Marketing Automation: It's All About Timing

Marketing Automation: It's All About Timing

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Marketing Automation

Succeeding in sales is not so much about luck as it is about timing. Your leads need to be in the right frame of mind and the right place financially as well in order to be in a position to make a purchase from you. If it’s not the right time, your sales pitch might fall on deaf ears.

Finding the perfect readiness window between you and your lead can be tough, but don’t give up! If it’s not the right time now, who’s to say the right time won’t be sometime in the future? It is a waste of your time as a sales representative to give up on a lead as soon as they tell you they aren’t able to buy the first time you reach out to them – or even the second for that matter!

This is where marketing automation comes in.

Marketing automation is able to give you a helping hand in terms of staying in touch with your “not right nows” and can help you determine when they might change into “I’m interested nows,” so you can follow up with them and turn them into paying customers! What’s more, marketing automation helps you do this without you having to devote valuable time you can be using to convert hot leads.

“OK, you’ve piqued my interest,” you might be saying, “but how exactly can marketing automation help?”

Well, there is both an inbound and outbound approach you can leverage.

Inbound: Leads tell you when they’re ready

Ideally, as a sales representative, you would like it if your leads told you themselves when they were ready to buy. Perhaps a year or so after you last reached out to them, when they indicated it wasn’t the right time yet, they find themselves in a better position. Will they remember to give you a call?

Marketing automation can be used to keep yourself top of mind with these leads without having to do a whole lot of work to maintain a relationship with them.  

For example, you can run your leads through an automated email drip campaign that will automatically send them a new email at designated intervals. Drip campaigns are a great way to provide your leads with additional information about your company and products, as well as guide them toward relevant resources such as blogs, whitepapers, and FAQs.

email drip campaign

Automated drip campaigns are an easy way you can keep in touch with your leads and ensure they remember you whenever they have need of your services. With a marketing automation platform, you can set up your emails well in advance and configure appropriate delays in between the sending of these emails.

Outbound: DIY outreach

While it’s great if you can rely on your leads to follow up with you whenever they choose, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands in order to get the ball rolling again and complete the sale.

“But how will I know when is the right time to contact them?” you might ask.

Marketing automation can be used for so much more than drip campaigns. With the tools available in an automation platform you are able to track each lead’s activity on your website and landing pages and have them progress through an automated campaign that tags and scores them accordingly to gauge their readiness to buy.

Here’s how.

When a lead indicates interest in your service or product but says it’s not the right time, enter them into your CRM so you can monitor them and their future interactions with you.

contact profile

Next, on your company’s website and in any email drip campaigns you run the lead through, ensure you insert tracker links and pixels, which will be activated once a lead interacts with the webpage or link and will store that information on the lead’s CRM profile.

On these trackers, you are able to attach a score or tag to the lead’s profile as well to help you gauge their increasing interest and the likelihood of making a purchase.

tracking link

Once you have your leads in your CRM and your trackers and scoring set up, you are able to create an automated campaign that will look at your leads’ profile information and whenever a predetermined condition is met (for example when a score exceeds a certain number) you can create an automated task that will send you an email telling you that contact is ready to be followed up with again.

automation campaign

The best part of all this is that once you set it up, you can let your campaigns run in the background while you pursue other leads and generate more revenue for your company. You don’t have to worry about remembering to contact these leads, you will receive an automatic notification as soon as they cross the threshold you set!

Inbound or outbound – automation can help

The truth of the matter is, you will never fully know for sure when a lead will be ready to take the next step. The “right time” for a lead, whatever it may be, is not something you can control. You simply have to stay the course and keep your leads interested and aware and be the first in the door when the right time finally arrives.

While this may seem like an arduous and insurmountable task, automation can make your life that much easier by reducing your workload and allowing you to focus your attention elsewhere until such a time as you are notified (either by the lead themselves or by your marketing automation platform) that the lead is ready to be re-engaged.

SimplyCast’s suite of marketing automation tools can aid in your attempt to catch your leads whenever they’re in a buying mood. With the SimplyCast 360 workflow automation tool, you can set up email drip campaigns and, used in conjunction with the Sonar web tracking application, you can set up and execute a campaign that will notify you once your leads’ scores reach a certain value.

If you are interested in reaching out to leads at the right time while also saving yourself time, click on the button below to sign up for a free trial of the SimplyCast marketing automation platform!

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