Your 2022 Guide to Marketing Automation

Let’s say you are using our marketing automation platform, or an alternative with similar capabilities.

In the following section we have outlined a few possible strategies you might want to adopt, with various levels of difficulty, from easy and suitable for someone with no or minimal experience of using marketing automation, to those that need more skills and experience to successfully apply them. Some approaches are very quick to implement (not including time to develop or source content) and others require more time.

1. B2B lead generation

B2B lead generation is a very effective nurturing technique that generates substantial conversion rates. In this, you share a topic or insight, perhaps on latest trends, techniques or products, to your audience and then use this as a reason for your Sales team to engage.

For example, you might share a topic on latest trends, monitor the engagement around the topic and follow up with a plain text sales email.  It’s an easy but useful technique to maximise engagement without requiring a lot of time to implement.

So, what are the steps for doing this?

• First, decide who your target audience are. Who will you be sharing your topic or insight with? Contact lists or your CRM system might help you decide this.

• Send a branded introduction email, from your brand or home email profile (rather than a specific team such as sales).

• Wait 1 to 2 days (no more than 2) then send an automated email. You want to send this at a good time for your contact so take account of time zones and times of day. It doesn’t usually make sense to send a B2B email at the weekend or at night. You might want to avoid public holidays too or they may actually be good times to send, it depends on your business, product or service and your contact.

• Monitor the recipient engagement. Did they open the email?

• It’s helpful at this stage if your marketing automation platform and your CRM system are integrated as you’ll know (and be able to exclude from further contact) if the recipient got in touch as a result, for example if they phoned. If you’re using web tracking, you’ll also know if any contacts viewed or downloaded the content you’re promoting and can exclude them.

• For anyone who didn’t engage, that’s the end of their journey on this. Don’t send any more content – they’re not interested, and you don’t want them to unsubscribe as they may still be a prospect, just not for this content.

• For those who did engage with your introduction email, follow up. After a 2-day delay, send a plain text email. Good practice is to send this from a named email i.e., a person rather than a generic company or brand email address. Make sure you refer back to the original content of the first email, in the content of this latest email to them and include a call to action, perhaps directing them to your website for more information.

This is just a simple example and in reality, it’s more realistic that you’d do several iterations of the same journey with variations of the content, scaling it up over several weeks.

A few key points to be aware of with this approach are:

• The first email is unlikely to lead to conversions. Don’t give up. Keep up the momentum and send the second and, if scaling up over several weeks, the subsequent emails as part of the journey.

• You may get response emails to the second (or subsequent) plain text emails, so make sure your sales team are able to and do respond to these.

• Ensure your CRM system is connected to avoid accidental cross over of automated emails and other sales engagements.

• Adapt and tweak this approach to find what works best, for example you might decide that extending it into several stages over several weeks works best, as you gradually introduce a topic or insight sent from your brand and then follow it up with more personalised plain text emails, sent from a named salesperson.

What should you expect as an outcome?

We previously mentioned that email open rates aren’t the best indicator of intent. With this approach we’d expect you to have normal open and click rates on the first email you send, possibly slightly higher. The second email is where you should start to see a difference with a higher level of both open and click rates. Bear in mind these are the contacts you already know liked the content and you sent them a follow up 2 days ago so whilst the uplift is great and any additional engagement is welcome, there’s an obvious reason for it.

2. Encouraging positive reviews

This strategy is slightly more involved than the previous B2B lead generation technique we’ve outlined but it’s still a fairly straightforward technique that shouldn’t take much time to implement.

This is where you’re looking to generate positive external reviews to build brand credibility and increase the potential for sales. It’s not enough to just hope you’ll get positive comments on review sites or take a reactive or worse, a passive approach. You need to be proactive to encourage and collect quality positive user reviews.

To improve your review profile here are a few areas to think about:

• Get some internal reviews first using your own systems and channels. That way you should be made aware of any problems or glitches and can address those before you go public. Once you’re getting good positive reviews and engagement internally, then you can take it to a wider audience and ask for external reviews.

