Microsoft SI's: A Guide to Getting Customers Ready for Marketing Automation

How to help your customers plan for marketing automation success

Staggeringly, 58 per cent of marketing teams say they’ve had trouble finding success with marketing automation because they lack “an effective strategy.”

Still, Forrester Research predicts that, globally, companies will invest USD $25 billion towards it by 2023. Clearly, marketers see the value in automation, but they don’t know how to implement it.

To help your customers plan for marketing automation success, we’ve put together an easy-to-follow guide. Before we get started, however, we must identify what your customers are trying to achieve.

Why do SIs’ customers use marketing automation software?

·        92% want to improve their qualified leads

·        81% want to improve customer retention

·        66% want to improve their lead nurturing process

(Source: Invesp.)

Now, let’s tackle each item in turn.

Improving Qualified Leads

The first step to improving qualified leads must be defining them.

What makes for a good lead? Often, especially in large enterprises, sales and marketing teams give different answers when asked to define their company’s ideal Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).

An MQL checks a high number of a company’s Ideal Customer Avatar boxes. They’re likely to become customers because they meet predetermined criteria, such as size, location, and industry.

An SQL, on the other hand, is a prospect that has demonstrated that they are ready to resolve a pain point, engage with a company representative or are nearing a purchase decision.

Suppose an organization’s sales and marketing teams disagree on what qualifies as an MQL or an SQL. In that case, its Sales team will likely grow frustrated when the leads it receives aren’t “Qualified” to become customers. Likewise, an organization’s Marketing team often feels discouraged if the leads it passes along to Sales don’t translate into deals.

Once the two departments have agreed on their definitions, they’re ready to import them into their Marketing Automation Software.

Improving Customer Retention

Roughly 70% of businesses report that it’s cheaper to retain existing customers than to develop new ones.

The key to customer retention is, almost invariably, providing high-quality customer service. As AI-driven marketing automation continues to permeate the B2C landscape, that bar grows ever-higher.

Automated customer responses, follow-ups, personalized incentives and smart Q&A have grown necessary as customers continue to rank experience above any other factor when making a purchasing decision.  Forbes reports that 69% of millennials prefer to stick with retailers that they feel have made an effort to personalize their respective shopping experiences.

By developing an experiential commerce platform, your customers can strengthen their relationships with their customers and set themselves up for success.

Improving Lead Nurturing

MarketingSherpa reports that nearly 80% of leads fail to translate into a sale.

Today, buyers spend more time than ever before reading up on their buying options before making a purchasing decision. As a result, sales cycles have stretched out dramatically. Lead nurturing helps offset that by keeping a prospect engaged until they’re ready to make a purchase. It also builds trust, improves brand awareness and mines analytics. Your customers can then use the analytics they collect to optimize their future lead nurturing campaigns and increase ROI. 

To maximize the impact lead nurturing has on your customers’ business, we recommend that they take four preparatory steps:

1. Define their leads

Like improving qualified leads, lead nurturing relies on collaboration between a company’s sales and marketing departments. Once they’ve agreed upon which prospects qualify as leads, they should look at who is already in their database, their current prospects and which ones are translating into sales. Once they do, they can use those parameters to build lead scoring thresholds, establish lead fit and lead engagement points.

2. Build their email lists

By injecting list-building strategies to the tops of their funnels, your clients can help ensure that they set up a healthy lead nurturing program. To keep their data clean, they should regularly eliminate data duplicates, remove inactive contacts and ensure that all their data is appropriately formatted. 

3. Segment their audience groups

The more your customer segments their leads, the more relevant their interactions will be to their prospects. They should compose their first segment with prospects who have entered the buying stage. Then, they should make up the second with another, business-specific variable. 

Adding behavioral segmentation and targeting a lead-generation campaign increases cross-channel engagement.

4. Test their campaign

Lead nurturing is an active process. As their campaigns roll out, your customer should set up a system that will allow them to monitor what works and what needs further optimization. To keep things running smoothly, they should have the tools and personnel to adjust it as needed. From time-of-day to copy length, different audiences respond better to different messaging styles and delivery methods. Unfortunately, experimentation remains the most effective way to figure out what works best.

5. Planning For Your Own Success

At Marketing Co-Pilot, we work with Microsoft experts to ensure that Partners succeed. To continue learning, we recommend you check out this free guide here. 

To pick our experts’ brains in real-time, you can reach out to us here.