No doubt everyone is aware of the growth of Marketing Automation software. Whether you are using one now, or are thinking about it, you know they’re designed for marketing departments to more effectively market, track and automate contacting plans.
As it relates to the sales funnel, automation of course can fit in across all stages. Indeed, marketers use various programs and initiatives to generate leads, cultivate leads and ultimately hand them off to sales teams.
The Growth of Marketing Automation
Maybe it is an event invitation program, a white paper offer, an announcement, a testimonial designed to garner a response or ongoing sequenced touch nurture programs perhaps on behalf of your sales teams. Marketing Automation gives you the ability to do all these things in an organized, timed, and measured manner, it really is great!
Email Overload
But what we’ve seen is that email has really become the primary method of communication coming out of Marketing Automation platforms. In most cases, the platform essentially only enables you to trigger emails, so Marketing Automation users are tied to email, and in a way not even by choice.
With everyone thinking and using email in this way, we’ve seen some significant challenges emerge as a result of this over-reliance on email.
It’s totally understandable—-Companies have invested significant expense and time into setting up their Marketing Automation and they want to see return on investment.
But the sheer quantity of emails that people are getting today, plus the fact that your competitors are also over-relying on email, has really pushed email overload to an all time high. Studies show that thousands of emails per day piling up on each other makes for clutter and receiver desensitization to the point that truly engaging prospects and making a genuine human connection with email alone has become very difficult, even with great content.
Previously, we shared a recent Boxpilot white paper that goes a bit further on some of the statistics of email clutter. Feel free to have a look to jog the memory. To paraphrase: What has really come out of this is that we see that it is Human Connection that keeps prospects engaged. Without it, you risk prospects become bored, losing interest, going stale, and ultimately flowing out of your funnel to your competitors. There’s a McKinsey study that shows that companies are potentially losing up to 70% of their prospects to competitors who are doing a better job of engaging them.
So this begs the question – how do we stop this loss to competitors, how do we get touches with higher levels of engagement than with email alone.
And the answer that we have seen emerge lies in utilizing a mix of media. Alongside emails, we’re talking phone calls, voicemail, texts, among other methods. Everyone knows it takes more than popping out a few emails to really drive engagement
Human Connection – Breaks through Clutter
For one, there’s opportunity where clutter doesn’t exist and where touches actually get noticed: A call, a voicemail, a text, these are things that still stick out to us because we don’t get nearly as many as with emails. On top of that, engaging with a real human voice, even if it’s just periodic, identifies you as a real person where a stronger relationship and trust can be built. It really validates your past and future electronic communication.
We’ve seen that it’s a mistake to leave making a human connection to the bottom of the funnel only. And it is a mistake to let your competitors be the ones engaging prospects more than you.
Actually, in a study called Dale’s Cone of Learning, we see that more engagement generates more recall.. people remember 10% of what they read alone, but as we go up in engagement, 50% of what we hear and see, a 5x improvement.
Engaged = More Sales
And so to bring it home, with this example workflow that has a mix of media embedded within it rather than email alone, referencing the McKinsey study earlier, if 70% of buyers are more predisposed to choose the company who engages them more rather than the company that uses email alone, it really means that doing a better job of engaging prospects can result in 2.3x more customers by virtue of not losing prospects from your funnel and having them choose your competitors. So the opportunity is immense.
Obstacles
But you might be thinking.. Yes that’s fine, I get that the more different touchpoints you make, the more engaged someone will be, the more sales that’ll translate into, but actually executing programs with a mix of media in this way isn’t easy. And setting up email workflows, even decision-based, or action-based, is relatively easy—-and doesn’t require more staff, or more technology investment.
And, to date, integrating triggers into your existing Marketing Automation systems to actually enact multi channel touches just wasn’t possible. So companies have tended to continue to rely solely on email, which has exacerbated the email overload problem. But has created opportunity for those who see the value of enhancing engagement.
So the question becomes: How CAN you actually reach out and engage with voice touches, but have it integrated directly within your Marketing Automation system?
Making It Happen
Well, to answer the question, there are a few elements that need to be in the formula for it to work.
