Using workflows to send a series of nurture emails to Prospects/SQLs that Sales have not had any activity with for 6 months.
Background and Hack explanation:
- The sales team of this MedTech company had a large volume of sales outreach to Prospects and SQLs. The data showed that there were a substantial number of contacts that Sales initiated contact with and qualified, but didn’t follow up with or Disqualified from further Sales outreach.
- As a way to incentivize Sales and ensure no contacts were dropped; the CRO and Marketing team requested we build an automation picking up lead nurturing if Sales did not.
- The target was set to Contacts who are SQLs, without any planned activity, 6 months since last activity and no active deals in the sales pipeline.
- Using a list to enrol affected contacts into a workflow, all contacts are nurtured via unstyled marketing emails sent in the name of the Contact Owner.
Q&A:
- Why not use Sales Sequences? → The automation picks up contacts well after the end of a sales sequence and if Sales does not to follow up in a timely manner.
- Why not use tasks? → If Sales has a (future) task associated with the Contact they would not be affected by the workflow.
Tips for successful outcome:
- If data is available on which persona the contact is; you can create a series of highly contextual emails addressing their specific needs and pain points. Split the workflow based on persona, or use if/then statements to send different streams of nurture emails to contacts.
- Choose the right set(s) of goal(s) so the contacts are unenrolled from the nurture flow once they respond to Sales or take another desired action.
- Enrolment needs to factor in if Sales have not been in touch recently because of Bad timing (conversation to be picked up at future date) or the contact has been Disqualified or sent back for Marketing Nurture. This can be set using an agreed set of properties.
- For optimising email open rates we added steps for Seventh Sense’s ‘Email Delivery Time Optimization’ functionality before each email send with an email delivery window set to 7 days.
An example workflow – simple construction with potential to add Seventh Sense steps for delivery time optimisation and conditional checks to remove contacts.
Author: Jasmine Ojbro
Inbound Marketing Strategist
