Any business, regardless of type or size, drives growth by acquiring new customers. Ideally, the process starts with generating leads either via offline or online marketing campaigns. Then, those leads are engaged and nurtured in a systematic manner until a deal is closed.
When generated, every lead is important because you never know which one is going to get you the sale of the year. Therefore, it is necessary to engage them as you capture them. Because it is proven that if you do not engage leads fast enough, they are likely to go cold. Even then, only 37% of businesses respond to a lead within an hour, according to a study by Harvard Business Review.
This means around 63% of businesses are operating without a lead engagement system, which could be costing them potential sales.
Shocking, isn’t it?
However, this fact should not be surprising. Because, even in today’s digital landscape, many companies do not engage leads with an automated solution. It takes tons of resources if leads are engaged manually. On top of that, clients these days demand highly personalized engagement. When you execute a personalized engagement campaign manually, it takes more time to engage a lead. For example, a really bad practice these days is sending an email to a lead that starts with “Dear Sir/Madam” or “To Whom It May Concern”. Emails that start like this are considered as unprofessional and is a huge turn off! But with limited resources, businesses cannot engage a high volume of leads in a personalized manner so this dilemma is a double-edged sword.
This is when businesses should consider having an automated contact engagement system in place. With a solid sales engagement plan and an efficient customer engagement framework, it is easily doable.
Let’s look at the three easy steps to set up a contact engagement process.
Step 1: Lead Collection
The process starts with collecting leads online. In digital marketing, the most common practice to capture leads is setting up an online form. If a lead finds your content/website/landing page convincing enough, then they will fill out the form and submit it. Once the form is submitted, all information is stored in a centralized database or in a CRM. Those leads are immediately sent a confirmation message regarding their form submission.
Step 2: Message Personalization
Once you have those captured leads in the CRM, it is time to engage them fast so you can ignite their purchasing intent. Ideally, this engagement message is sent by a super-personalized email. Now, as discussed above, when you do not have additional resources to spare, personalized engagement takes a lot of time. This is where a digital solution can mitigate this issue. This solution can be an email marketing, SMS blasting, fax blasting, or a voice broadcasting platform. Let’s consider email marketing here. By using an email marketing software, you can build an email template with visual elements. Then, depending on the type of information you capture, you can set up personalization criteria. Don’t worry, this process does not need any technical skills. The best practice here is to provide the lead with an option to respond. Usually, a personalized button to click in the email does the job.
Once the personalization process is done, you can select the list of captured leads in the CRM. The platform will automatically send a personalized engagement email to each of the leads. If you use a scalable email marketing platform, it is possible to engage millions of leads at a time.
Step 3: Metrics and Reporting
Now, you sent personalized engagement emails to all of your captured leads. What now? How do you know whether your leads are good or bad, or if the template you are using is working for you? Are you going to manually count responses from those thousands of emails you sent earlier? Almost impossible!
Again, if you are using the right platform, you can automatically have metrics available that show the performance of your contact engagement campaign. The metrics may be email delivery rates through which you understand the quality of the email template you produced; the email open rate to check if your subject line is appealing enough; or a click-through-rate to measure if the email you sent is powerful enough to make the reader take your desired action (e.g., clicking on a button or link).
Done! It wasn’t too difficult, was it? If it were done manually, it would certainly a difficult task. But, with a powerful customer engagement framework and the right tools in hand, it’s a cup of tea.
Okay! What’s the Next Step?
The next step for you is to find a perfect digital automation solution to set up and launch your contact engagement process.
You can try SimplyCast’s automated contact engagement solution, which is built entirely in-house, using an online form builder, CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation software. It is fully customizable so you can tweak and build contact engagement campaigns the way it meets your solution. With tons of features, you can build engagement campaigns in nearly unlimited ways.
Interested? Book your one-on-demo with our engagement automation solution experts today.