• This is an obvious one but surprisingly not always acted on. Ask for reviews! Tell your customer you’d appreciate a review and, if you’re able to, make sure you have the resources to be proactive and respond to comments (good and bad) left on review sites.

• Get your timing right. Don’t leave it too long to ask your customer for a review. Months after a purchase is usually too late. Send an email prompt when user/buyer engagement is likely to be high – immediately after purchase or one to a few days after. If needed, look at your engagement curves to see when seems likely to be a good time.

• Make it easy. Integrate with your preferred review site – for example a major well-known site such as Trust Pilot – and include a link to their site on the follow up email you send to the buyer requesting their review. Most review sites allow you to create simple links to the review location.

• Monitor all or at least the main review sites relevant to your industry. Listen to the negative reviews as well as the positive ones. Where it’s negative, look at ways to improve anywhere the product or service fails to deliver and make sure the improvements are actioned. Your business and the teams within it should be made aware of the business review scores and aim to work together to improve them.

• Your marketing and sales teams need to understand the product or service and how it gets to the customer, not just their part of the process. They should be able influence changes and improvements that will lead to better customer satisfaction and better reviews, which in turn contributes to higher sales.

How do you do this?

• When someone buys a product or service from you, this should trigger a request for a review. We’ve mentioned the importance of timing and we’d suggest the best engagement is immediately after purchase or a few days after. Don’t leave it too long.

• Send a simple email, with a link to a landing page where you request the buyer to leave a review.

• You can also choose to give them options such as 1 to 3 or 5 stars or a scale or 1 to 10 similar. It’s best not to over complicate it. Remember this is a review for you to see internally, you haven’t yet asked for a review on an external site.

• Monitor the reviews you receive and respond to or action them as appropriate.

• If you’re receiving poor, very low score reviews you should investigate why in case there’s an issue with the product quality or delivery or something else. Follow up with Customer Services or whoever the relevant internal team is to see what can be done to address the reason for the poor reviews. You may wish to contact the buyer directly to ask for more details on their poor review and see what you can do to address any issues.

• If it’s a low but not rock bottom review score, say 2 star or 5 out of 10 (depending on the range you’re using), send an email to say thanks and take no further action.

• For higher, more positive reviews, send an email to say thanks and also ask the buyer if they’re willing to also leave their review on a public review site, such as Trust Pilot. Either include the link to where the review will be posted, in the body of your email or make sure there’s a trigger for an email to be sent from Trust Pilot or whatever your preferred review site is, direct to the buyer. Make it easy for them.

Competitions and incentives

A useful approach to encourage buyers to leave reviews can be to link reviews to prize draws, competitions or other incentives. In return for leaving a review, the person will be entered into a free prize draw. Rather than one big prize where there can only be one winner, it’s often better to offer several smaller value prizes so there will be more winners and it’s more appealing.

The value and nature of any prize or other incentive is important. It should make sense commercially to the business and be of sufficient value and relevance to interest the buyer/reviewer. For example, it might be an hour’s consultancy, an additional product or sample, an entry ticket, a weekend break – the options are endless, but they must be relevant and appropriate to your business and your audience.

This isn’t something to use frequently and you shouldn’t expect a huge uplift as a result but it’s something additional to consider, as a way to encourage and boost reviews at certain times. It’s also important to adhere to any advertising standards and regulations around competitions or prize draws in the jurisdiction where you’re based, and it should never be used to influence the actual content of a review (you’re looking for genuine, unbiased reviews)– it’s simply a way to encourage someone to spend the time to provide a review in the first place.

Perhaps you’ve just launched a new product or service and to celebrate you’re offering the first 100 purchasers to leave a review, or anyone who’s purchased and leaves a review in that month, the chance to be entered into a free prize draw and win one of a range of prizes. Make sure it’s clear what the prizes are, their value and the terms and conditions of the competition.

