Targeting Prospects With Automated Follow-up

So, you have prospects who have shown an interest in your products or services and now you want to move them along to become paying customers. You can do this in an automated way by sending them targeted emails based on their interests, subtly moving them along the buying journey.

But don’t send an email blast, where everyone in your database gets the same message. You’ll just get a bunch of unsubscribes and very few prospects will move along the buying journey. You NEED to group your prospects and send each group a message that targets them by interest, market vertical, business size……whatever suits your business best. Just remember you may only have one product or service but you don't have one type of customer. You need to group similar prospects by adding tags or making customer segments. Prospects can be marked or “tagged” in your database both manually or automatically.

Manually - When a salesperson meets or talks to a contact who expresses an interest. The salesperson can manually mark or tag a prospect's interest.
Automatically - When a prospect lands on a web page that you are tracking, their interest in the page is automatically added to their history tagging their interest. If they visit the page more often, then their interest level is higher and they are a warmer prospect.

Grouping contacts like this are examples of simple Segmentation which is an essential requirement for targeting prospects. There is more on segmentation here.

You will then create a workflow that a prospect automatically enters when their tags, grouping or segmentation match your entry criteria, thus triggering the automation or nurture campaign. A campaign like this would typically be a series of 3 to 5 emails, specific to their interests, over a 2 to 3 week period.

With an automated workflow like this, you can:

Get sign-ups for your newsletters
Promote your online shop
Promote a new product or service
Strengthen relationships with existing customers
Revive relationships with old customers
Send marketing emails to existing or lapsed customers
Send marketing emails to new prospects
Use it to get information about what really interests a contact

A Targeted Product Interest followup works like this:

targeted-workfow-follow-up

The automation begins when a prospects interest in a product or service is identified and a tag is added to a contact.

The automation waits or holds for a period of time (1 hour to 1 day)…. (You don't want to look desperate)
The “Special Offer for your Product 1” automatic email is sent
The automation waits 2 days. Did they open and click the link?
If yes, send we email 2. If no, we send email 2B (A variation or slightly different interest)
We repeat this process over the time period based on whether the link is clicked or not. Each time looking to find out their true interest until they reach the end of the automation or they complete our Goal.

Notes :

An automated workflow like this will always have Goals. A Goal is when a prospect does something we want them to do - Buy from your online ship, schedule a meeting with you, download an asset…..whatever. When a Goal is achieved, the prospect is immediately and automatically removed from the campaign. That campaign is over for them, mission accomplished. Add them (Manually or automatically) to another campaign with new goals.

Contents of the emails is your choice; discounts, incentives, new features…...etc

The wait between steps is automated and can be fine tuned over time to find the best spacing for your customers.

At any time should the customer complete a goal you set, they will be removed from the campaign so they don't get messages encouraging them to do something they have already done.

So how can you start the process of following up previous interest? Just sign up for our Automated Marketing platform and bring a contact list

Many of the things we have set out here are basic to most email marketing systems. However, if yours cannot achieve some of the points discussed, please feel free to contact us to find out how we can make your email marketing better you achieve them.