Workflow automation is the process of automating a repetitive task, so it's done automatically, not manually. And by using an automation tool like HubSpot or Marketo, you cut resources and time out of your equation. But most importantly, automation can increase your B2B lead close rate:
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. – Forrester Research
In this post, we’ll cover the benefits of workflow automation for B2B lead nurturing.
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Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
As your business scales up lead generation, it becomes impossible to personally guide every prospect with custom emails — especially hard to qualify prospects.
But marketing automation can do the busy work for you. B2B marketers can send lead nurturing emails for many stages:
Over time, these sequences will nurture contacts into qualified leads, ultimately increasing the chance they become paying customers.
The average sales cycle has increased 22% over the past five years, due to more decision makers being involved in the buying process. This means more work especially for B2B marketing.
However, nurtured leads experience a 23% shorter sales cycle.
By nurturing leads automatically, you can facilitate education on your own terms. This means dishing up content that explains your solution, appeases hesitations, and offers value. Then, you can bypass the waiting game for your lead to wander back to a certain page or marketing material.
Overall, automated nurturing shortens an often unattended sales process.
Sales teams are busy. And while most sales reps know that following up is crucial to close the deal, the average salesperson only makes two attempts to reach a prospect.
But what if salespeople could reach leads at the right time?
Workflow automation can provide helpful clues to salespeople about when a prospect is interested. For example, you can receive notification emails when a lead takes a specific action, such as downloading a certain eBook, or visiting your pricing page. You can also set up automatic lead scoring to highlight the best-fit leads.
By identifying the hottest leads for your sales team, they can prioritize calls with the best outcomes. Moreover, when processes are automated, no leads will fall through the cracks.
Marketers can create targeted buyer personas, and create custom content and programs for these segments. Then, these are sent in targeted campaigns via workflow automation.
With automation like HubSpot, you can transfer your company's target personas into automated digital follow-up actions, like targeted campaigns.
Segmented campaigns receive over 100% more clicks, according to MailChimp.
This leads to a more effective and efficient process for closing sales. And furthermore, automation reports can give you helpful analysis of how each persona is engaging. That way, you can double down on successful targeted campaigns, and increase conversions overall through cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
77% of CMOs at top performing companies indicate that their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation is to increase revenue.
Nurtured leads close deals more often, and more quickly — but there's another huge benefit, too:
Research also shows that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
This is because nurtured leads trust your brand, and they've been educated more fully. Therefore, they are more comfortable making larger and more educated investments.
Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.
How? Because it eliminates repetitive manual processes, while erasing human error.
For example, how are leads currently assigned to sales reps? Marketing automation that integrates with a CRM (Like HubSpot Sales) can assign leads to sales reps automatically based on geographic location, sales rep capacity, or other factors.
You can also send one-to-one email sequences based on a prospect's actions. So, if they ignore two emails in a row, you can send them a very specific "Just checking in" email. This means less time spent manually organizing sales timelines and crafting custom emails.
Now, salespeople get to spend more time doing what they do best: closing deals.
63% of marketers say that setting measurable objectives for each of their campaigns is the biggest value from marketing automation.
The power of workflow automation lies in the analytics. Marketers can measure performance, learn from mistakes, and adjust campaigns in real time. Analytics make it all possible. By capitalizing on successes, teams can deliver content — in the right order, and at the right time — and close sales faster.
Lead nurturing is essential for all businesses that wish to drive higher profits and ROI. Setting up a workflow automation on a platform such as HubSpot enables marketers to do many important B2B tasks: Follow-up with leads automatically, nurture leads further down the sales funnel, and turn more leads into customers.
Sources:
https://dedicated.madisonlogic.com/jd/marketing/content/infographics/B2B_Journey_Infographic.pdf
https://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2010/09/hard-data-to-justify-your-marketing.html
https://mailchimp.com/resources/research/effects-of-list-segmentation-on-email-marketing-stats/
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