Here’s an outline of the steps you might want to take:

1. Decide who your audience are for this – who are you sending it to and why?
2. What’s the trigger point – when will engagement be highest? It’s generally immediately or very soon after purchase and payment.
3. Wait! Choose the best time for when you send the review request – time it so any automated emails go out at appropriate times during the day/week/weekend as appropriate rather than immediately sending it. You want to ensure the recipient receives the request at an appropriate time when they’re more likely to positively respond.
4. Send a simple email requesting a review. Send it from your company or brand name, rather than an individual. Keep the subject line and message simple and straightforward, letting the recipient know clearly what you’re asking.

At this point, you need to make a few decisions.

• Check if the contact left a review, using a star rating or scoring range you’ve chosen. You may have also included a couple of other questions on a supplementary landing page that links through from the email. Again, don’t over complicate it or be pushy. It’s good to get feedback and gauge a contact’s interest in your content but you also don’t want to risk them unsubscribing.

• If the contact only left their review such as a rating in the email and didn’t go on to complete additional questions on the landing page, that’s fine, you have their feedback just not the supplementary information. If they opened the email but didn’t click or provide any feedback, they may simply not be interested to leave feedback at this time or at all.

• For anyone who didn’t leave feedback, do nothing other than wait another 2 to 3 days. If they haven’t taken any action and haven’t left a review within a few (1-3) days, you can now decide to send another automated email to them as a reminder, after having waited a few days. If we look back at the engagement curves, the aim is to get the balance right – to not leave too much time before reminding them (as engagement will decline) but also not being too pushy too quickly.

• Send your automated email reminder. It can be useful to vary the subject line and message in this follow up reminder, even acknowledge they’ll have received the first one. Again, keep subject line and message content simple and to the point.

• Time for another decision. If the contact has responded and taken action this time (they’ve left a review), great. If they haven’t, it’s probably best to end that journey now so no further email reminders are sent to them.

• The next stage really depends on how your marketing automation platform has been set up and what rules have been set. For example, the system will be able to monitor whether reviews have been left by the contact, what the review scores are and what actions happen next. That could mean customer service is contacted to investigate a rise in poor reviews, it might mean a thank you email is automatically sent to the contact or (for higher review scores), it may trigger a different automated thank you email being sent to them, with a link to an external review site such as Trust Pilot, asking them to share their review there.

• As we mentioned previously, having a few email templates already set up that can be used to respond to different circumstances is useful, such as two or more variations on a ‘thank you’ email.

• Depending on which steps are relevant, when completed, each journey ends.

What should you expect as an outcome?

If you’ve followed the suggested steps, used appropriate trigger points and sent your emails and follow ups at times where you’d expect high engagement, then it’s reasonable to expect open rates from around 60 to 80% and click rates around 50% or higher, consistent across the user journey. Any reminder emails sent to those who didn’t respond to the first email, will typically have lower open and click rates. Generally, you could expect around 30-40% review conversion using this approach.

3. Using Gated Content

Another marketing automation strategy to consider is to use gated content. This is another one that isn’t difficult to do and it’s very quick to put in place.

Gated content is where you hide or restrict access to digital content until the reader provides their information, through completing an online form on a popup or landing page. You’re asking them to provide certain details of value to you, such as their name and email address and in return for that you’ll give them access to information that’s valuable to them, usually downloaded via an automated email link. The form that a user completes is the ‘gateway’. As a business you get to build your database of subscribers and qualified leads whilst the subscriber exchanges their data in return for your content.

The main reason marketers use gated content is for lead generation. These qualified lead details can then be passed on to sales with the aim of moving the contact along the sales funnel or they may be nurtured as part of a targeted email marketing campaign, managed through your marketing automation platform. Another advantage is that in the process of providing their details in order to access gated content, the user is also able to refresh any data you already hold and renew their permissions, all very useful.

The type of gated content varies depending on your business and what your audience will find valuable but might include: e-books and e-guides, premium content, exclusive previews, webinars, live or pre-recorded presentation or demonstrations, detailed guides or research papers or even access to exclusive tools.

With increasing use of web tracking, there is some debate as to whether gated content is still a useful approach. Is using gated content still relevant in 2022? We think yes, as long as it’s done with proper planning and care.