- Firstly, there needs to be a way to link with any voice touch provider. This often comes in the form of APIs (i.e. a secure programmatic way to send data back and forth).
- Another element that must exist is that you need to be able to trigger the voice touches based on various events.
- And it has to be easy to add in the workflow, DIRECTLY from the MA platform itself
- And with data being synchronized the last piece of the puzzle is designing voice touches such that voice itself can come from a person at your company.. maybe your sales rep for their territory, or specific individuals in your pre-sales department, or even your CEO for example.
Boxpilot Call Trigger
Enter Boxpilot. Integrating either natively or by using various intermediary tools, Boxpilot can integrate with virtually any Marketing Automation platform. This gives you the benefits of automatic, virtually instant updates, visibility and program changes on the fly.
Essentially what happens is that a trigger is set up in your workflow such that if a particular event occurs, Boxpilot gets an alert to make either a live voice, guided voicemail or text reach out. It can also trigger an entire sequence that Boxpilot then enacts over time that is linked with your Marketing Automation, or CRM each step along the way. In any case, Boxpilot actions are reflected directly into your data.
Some examples of triggers which we seen used to instigate a call are:
- Web Form Submissions
- Content Downloads
- Click Throughs
- Website Visits
- Inbound Calls
- Timed Sequence on a dynamic list.
Really anything you can build off of in your marketing automation platform.
Similarly the touches can be integrated into any workflow you’ve set up at any point. For example, let’s say you want to make a simple voicemail touch to kick start the event you are promoting, this can be a task in your workflow that pushes qualified names to Boxpilot. Or as another example, you are supporting your sales team with voice touches, in their voice, to expand their territory reach – where one call in their voice happens, and then it reverts back to email.
Just imagine Boxpilot services simply as another box in the workflow.
Same thing for Lead-gen and nurture programs, renewal programs, appointment setting or even data quality programs. There’s no limit.
Example
Here’s a very basic example workflow in Eloqua. And again, this can be done in any automation software. The workflow example here shows two possible voice touches depending on whether an Intro Email is clicked on or not. If it is clicked on, one particular voice message is delivered to the respondent from, say your top sales rep, and if it is not, then another voice message is delivered from, say, your pre-sales team. There are no limits to the creativity you can inject into your workflows knowing that you can make live voice, voicemail or text touches with a click of the button.
(Add a simple drop-down in your marketing automation tool that gives you the option of adding voice touches directly from within your workflows. Watch video!)
Maybe it is a sequence of voice touches over time, maybe it is based on the sales rep territory, maybe voice touches are only used when lead score hits a certain number. In all cases, we can work with you and provide consulting on where to best add voice or even design the workflows for you.
The Boxpilot Advantage
So what makes Boxpilot the right partner to handle this for you? To answer the question, in short we’ve been set up to do exactly this.
And so what makes us different is that we have three core capabilities rolled into one. We have the agency side where strategy, content and planning are done—-building off of a significant depth of expertise from having done more than 16,000 programs—-and here we can be of great assistance in best practices in the voice touches you integrate into your workflows.
Secondly, Having a state of the art in-house North American contact center has enabled us to innovate methods of execution specifically for B2B, all with the benefits of in-house control,
Finally, and our Program Portal technology platform not only provides protocols needed for easy and fast seamless integration into your Marketing Automation system, but also allows us to manage background complexities in your triggered Boxpilot tasks, so that your user experience is a simple as possible.
Summary
So Big picture: the reality is that email clutter is at an all time high. And, yes, it’s easy to send emails from marketing automation systems. But if that’s all you do, you’re losing prospects to competitors because prospect engagement is probably low.
Instead, by adding voice touches directly into your marketing automation workflows in such a way that a live call, a voicemail or a text is triggered directly from within the MA, you gain the advantage of higher engagement which leads to less prospects fraying to competitors more leads for the sales team, a happier sales team, and more sales and profits as a result.
Next Steps
To learn more about adding a “voice touch” button to your marketing automation software, please contact your account manager watch our video, or call or email us to schedule a demo.
We can discuss your marketing automation and show you exactly step by step how you can add voice touch steps in your workflow interface. giving you the advantage of engaging prospects by voice, more than your competitors, in an automated fashion.
