But, because there’s never enough time to manually stay on top of a large contact list, a large proportion of valuable leads never get nurtured. And, from the recipients’ point of view, most of them will be receiving emails that don’t interest them or are wide of the mark. This is where the ability to offer personalized nurturing with email workflows comes in. Your list is composed of different individuals each with different interests, needs, and buying habits. With email workflows, your list can segment itself according to actions taken by the leads themselves.

Research shows that businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience an amazing 451% increase in qualified leads.

How Email Workflows Work

Emails in a workflow system make use of an “if this then that” logic system. For example, there might be a series of emails to welcome a new purchaser or subscriber, contact the owner of an abandoned shopping cart, or encourage social media contacts to share content. Workflows feed triggers into the system which then assigns contacts to the appropriate email responses.

Email Workflows are Beneficial Because They:

• Permit true personalization.
• Generate many more qualified leads.
• Produce higher opening rates of emails by recipients.
• Lessen the time it takes to produce a sale.
• Give you the ability to re-engage inactive contacts.
• Generate more repeat customers.
• Help you leverage the power of your highly-engaged contacts.
• Make upselling easier.
• Enhance cyclical purchasing.
• Provide a rich source of data on customers and campaigns.

Email Workflows Best Practices

Getting the most out of your workflows means creating content that always puts your brand in the minds if your customers and enables them to tell you how they want to interact with you. Here are some ways to go about this.

• Create multi-email workflows: To make a cold lead into a sales-ready one will require more than one email, so each workflow should consist of several emails. For example, let’s consider welcome emails. Sending a single welcome email is a “no-brainer.” However, sending a series of welcoming emails will increase the level of conversions.
• Create strategies: Planning should be designed around where one workflow ends and the next begins. Ideally, each customer should be assigned to two or more relevant workflows simultaneously.
• Set goals for your workflows: Build them the same way you’d construct a user trip through the several pages of your website – every step should be its own miniature sales funnel within an overarching strategy.
• Analyze your data: Use the information coming from your customers to provide a clear understanding of what works and help build more focused, targeted email workflows over time.
• Build workflows around field updates: A high percentage of names on your email list will undergo a “field change” caused by relocation, marriage, change in employment status, etc. These changes will alter your customers’ needs and their relationships with your brand.
• Fuel post-purchase emails with net promoter scores: Customers already expect a post-purchase email and autoresponders constantly crank them out. But they can also be used to deliver significant benefits by inputting Net Promoter Scoring(NPS).
• Use topical workflows: Build your email workflows around your customers’ interests and prod them down the sales funnel by giving them topical emails.
• Build workflows around live events: Email workflows are the ideal tool to promote a real-life or digital live event and profit from the "buzz" beforehand, attendance, and relevant materials that can be released.

A marketing automation subscription service can be expensive for small to medium-sized businesses, but this doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the benefits of email workflow technology. Please contact us to see how we can help you.