How to Generate Leads and Win More Business with a Customer Journey Marketing Campaign
Data has become one of any company’s most valuable commodities. Most businesses know they need to collect it, and many understand the importance of creating a well-managed and segmented database. But how many companies are really using it effectively to create a customer journey that integrates their marketing and sales activities for improved lead generation and conversion?
In this blog, we’ll reveal:
· How to give your marketing activity better direction by creating customer journeys tailored to the profile and preferences of different customer groups
· The secrets of aligning your marketing activity with your outbound sales activities to make both sales and marketing more targeted and effective
· The best approach for achieving higher open rates for your marketing activities
· Proven campaign methodologies for improved lead generation and conversion rates
Planned well, a customer journey approach to marketing will help you generate more leads and convert them more quickly, helping you to grow your business. Read on to find out how.
The Value of Data
The days when generating sales leads was based on your sales team milking their little black book of contacts and keeping their ear to the ground are, for the most part, far behind us. With the digital tools available to contemporary, forward-focused companies, the sales process can be much more targeted and individualised, but having an accurate and well-maintained database is critical to achieving those goals.
According to US business magazine, Forbes, it can cost up to five times more to generate a new customer than to win repeat business from an existing customer. It’s definitely a good idea to keep expanding your customer base to feed growth, but the low hanging fruit when it comes to generating sales leads is actually the companies you’re already working with, or the ones that have bought your products and services in the past. That’s why maintaining accurate and up-to-date customer data is so important.
A customer journey can also be developed for a bought-in database of new prospects too, however, and these contacts can be targeted with a ‘new customer’ journey, including welcome offers and relationship building messaging.
Whether you have a full blown CRM (customer relationship management) system or more basic database, keeping information up-to-date not only means that you have a ready-made target audience for direct mail and e-marketing activities, it also means that you can demonstrate your marketing is GDPR (General Data Protection Legislation) compliant.
This is the starting point for any customer journey marketing campaign because, from here, you can segment customers and develop various routes tailored to different customer profiles.
For example, you may choose to segment customers by:
· location
· size
· length of time since they last bought from you
· Frequency of previous transactions
· Value of previous transactions
How Do We Use Data to Create a Customer Journey?
At Construction Marketing Experts, we specialise in helping our construction industry clients use their data effectively so that they can develop customer journeys that target contacts with appropriate products and services. We enable them to tailor marketing messages, communication methods and communication intervals to improve open rates and lead generation.
Our experts can analyse your data to develop both a strategic approach and a programme of regular activity, including trigger points designed to respond to customer activity. You will also need to invest in sales and marketing software, however, in order to implement the customer journey strategy effectively.
A customer journey marketing campaign has a CRM system at its core and we recommend specialist software such as Hubspot. This provides an integrated CRM and marketing system that can:
· personalise marketing materials
· segment contacts into different customer journeys
· embed different triggers to maintain suitable frequency and messaging of outbound marketing materials.
The software will also enable you to track open rates and response rates to all e-marketing activities so that you can continue to evolve the customer journey over time. For example, using Hubspot you may send out monthly special offers and notice that some customers open all your emails but do not respond to the offer. In this scenario, you may choose to change the type of offer – from money off to added value extra, for example – or to trigger a sales call. Or we might advise you to take a step back from ‘selling’ to those customers who open your e-marketing communications but do not respond and focus on relationship-building informative emails for while instead.
How Does the Customer Journey Integrate Sales & Marketing?
Regardless of which customer journey software you choose, there is a cost attached and this needs to be factored into your customer journey campaign planning. However, based on a database of 10,000 contacts, you can expect to pay around £1,500 per month, which, although a significant expense, equates to around half a salesperson’s salary.
The trick to making that investment deliver a return is to ensure you’re integrating the marketing activity with your sales process. In this way, the impact of your customer journey campaign is equivalent to one or more additional sales people reaching out to existing and potential customers with outbound sales.
For example, by analysing response rates from your sales journey, you’ll be able to see which companies are showing an active interest in your e-marketing activity by opening your emails or clicking through to your website. These contacts are warm leads and should be the priority for your sales team. You can even track which offers are of most interest to each contact and which pages of your website they have visited so that your sales people can be specific in the sales messages they include when they reach out by phone, email or sales visit.
In this way your team can:
· Join up the sales and marketing functions in your business
· Take a more strategic approach to sales
· Ensure you don’t overlook warm leads
· Capitalise on interest in a particular product or service
· Use sales resources more efficiently to generate and convert leads
· Focus marketing activity on the most popular /profitable products and services
What benefits Can You Expect from a Customer Journey Marketing Campaign?
At Construction Marketing Experts we have developed and implemented customer journey campaigns for clients that have generated proven results including:
· Improved open rates for e-marketing materials
· More website traffic
· Increased sales leads
· Higher sales lead conversion
· Faster sales lead conversion
If you’d like to know more about how we could use a customer journey marketing campaign to help you generate sales leads and win more business, why not get in touch on 0843 506 5202 or email sarah.reay@constructionmarketingexperts.co.uk for more information.