Which marketing workflow works best for your needs?

Ever heard of a marketing workflow? Workflows are this helpful tool within marketing automation that can save your life in terms of email marketing organisation. Instead of continuously monitoring your contacts and trying to think of which campaign to send them next, workflows do all the hands-on work for you. So how do they work and how can you create the most suitable type for you?

What do you need a marketing workflow for?

No matter how vigilant you are, you can’t keep tabs on all your contacts all the time. It would be impossible. What workflows do is allow you to set up a list of rules for content, email or website interactions that means they’ll see the emails you want them to, when they need them most.

There are a variety of different workflows you can use for any number of different scenarios. All designed to boost your engagement, click-through and retention rates. Below we’ll discuss three main types: welcome workflows, win-back workflows, and one-year customer workflows.

The welcome workflow

The focus of these initial emails are to make a good first impression and initiate your contacts to your company style. Your triggers for them to be added to the workflow will therefore be things like them signing up for your newsletter or your lead gen software recognising a brand new contact on your website. It could even be someone coming through to your website from other channels such as social media, etc.

Alongside sending a welcome message, you should invite prospects to peruse content on your website, like whitepapers and blogs. This workflow is great because it helps make a good first impression. By setting up triggers based on the recognition of brand new contacts, you can start off your B2B relationship in the best way possible – by providing them valuable content. Making for a lasting, rewarding connection.

Win-back workflows

This is for those contacts that showed an interest in your product, but never followed through in the end. Triggers might include contacts having a high overall lead score but a low ‘current’ or date score. This means that whilst they have shown enthusiasm at some point they are less keen now.

This is almost a lead nurturing workflow, only it focuses on gently reeling prospects back toward your company. All it takes is a few content marketing emails here and there, alongside some soft marketing (letting them know how you’ve improved as a company or what you’ve achieved since their interest spiked, for example) and you can re-engage contacts in no time.

One-year customer workflows

As soon as a prospect becomes a customer, add them to this workflow. This helps to show clients that their loyalty is appreciated, and give incentives for them to continue business with you. Within this workflow, you might have a campaign which offers a loyalty discount around the 6-month renewal period. With offers like this, clients are more likely to feel as though their custom is better rewarded by you than by seeking business elsewhere.

The beauty of workflows is you can make them as complex or as simple as you want – whatever suits you. Adding in more segments and sections can help boost engagement, but sometimes all you need is a simple layout for smaller groups of emails. Make them work your way.

For more workflows that you can use, check out our whitepaper on marketing automation workflows you should be using.