This blog post is an edited excerpt from the eBook, "How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign"

So you have designed a stellar marketing offer and placed it on your website. But before you start driving traffic to it, you need to consider how you are going to nurture the new leads that you create. How are you going to further educate them about your company and product or service? 90% of the people that come to your website aren't ready to buy - you will need to nurture leads with automated workflows.

What is an automated workflow?

Workflows are an automated series of emails or other communications that pre-qualify early-stage leads before handing them over to sales. Workflows are also known as advanced lead nurturing, marketing automation, drip marketing, and auto-responders. Their goal is to nurture your new leads to until they are ready to buy.

Wondering what your workflows might look like? They can be as simple or complicated as you wish them to be. Let’s look at a couple of examples of hypothetical workflows that can help you with lead scoring and moving prospects down the sales funnel, accordingly:

Image courtesy of HubSpot

By using workflows and nurturing your leads, you save your sales organizations time because you educate and qualify the lead over time. This is only one of the reasons you should start doing lead nurturing. Let’s look at some of the other benefits.

Getting the timing right

Study after study shows that email response rates decline over the age of the lead. In his science of timing research, Dan Zarrella, Hubspot’s social media scientist, discovered that there is a positive correlation between subscriber recency and click-through rate, one of the key metrics of engagement.

Once you set up workflows, emails are sent out automatically according to your schedule as new leads come in.  You might launch the campaigns and forget about them, but the emails will be doing the work for you, helping you qualify leads and push them down the sales funnel faster.

Building automated workflows

Targeting

Studies show that targeted and segmented emails perform better than mass email communications. Lead nurturing enables you to tie a series of emails to a specific activity or conversion event.  

Segmentation

Your contacts are not all the same. In order to do effective, targeted marketing, you need to break your contact database up into smaller groups or segments.  Creating smaller segments allows you to group your contacts by their interests, industries, geographies, etc., and then create experiences and messages specifically for each segment. This will increase engagement, and help move your contacts farther down the funnel. For instance, you can automatically segment your leads based on any criteria like:

• A Contact Property: A contact property is based on company name, state, size, industry, lead grade or lifecycle stage, etc.
• A Form Submission: Segment based on eBook download, a webinar registration, a demo request, etc.
• An Existing List: Segment based on presence in an existing marketing list.

Build automated workflows

Once you’ve created your segments, you need to figure out how you can help them move them through your sales and marketing process in a way that caters to their needs.  

Create nurturing campaigns that will resonate with each segment and make sure that your lists of leads are updating in real-time to include new leads who need to be nurtured.

Software Highlight: Hubspot enables you to create workflows that can be triggered when one of your contacts becomes part of a segment. We call this a smart list. For example, if someone downloads an eBook, indicates that their company size is between 50-200 employees, and says that they are in the manufacturing industry, you can send them a nurturing campaign designed specifically for them. If another company downloads the same eBook, but says that their company size is between 1-10 employees and that they are in the software industry, you can send them a different nurturing campaign that will be more relevant for their business.

Automated workflows sync your sales process with your customers' buying processes.  Most leads aren't ready to buy when they come to your website; automated workflows help you engage and educate your customers and promote your company as the best choice to help them when they decide to buy.