigns, tracking them at every stage manually is just impossible. When you want to reach hundreds and thousands of customers daily, the only solution is to automate the interactions. With marketing automation platforms it becomes easy. The lead may be at any stage of the pipeline, once you define the contents and the workflow, the content would be delivered automatically. Leads are scored based on their readiness to buy. When the scores are high enough, a manual intervention like call or visit from sales team can be arranged to finally close the deal.
Additionally, these automation tools track all the marketing campaigns and generate reports which can help management understand how different campaigns are performing. Using them a manger can deploy the marketing budget in more efficient way.
Distance MBA in marketing management
Marketing Automation is key knowledge area for someone who wants to do good career in marketing management after pursuing distance MBA. He/she should also study some of the leading marketing automation platforms like Marketo, hubspot etc.