In addition to building your database of qualified leads and updating and renewing information and permissions, another benefit of gated content is attribution. It’s a simple, direct way of measuring where your leads come from.

This strategy can be very effective but needs to be done well and isn’t always the best approach. Maybe it’s simply not appropriate for a particular product. If it is, you need to have high quality, appealing and valuable content to offer through a seamless access process. You need to consider that by gating your content, you reduce that particular audience as not everyone will be willing to provide their details. You might not have the technology in place to manage the process or do the follow up marketing and sales activities needed. You also need to ensure that you don’t damage data you already hold, for example some people use dummy data, names etc to complete forms, just to access the content. Clearly that’s not something you want so you need to ensure there are checks that your marketing automation platform makes before updating existing contact information.

There are ways to do this of course, for example you can avoid dummy data by asking the user to enter their contact information (required to access the content) and then direct them to a separate landing page to confirm details.

Using marketing automation for this type of process and interaction means you can also:

• monitor other indicators of user interest and intent
• retarget users who haven’t downloaded the content
• control the user journey, including using your platform’s templates and design suite
• refresh cookies each time and on each device the user logs in
• manage who else can see your contacts, for example using suppression lists or using marketing automation to ensure certain users or competitors aren’t sent the content

It’s also good practice to ensure you set transactional email status which is applied to email stages of a journey and means anyone who’s previously unsubscribed can still receive content they request.

There are lots of considerations and we recommend you speak to an expert. In terms of a general overview for using gated content you’ll need to:

• Define your start audience – who do you want to target?

• Once someone has completed the form in order to access the gated content, an automated email and download link should be sent to them immediately.

• Use web tracking to monitor whether the contact has actually used the link to download and view the content.

• If they haven’t after a few days, you may want to send a reminder email and resend the link. You can also decide which day and time you want to do that, taking into account working hours, weekends etc and when is considered the best time.

• If after sending one reminder email and link, the contact has still not downloaded your content it’s best to not contact them further at this stage.

• You might also want to update the status of your contacts to indicate if they have downloaded the content.

• Once a contact has either downloaded the content or (after one reminder) chosen not to, that ends the journey.

What should you expect as an outcome?

In the process of providing their details and completing a form, you’ll benefit from being able to update your data and renew marketing permissions. You can expect open rates and click through rates (CTRs) to be high, around 90% or more for those receiving the first content link email and still very high for those who are sent a follow up reminder email. 80% or more of contacts who’ve requested the content will open and consume it. None of that’s surprising as the content has been requested by the user and the link sent to them shortly after they have provided their contact information.

4. Sharing leads

This is another really easy, very effective strategy that’s very quick to implement. Here you’re passing the best leads onto your sales team as soon as possible so they can follow up directly with the contact. Benefits include ensuring the customer is contacted (at a time when they’re highly engaged) by a knowledgeable expert able to answer any questions. It also fosters and requires development of a good working relationship between marketing and sales.

It’s important that only high quality, qualified leads are passed to sales. Also relevant is that sales only get in touch at the point that the contact is most likely to be receptive. Generally speaking, give contacts enough time to browse and engage with your content on their own and at the same time try to identify any moments when they might want and be receptive to some intervention, offering support and advice.

Most good marketing automation platforms will of course use a lead scoring methodology which enables a business to identify how engaged the contacts are, as we mentioned previously.

Before passing any leads to the sales team, you need to identify those showing high lead scores. 

Your marketing automation platform will enable you to search and identify anyone listed within certain score ranges as well as allowing you to include other filters, for example making sure they’re not already talking with sales.

The next step is to add the contacts that fit your criteria to your CRM system. Ideally both systems should be fully integrated to make this as seamless as possible. Your CRM can be set up to automatically route relevant leads to your sales team so they can follow up personally. This should happen fairly quickly, either soon after the contact reaches the lead score level you’ve decided is appropriate to merit being passed on to the sales team or you may decide to include a before the sales team is alerted, so they don’t get in touch too quickly. Once the lead is passed to sales, that is the end of this journey as sales will take over.