Are your contacts sitting dormant in your database or are they going along with the flow? If you don’t use email workflows, chances are that you are losing out on some great opportunities to leverage, engage, and reach out to your contacts.
What is an email workflow?
An email workflow consists of automated emails that will or will not be sent, based on a person’s behavior or contact information. Workflows are very important from a marketing perspective.
You can trigger them based on information you have about your leads. This allows you to respond to the right person with the right message and at the right time. For instance, you might send automated emails to:
- Contacts from companies in a particular industry or in a particular location
- Leads with a specific website history, like clicks on calls to action, downloads of offers
- Numerous other parameters
An email workflow allows you to batch your emails in a way that’s more relevant, timely and targeted than a mass email sent to your entire list. Once you have set up an email workflow, you can send a series of automated emails to all the leads in a specific group until they are ready to buy or participate in various aspects your sales cycle.
A report released by Lenskold Group and The Pedowitz Group shows 60% of those who use marketing automation say it has increased the quality of the leads that get passed to their sales teams.
How to set an email workflow
Email workflows can be set up using a marketing automation tool, like Hubspot, Mailchimp or Infusionsoft. We’re a Hubspot partner so you might guess what we’d recommend. Whatever you choose, you’ll have to refer to the set of instructions from your software provider to set one up. Each of the aforementioned services are easy to use.
Advantages of email workflows
Apart from sending periodic emails to your database contacts, you can also automate other actions such as updating a contact’s lifecycle stage, adding or removing that contact from a list, setting a contact property value, or triggering an email notification to a lead’s sales representative. From a marketing perspective, email workflows allow you to do more targeted, effective marketing.
There are two major benefits of workflows: one, you can better engage with your leads and turn them into customers through relevant emails; and second, you can automate the whole process and the time that you save, you can spend on strategizing and growing your other aspects of your businesss.
