Most of the time, your prospects aren’t active in your sales cycle. They are sitting there, minding their own business, looking at products and services that aren’t related to yours. They might be receiving your email marketing campaigns, reading your blog content, or interacting with you over social media. However, at that moment, they are just inactive.
Then there is a sudden flurry of activity from the prospect, and they move through your sales cycle very quickly. Before you know it, they’ve bought your product.
What causes this to happen? How can you use this within your marketing automation to help you generate more sales and speed up the process?
What Causes This Sudden Flurry?
The main reasons for this sudden flurry are called ‘trigger events.’ These events can occur either internally (change of circumstances, new management, etc.) or externally (competitive threat, damage to property). They change the perspective of your lead so that they see the need for your product.
Just after the event, the prospect is looking for new information that will help them solve a problem. However, time is precious. Your prospect is working fast to find a solution, and they might be looking at many of your competitors – therefore, you have to portray why you are the right company, faster than anyone else. Waiting for a manual sales process to complete is simply not the best way forward. Research has found that businesses that engage with their prospects after the trigger has occurred are four times more likely to secure the sale.
Why Automation is the Key
You need to rely on automation rather than manual processes. For this, you need to structure your sales process around ‘trigger events’ and then create scenarios that will begin a process once a trigger event has started.
For instance, if you were in building maintenance, and you offered mold removal services, you need to consider what a consumer might be looking for. The possible trigger events are that they have mold in the house and want to remove it, or the weather is getting colder, and they want to prevent it. For both of these scenarios, you have very clear guidelines for the content you can create to relate to these two activities.
How to Use Automation With Trigger Events
The first step is to build pages about mold removal and mold prevention. These will act as a signal to your automated system that these people have this problem now. Once they’ve visited your website, a cookie can tag their IP address for use with Google Remarketing. Alternatively, you can entice them to give their contact information from an email marketing campaign.
Google Remarketing will remind the prospect of your services whenever they visit a site that has Google ads on. Whereas, you can actively target them with email marketing using an auto-responder, email marketing series. It is a series of emails that are sent to your prospects automatically, at specified intervals, to remind them of your product.
Then, your system needs to monitor their interactions with the messages. If they are opening and clicking through often, you need to get in touch with them. Because you’ve used the trigger event to create the sales path, you know exactly what the prospect’s issue is and can create a sales pitch based on that information. They have also regularly interacted with your brand, so the prospect has been warmed up. Both of these make it easier to make the sale.
If they aren’t opening your emails, then the time has elapsed, and they’ve found another solution to the problem.
Conclusion
Marketing automation can be a useful tool to connect with prospects around trigger events. By creating the content early, you can monitor results and know exactly the right time to speak to the prospect. It increases the success rate of your sales conversion.