How to convert your prospects into customers with Marketing Automation
Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2025 3:30 am
Aligning marketing and sales: a crucial issue
In this process, Marketing Automation will be of great help to you thanks to two major functionalities:
Lead Scoring.
Lead Nurturing.
Lead Scoring
Marketing Automation allows you to measure the degree of maturity of a prospect panama email list based on the history of their behavior towards your brand and your communications.
This feature of Marketing Automation is called Lead Scoring .
Concretely, Lead Scoring consists of determining a list of characteristics for which you will define a score, positive or negative, in order to obtain an overall score of your prospects out of 100.
The closer your prospect has a score to 100, the more qualified and mature he will be.
Here are some examples of criteria we use in setting up our Lead Scoring :
The prospect's function.
The size and turnover of his company.
The date of his potential projects.
The number of pages visited on our website.
The number of clicks in our emails.
The nature of the pages he consulted on our website.
You will naturally understand that a person who visits the pricing page of your website will be closer to making a purchase than a person who reads an article on your blog.
The idea here is to determine a threshold for which you consider that a Lead is mature, ready to be transmitted to a salesperson, so that your Marketing Automation tool automatically transmits it to them via an alert as soon as this Lead reaches the threshold in question.
Lead Nurturing
In B2B, feeding the buyer's thinking has a double advantage: reducing the length of the sales cycle and showing them that you are the best solution to resolve their problem and achieve their objectives.
As a B2B company, it is essential to feed the buyer's thinking to convince them that your new solution perfectly meets their needs. To do this, you must offer high value-added content adapted to the 3 phases of the purchasing process :
Awareness: convince your prospect that their problem needs to be resolved.
Consideration: Encourage your prospect to consider your solution as relevant.
Decision: convince your prospect to trust you.
Lead Nurturing is a Marketing Automation feature that allows you to automate the sending of message sequences offering your prospect quality content to help them move forward in their purchasing process. The idea is to bring them closer to the Decision phase and then pass them on to salespeople.
Lead Nurturing, via Workflows, is a very powerful feature since it allows you to automatically send personalized messages . Contrary to what it sounds like, isn't it? Not really!
Workflows
Vulgarly, a workflow is a sequence of automated actions configured according to the behavior of your prospects.
The idea of workflow is to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Concretely, thanks to workflow, you automatically send a quality message to your prospect based on their profile and behaviors.
For example, you can set up a workflow that sends an email containing a sales presentation to all prospects who have visited your Pricing page. That's for the simple version, but Marketing Automation allows you to go much further.
Best practice is to set up a workflow that covers the entire purchasing process with the aim of automatically feeding your purchasing process.
To help you understand the interest of Workflows, here are the different Lead profiles that you will find in a Marketing Automation tool :
The Lead: This is a prospect who has downloaded a premium content offer on your website.
The MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): this is a Lead that has reached maturity, close to the act of purchase.
The SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): this is an MQL that has been worked on and deemed relevant by the sales department.
The Opportunity: This is an SQL for which an offer is in progress.
The Customer: that’s all we wish for you!
Now let's imagine that a prospect downloads your latest white paper. This is a Lead. The goal of your Workflow will be to convert it into an MQL so that it is then automatically transmitted to a salesperson.
With Lead Scoring, you have the ability to set a rule whereby a Lead becomes an MQL after performing X actions on your communications. From then on, you simply need to set up a Workflow consisting of a series of messages encouraging your Lead to perform their actions.
Example of a 3-step workflow:
Step #1:
▸ A person matching your ideal prospect profile downloads your white paper and receives a message offering 3 complementary articles within 48 hours.
Step #2:
▸ If she clicks on one of the links in this email, she will receive a new email 48 hours later offering to download a customer case.
▸ If she doesn't click, she receives an email within a week offering her a new white paper.
Step #3:
▸ If this Lead has completed all the proposed actions, it is automatically switched to MQL and transmitted to a salesperson.
In this example, you feed the buyer's thinking, bring it to maturity and pass it on to a salesperson, all automatically. Not bad, right? Your salespeople will appreciate it!
