As a demand gen marketer, we are all looking for the next lead, meeting, demo or conversation. But too often do we overlook the “free” lead gen channel right at our fingertips. Here’s how you can mine the data using bots and automation to bring more value to your email marketing strategy, answers, Kate Adam, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Drift.
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Your email list is telling you exactly who to talk to in a given organization – and frankly, you aren’t listening. You’re leaving the right people in your target accounts on the table and turning your back on them. Instead, mine this data using bots and automation to bring more value to your email marketing strategy.
So you’re in Demand Gen. You wake up every day thinking “How can I get more qualified leads over to my sales team.”
You’re working on your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) game – bringing more traffic to the website. And your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – converting the traffic you do have at the highest rate possible.
After you acquire those names and email addresses, you work your nurture game to qualify that audience and push them further down the funnel. This is where email comes into play – usually as the primary lever to influence broader awareness of how your product can solve pain points better than any other solution on the market.
So by now, you have a team of copywriters and marketing ops people building and iterating on campaigns and pumping out emails. Your nurture engine is rolling so you can go back to getting more leads, right? Not so fast.
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Let’s look at the math.
Say you send 1,000 emails. And 15% of those are opened. That’s 150 opens. Maybe 20% of those are clicked. Which means 30 people land on your site. If you have a 10% conversion rate on that particular page, you capture 3 people.
Maybe you can get additional opens by adding an emoji to your subject line? Maybe your click-through rates can be improved with better CTA text? Or just maybe you can get more conversions by launching a bot on your landing page?
We all keep iterating – tearing down and building our campaigns back up – trying to move the needle any way we can. But what are you doing after the send is done? You check all the standard metrics and monitor the actions recipients take, but did you look at how many auto-replies you got? Did you check how many people replied to your email with anything other than “unsubscribe”? If you’re like most marketers, you count auto-replies as “noise” or the rare genuine reply of “Can I see a demo” as a gift from the heavens that Marketing Ops hopefully surfaces and quickly routes to the right rep.
Rather than looking at all of this as noise that follows email sends like a cloud of exhaust, what if you looked at it like breadcrumbs leading you to your next customer? So often auto-replies hold the gems of who your team of BDRs should be engaging with next.
If an auto-reply says incoming messages should go to Michael Scott, maybe that’s the manager (aka decision maker) BDRs should target. If an OOO shares information about a departing employee, you know to stop wasting time trying to engage that contact – and who you should engage instead.
As a demand gen marketer, we’re all looking for that next lead, that next meeting or demo or conversation. We painstakingly study the value of every lead we generate to make sure our customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratios stay on target, but are we overlooking the “free” lead gen channel right at our fingertips?
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Your BDR team could mine these auto-replies and update your CRM accordingly. Or better yet, you can do this programmatically with various tools that are available in the market. Either way, there’s value here…let’s figure out how to leverage it instead of overlooking it.