Close & Delight—Customer Acquisition

A workflow is more than just marketing automation. It’s a series of “if’” and “then” descriptions that when set to trigger in a strategic format, will help you save time and convert more contacts into customers. Think of the workflow setup like plumbing. You are piping your leads through a series of synchronized marketing events that delivers them ready for the next stage in the marketing or sales funnel. These events can be triggered based on a contact’s entered information on a form or on an individual’s interests and actions.

Workflows lead the relationship with your contacts and customers with an understanding of what it takes to move to the next level. For each campaign you must know your target, define your goals, and create a strategy that is aligned to both. These three items working together lead your contacts and customers toward your predefined goals and enables your team to further develop the relationship, or to close a sale.

Email is more scalable for marketing and should be a part of your content promotion and lead generation service offerings. Yes, the ideal, low-cost lead discovers your client’s content organically, however, email provides a quick and easy way to drive incremental activity additional conversions from prospects.

144.8 billion – that’s the number of emails sent every day, according to Mashable.

How do we stand out from the clutter and deliver the right message, to the right audience, at the right time? How do we measure the return on investment (ROI)?

With inbound email marketing, you can stand out. When you integrate your email campaigns with other data sources, you generate qualified leads, and follow them through the entire sales process. You build trust by nurturing these leads with targeted messages based on their actions, needs, and interests to help them become ready to buy.

ROI? With inbound analytics, you know how many customers are generated through email. Plus, you can provide existing customers with relevant content to help them achieve their goals.

How many times have you heard sales reps complain about the quality of the leads they get? Sacrificing lead quality just to deliver a higher volume of marginally qualified leads erodes your company’s performance from top to bottom. Think about that for a minute. If marketing doesn’t drive the lead qualification process to ever increasing standards of quality, everyone suffers from sales, to manufacturing, to shipping. Consider the proliferation of high quality content available on the Internet and the impact this has had on the ways buyers make purchasing decisions.

Effective inbound marketing requires an even deeper understanding of the influences that make your prospect tick. If you’ve dialed into your customer persona, and spent time analyzing which leads become customers and which don’t, you can hone your inbound marketing strategy. As prospects travel through the funnel they’ll have more and more “Ah Ha!” moments as your content speaks directly to topics closest to their heart – and their bottom line.

Align the sales and marketing team members, goals, and activities to make sure everyone is on the same page. In a small company, sales and marketing functions are often the responsibility of one or two people with blended roles so the communication of goals and priorities is often simple and clear.

As an organization grows, it’s common for marketing teams to have very little knowledge of the sales process, and for sales teams to be clueless about the effort required to generate the leads they are following up on. Among other things, you need to make sure your marketing activities are designed to:

• Attract and educate prospects that are easier to sell to
• Increase the efficiency of your sales process
• Generate enough qualified leads to support your growth goals
• Improve close rates

In the end, your marketing and sales teams have the same objective: to attract qualified customers to use your products and purchase your services. Adopting a collaborative marketing approach is the first step to optimizing results and maximizing your budget!