Workflow automation isn’t anything new. Today, it has emerged as a major trend in the industry. More and more enterprises and organizations across industries are adopting the concept of workflow automation to streamline business operations, enhance workplace productivity, and boost ROI. Essentially, workflow automation refers to designing, executing, and automating workflows or business processes based on the pre-defined and standard business rules.
Workflow automation is becoming a reality of many industries, and marketing is one of them. Marketing workflow automation aims to amplify and expedite your marketing campaign efforts through automated processes so that you don’t need to be heavily dependent on human resources for all the work.
Workflows lie at the heart of marketing automation. These workflows activate specific triggers according to a user’s action or engagement with a brand.
We’ll elaborate on this through an example. Let’s assume, you as a marketer, want to nurture a user via emails, provided they fill out a trial request form on your official website. To do this, you have to create a workflow that will clearly represent the communication style you desire to have with the user. So, if we break down this particular workflow using HubSpot (one of the most widely used marketing automation systems), it should look something like this:
This simple flowchart will ensure that everyone working on the project understands the objectives of the campaign in each step and collaborate accordingly. By creating a well-structured and detailed plan to improve marketing automation workflows, you can free up the valuable time of your human employees and encourage them to focus on the administrative tasks that demand human cognition.
Now that we’ve highlighted the importance of marketing workflow automation let’s focus on optimizing marketing automation workflows. Keep reading further if you wish to improve marketing automation workflows for your organization!
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Five marketing automation workflows you should implement in 2020
Here are the five most important workflows and our tips to optimize marketing automation workflows for the best results!
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Welcome workflow
Each time a new user signs up with your company, they become a new contact who has shown interest in your brand. This involves a conversion – from being a mere visitor, the user is now a registered contact. Since registration is a form of interaction with your brand, the contacts who register with you are more likely to accept relevant marketing messages from your brand. The best way to keep such registered contacts in the loop is to send out welcome emails. Stats confirm that subscribers who receive welcome emails depict 33% more engagement with a brand!
Optimization tip: When seeking to optimize your welcome workflow, always send the first email immediately after a user registers with your company. Also, make sure to personalize the emails to make the users feel both welcome and valuable.
- Re-engagement workflow
Did you know that it can cost you seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer?
Over time, it is natural for customers to stop interacting with your brand. There could be many reasons behind this, including change in preferences, needs, job, location, or maybe simply because your brand is failing to meet their expectations. In such situations, it becomes crucial to re-engage such customers and bring them back to you. You can do this by designing re-engagement campaigns to remind your customers about the value proposition of your brand and assure them that they are still your valuable clients.
Optimization tip: Before you start creating re-engagement campaigns, take time to plan it well. Start by defining what constitutes an inactive contact in the context of your business. Monitor user behavior for your website, such as how much traffic you are getting daily, what’s the CTR, scroll time, etc. Try to get to the root of the issue – why has a user stopped interacting with you? Once you get enough data to back these issues, you can create a comprehensive re-engagement strategy.
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- Cart abandonment workflow
Anyone who’s in the online business has faced cart abandonment issues. Apparently, most online businesses face high cart abandonment rates ranging anywhere between 50% to 80%! Cart abandonment is a clear sign of willingness to purchase, but due to some reason, the prospective customers quit. It may be because of the price or the possibility of better deals elsewhere. Mobile platforms register the highest rate of cart abandonment (85.6%). Cart abandonment workflows aim to find solutions to win the customer back into the purchasing mindset.
Optimization tip: You can influence a prospective customer to make a purchase in multiple ways. For instance, you could send emails containing reminders of specific products, boost the value proposition of the products, send out attractive offers and discounts, and so on. Most importantly, you must aim to improve the customer journey via a combination of cleverly applied marketing communication.
- Topic workflow
Topic workflows are an excellent technique of requesting a user’s contact information in exchange for a digitally downloading or accessing other types of content, a.k.a, lead magnet. A lead magnet can be an e-book, or a webinar, or a newsletter, or a blog – basically, any type of valuable content that revolves around a specific topic. Since content is the core of the topic workflow, you must aim to create high-quality and relevant content. By doing so, you can boost your conversion rate by 30-40%!
Optimization tip: Segment your users into different personas according to their topics of interest. This will enable you to create customized email strategies/campaigns to provide maximum value to your users. The more relevant content you create and send out, the higher will be the chances of driving your contacts (leads) farther into the sales cycle.
- Lead nurturing workflow
The lead nurturing workflow follows the topic workflow. Once you acquire leads through your content, you must maintain the flow of value to those leads so that they can advance to the next stage of their customer journey. This process of keeping up the flow of value to your leads is known as lead nurturing. You can nurture your leads by using highly targeted content, using multi-channel nurturing strategies, regular follow-ups, and sending personalized emails, to name a few. The benefits of nurturing leads are many. Not only do the nurtured leads make bigger purchases (nearly 47% of the time), they also have a 23% shorter sales cycle. By leveraging a lead nurturing workflow, you can build meaningful relationships with your leads and also prep them to enter the sales cycle.
Optimization tip: Make sure you nurture the leads through a mix of marketing techniques and campaigns before pushing them to the sales cycle. Set clear goals for your nurturing campaign, identify your target audience, map the content to each stage of the customer journey, and review the results to see the areas of improvement for optimal success.
The ultimate goal of marketing automation is to save precious business hours and redirect your human resources to the more strategic areas of your business. The best method of optimizing marketing workflow automation is to use a marketing automation system (MAS) like HubSpot.
HubSpot’s workflow tool will take care of all your marketing automation needs so that you need not spend time on repetitive tasks. Get in touch us today, and visualize workflows according to your unique needs, use workflows to set up webhooks, score leads, convert leads to sales, trigger internal notifications, and so much more – the possibilities are never-ending!