In this process, Marketing Automation will be of great help to you thanks to two major functionalities:
Lead Scoring.
Lead Nurturing.
Lead Scoring
Marketing Automation allows you to measure the degree of maturity of a prospect panama email list based on the history of their behavior towards your brand and your communications.
This feature of Marketing Automation is called Lead Scoring .
Concretely, Lead Scoring consists of determining a list of characteristics for which you will define a score, positive or negative, in order to obtain an overall score of your prospects out of 100.
The closer your prospect has a score to 100, the more qualified and mature he will be.
Here are some examples of criteria we use in setting up our Lead Scoring :
The prospect's function.
The size and turnover of his company.
The date of his potential projects.
The number of pages visited on our website.
The number of clicks in our emails.
The nature of the pages he consulted on our website.
You will naturally understand that a person who visits the pricing page of your website will be closer to making a purchase than a person who reads an article on your blog.
The idea here is to determine a threshold for which you consider that a Lead is mature, ready to be transmitted to a salesperson, so that your Marketing Automation tool automatically transmits it to them via an alert as soon as this Lead reaches the threshold in question.
Lead Nurturing
In B2B, feeding the buyer's thinking has a double advantage: reducing the length of the sales cycle and showing them that you are the best solution to resolve their problem and achieve their objectives.
As a B2B company, it is essential to feed the buyer's thinking to convince them that your new solution perfectly meets their needs. To do this, you must offer high value-added content adapted to the 3 phases of the purchasing process :
Awareness: convince your prospect that their problem needs to be resolved.
Consideration: Encourage your prospect to consider your solution as relevant.
Decision: convince your prospect to trust you.
Lead Nurturing is a Marketing Automation feature that allows you to automate the sending of message sequences offering your prospect quality content to help them move forward in their purchasing process. The idea is to bring them closer to the Decision phase and then pass them on to salespeople.
Lead Nurturing, via Workflows, is a very powerful feature since it allows you to automatically send personalized messages . Contrary to what it sounds like, isn't it? Not really!
Workflows
Vulgarly, a workflow is a sequence of automated actions configured according to the behavior of your prospects.
The idea of workflow is to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Concretely, thanks to workflow, you automatically send a quality message to your prospect based on their profile and behaviors.
For example, you can set up a workflow that sends an email containing a sales presentation to all prospects who have visited your Pricing page. That's for the simple version, but Marketing Automation allows you to go much further.
Best practice is to set up a workflow that covers the entire purchasing process with the aim of automatically feeding your purchasing process.
To help you understand the interest of Workflows, here are the different Lead profiles that you will find in a Marketing Automation tool :
The Lead: This is a prospect who has downloaded a premium content offer on your website.
The MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): this is a Lead that has reached maturity, close to the act of purchase.
The SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): this is an MQL that has been worked on and deemed relevant by the sales department.
The Opportunity: This is an SQL for which an offer is in progress.
The Customer: that’s all we wish for you!
Now let's imagine that a prospect downloads your latest white paper. This is a Lead. The goal of your Workflow will be to convert it into an MQL so that it is then automatically transmitted to a salesperson.
With Lead Scoring, you have the ability to set a rule whereby a Lead becomes an MQL after performing X actions on your communications. From then on, you simply need to set up a Workflow consisting of a series of messages encouraging your Lead to perform their actions.
Example of a 3-step workflow:
Step #1:
▸ A person matching your ideal prospect profile downloads your white paper and receives a message offering 3 complementary articles within 48 hours.
Step #2:
▸ If she clicks on one of the links in this email, she will receive a new email 48 hours later offering to download a customer case.
▸ If she doesn't click, she receives an email within a week offering her a new white paper.
Step #3:
▸ If this Lead has completed all the proposed actions, it is automatically switched to MQL and transmitted to a salesperson.
In this example, you feed the buyer's thinking, bring it to maturity and pass it on to a salesperson, all automatically. Not bad, right? Your salespeople will appreciate it!