Marketing is all about converting maximum leads into customers and driving higher profits for your business. While the top of the sales funnel includes prospects who know nothing about your business and who you know nothing about, the bottom of the funnel consists of clients who have considered your brand and are most likely to make the purchase.
So, how will you facilitate the process of conversion and shorten the sales cycle?
The answer is lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is the tactic by which you build a stronger rapport with the interested leads and persuade them to convert. The primary objective of lead nurturing is to create awareness among the prospects, share relevant information with them, and gradually get them to take action or buy from you.
Most of the marketers practice lead nurturing with the help of their CRM tool that helps to automate the entire process and send custom email templates to the subscribers. It also streamlines the activities and lets you reach your target audience with the right message at the right time.
One such CRM tool is Marketo, and this article will give you a detailed insight into how you can use Marketo Engagement Engine to reinforce your lead nurturing process.
Let’s start…
Marketo’s Customer Engagement Engine: The Beginning
The modern customer psychology has evolved over the period of time and it no longer entertains batch and blast emails. As a marketer, there are several permutations and combinations in which the customer will interact with your brand. Same applies to you—you can target them with different communications based on their engagement.
There was a time when the entire process worked on If-then algorithms. It used to get unbelievably overwhelming for marketers and also increased the likelihood of errors. All of their time was squandered in building workflows and testing them. Ultimately, the marketing strategy could not be as effective as they wanted it to be.
To help marketers get over this challenge and build easy flowcharts, Marketo came up with the Customer Engagement Engine.
The best part of this platform is that you do not need to be a technical person to work on it. The only thing you will need is a marketing automation platform, with the help of which you will be able to build complex nurture programs to win over your customers.
How Does It Work?
Customer Engagement Engine Allows You to Send Relevant Content.
In the past, marketers had to assume and predict the future interaction of the prospective clients and customers to build their marketing strategy. With customer engagement engine, you just have to build rules for the transition. Accordingly, your automation system will drive the buyer’s journey and take them closer to the purchase. It can also pull the prospects backward based on the interaction. For example, if a lead at the bottom of the funnel stops responding, the system would automatically place it in the early buying stage or the stage of dormancy.
Marketers will get full liberty to define the transition rules according to the age, sex, designation, and actions taken by the prospects. For instance: You can decide that a subscriber will transition to an active nurture stream once they download more than three content resources or visit the pricing page or when they reach a particular lead score.
In case the status of the lead changes, these transition rules will help to target the customers with relevant content.
2. Marketo’s CEE lets you set limit on the number of emails sent to a subscriber per day.
Sometimes, your automation workflows are set in such a way that the subscribers receive more than one email from you every day. One of the possibilities for this is that the subscriber is placed in multiple segments. Eventually, this would lead to more unsubscribes or people would stop engaging with your emails. Marketo’s CEE gives you the feature of setting limits on the number of emails you can send each day.
3. Customer Engagement Engine offers you with an exhaustion graph.
Marketing can get challenging if you run out of ideas to reach out to your prospects or customers. To make sure that your nurture stream does not have an abrupt breakdown, Marketo gives you an exhaustion graph. It will give you an insight into the number of conversations that need to be worked upon and how long will the remaining conversations last. Consequently, you will have a clear picture of the nurture stream and when you need to have new content in place.
Besides the nurture stream for prospects, you will even be able to keep the communication going for your existing customers. It will help you upsell and cross-sell with your customers while building brand advocacy for you and boosting customer loyalty.
4. It lets you Monitor the Customer Engagement.
It goes without saying that if your content fails to engage people, your strategy is of no use. Therefore, you must keep a close eye on how people are interacting with the messages you send. The beauty of Customer Engagement Engine is that it gives you access to complex engagement metrics and scores in a simple format. You can instantly get to know what kind of content is performing better with your subscribers. Considering this information, you can optimize your content for better results.
5. CEE Assigns a Single Score to Your Marketing Campaigns.
In the previous step, we talked about how CEE scores individual campaigns that you run. Apart from that, CEE also scores your entire program by comparing the campaign results and lets you know what is resonating the most with your customers. Based on this score, you will be able to revise your strategy and create HTML email that would work better for your business.
Wrapping Up
Whether you want to target your customers with highly personalized campaigns or create a consistent cross-channel experience for them, Customer Engagement Engine by Marketo is the most robust platform for all your needs.
So, if you are looking forward to building long-term relationships with your prospects and customers alike, employ Marketo Engagement Engine right away!
Of course, if you need help with your Marketo email templates and strategy, you can definitely get in touch with us.
Disha Bhatt (Dave)
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