Top 10 Factors to Consider When Designing an Automated Nurture Flow

November 30, 2020ANALYSIS, RESEARCH AND INSIGHTS, DIGITAL STRATEGY, EMAIL MARKETING, HOW TO: DIGITAL MARKETING, LEAD NURTURING, MARKETING AUTOMATION

Many marketers use click-through rates or subscriptions to measure the success of their inbound marketing campaigns. However, these factors don’t guarantee improved sales. Research shows that 80% of leads never translate to sales, while 96% of your website’s visitors aren’t ready to buy.

An automated lead nurturing process delivers better outcomes through stronger relationships with leads. It’s easier to convert a prospect into a marketing qualified lead (MQL), resulting in brand visibility and higher sales conversion marketing automation processes such as these save your money and time and reduce human error risk. Once you set up the automated nurturing campaign, it’s easy to tweak it to suit any changes in your strategy. This post explores how you can design an automated nurture flow to get even more out of your lead nurturing strategy.

Identify your Target Audience

In this age of big data, use data from your contact points and other tools to narrow down your target audience. Creating buyer personas is the most crucial stage in your automated lead nurturing project. You can narrow down your audience through physical location, age, gender, income level, (demographics) contextual/behavioral insight. For your first step at automation, start with a small subset of your audience.

Lead Scoring and Qualification

Lead qualification and lead scoring (Lead Q&S) are integral components of an efficient lead nurturing process. Lead scoring is a method to help you rank leads based on their sales-readiness. Marketers can prioritize prospects based on factors you have selected. When setting up your scoring system, you focus on two types of data; prospects’ traits such as demographic information and prospects’ behavior (online or offline).

A lead scoring system is critical when designing an automated nurture flow. It guarantees an effective marketing campaign, increased revenues, and helps align sales and marketing. It all starts by creating buyer personas, determining attributes to assign points, assigning point’s value and selecting a threshold for qualification.

Closely tied to lead scoring is lead qualification. This helps you cut through the crowded list of prospects on your database. This process helps you determine whether a prospect fits your pre-selected ideal customer profile (ICP). Through lead qualification, you also determine if there’s a big chance of a lead converting into a customer and the opportunity to turn the leads into long-term customers.

Identify Lead Stages of the Buying Cycle

Every company’s sales cycle is unique. For this reason, assess the stage of the sales cycle where most of your leads are. The stages of the buying cycle are; attract, convert, close, and delight. Within these stages are designations such as the top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

When you know where your leads are, it’s easier to identify the best content to use for increased engagement. You can also identify bottlenecks that might arise in the buyer’s journey and find solutions to overcome these.

Set Goals and Objectives

The best laid digital marketing plans start with campaign SMART objectives or targeted goals. Examples of goals include boosting the lead score, better sales conversion and increase brand awareness. Make sure you tie these goals and objectives to your sales cycle and target audience.

Draw a Content Strategy

Content marketing is highly effective, and in 2020, 24% of marketers plan to increase their investment in content marketing. The best content encourages prospects through the purchase journey. Use personalized content that adds value or solves pain points for your prospects. Answer common questions by your buyer personas, leverage keywords and ensure you have a powerful call to action (CTA).

Best Practices in Your Messaging

Whatever type of content you choose, always go back to the buyer persona to confirm it’s helpful. Before you launch the automated lead nurturing campaign, research the best channels and learn the best practices.

Build the Automated Nurture Flow

Choose a trigger event for your campaign. This is the signal that points to a prospective lead and activates the nurturing workflow. Your automation software has all the tools you need for this stage.

Testing, Testing, Testing

The greatest blunder a marketer can make is to rush the launch of their automated lead nurturing campaign. Testing is critical, especially in the digital marketing landscape. You don’t want leads to receive emails with grammatical errors or files that can’t open. Put yourself in a lead’s shoes and determine if the messaging is clear. 

Measure the Results and Make Adjustments

At the core of automated lead nurturing is data-driven digital marketing. The best automation tools generate invaluable data which gives insight you need to target and personalize your messaging. This includes using attribution models to measure performance.

Start monitoring your lead nurturing process by considering the objectives and goals you set at the beginning. Key metrics for your automated lead nurturing flow include:

  • Response rates 
  • Life-time value (LTV)        
  • Opt-in rate       
  • Sales cycle time       
  • Unsubscribe rates       
  • Percentage of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs).      
  • Cost per customer
  • Acquisition (MQLs and      
  • Average engagement points per lead SQLs)      
  •  Return On Investment (ROI)       
  • Lead conversion Rate

The results help you determine which stages of the lead nurture flow requires improvements.

Reliable Software Vendor

Your company’s needs should guide you on the choice of lead automation software. Look for an established marketing software vendor with a solid reputation on the market. Look for automation software that seamlessly works with your existing systems. 

The best automation tool harnesses the resources you already have and streamlines operations by generating invaluable data for your campaign.

Final Thoughts

Automating your lead nurturing strategy is one of the most effective solutions to get more out of your marketing campaigns. It works through personalized and targeted messaging. This helps to move a prospect seamlessly through the sales funnel till they are ready to buy from you. 

Pulling off lead nurturing flow automation design is difficult. At ONE12TH, you get all the resources you need to build an efficient lead nurturing workflow using social media, email, website, and mobile marketing.

Contact our attribution experts today and learn how to design automation flows to nurture prospects into long-term high-value customers.

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