4 Simple Automation Strategies to Kick-start B2B Sales in Higher Ed

Marketing is evolving at a rapid pace. Various tools have made data easily available, and this has changed every aspect of how you as a business interact with visitors, prospects, leads, and customers. If your institution has a digital marketing strategy, you should already know that B2B and B2C marketing are miles apart in the higher education landscape and require different approaches. B2B customers’ buying behavior and decision-making are bit more complicated. The buying cycle is longer, and there are various factors to evaluate that are specific to each business requirement.

Understanding the exact needs of those B2B customers and engaging with them is a big challenge, and this is where marketing automation can help. Let’s take a look at four automation strategies your B2B business needs across the customer journey funnel.

B2B Marketing and Sales teams have a range of strategies to advertise programmes and short learning programmes to potential customers. Institutional landing pages can say all the right things and have the perfect resources, but how do you get the right visitors to notice? That is where automation comes into the picture. A study conducted in 2017 showed that 59% of marketers reported better lead quality with automation. Let’s see how automation helps in curating leads.

Using pop-ups is an effective way to build your email list. However, visitors are known to dismiss pop-ups that are thrown at them at random. By automating pop-ups, institutions can ensure that they are shown at the right moment according to visitor behaviour. For example, by triggering a pop-up with a targeted message when visitors are leaving your website, you can get their attention. If you find visitors spending time on a particular page, throw out a pop-up with targeted educational content, and get them to sign up for your mailing list. Increase content reachability as well as leads with automated pop-ups.

With marketing automation, institutions can send responses based on buyer interactions across channels. A fringe benefit of omnichannel marketing automation is the ability to initiate immediate response in whichever channel the lead is active on. It could be an SMS, an email, or even a blog- or social post.

Lead nurturing is a strategy to engage with leads and build relationships with prospects evaluating qualifications from your institution. The key is to attract, educate, and lead them to conversion. Automating this process has proven to be a huge help for more than 65% of B2B marketers. Let’s look at a few lead nurturing automation strategies. 

In an automated marketing system, triggered campaigns are activated once a lead meets predetermined criteria. For example, institutions can trigger an outreach email for visitors who download any content from your site. With this simple step, higher education institutions can keep the momentum going and increase the chances of prospects being convinced to click, interact, and eventually requesting a quotation for programme delivery.

With each visitor’s or lead’s online activity, a marketing automation system groups them into a segment based on the pages they visit, forms they complete, links they click, their demography, and more. Targeting your content through segmentation is one of the best ways to be relevant.

Lead scores provides insights into a lead or a prospects buying intentions. The higher the score, the more likely they are to buy. Automating the lead scoring process lets institutions see where leads are in the sales cycle and allows for strategic follow-up without the guesswork. Parameters can be set up to assign scores to leads so that once they reach a cut-off, they become qualified. You can then set up automatic notifications to your sales team that trigger whenever a lead qualifies.

Personalisation has gone way beyond just “first names” in salutations. Running on data-driven insights and tracking intent signals, marketing automation can achieve the long-sought ideal: the right message to the right person at the right time. Depending on the target audience and your business goals, marketing automation can help you effectively personalise your marketing messages based on: 

• Industry: Personalised content for a specific industry vertical.
• Account: Personalised content for a specific prospect organization
• Stage: Personalised content for individual stages of the buying process.

Improving customer retention rates starts with a comprehensive retention strategy built on continuous engagement. By automating your strategy, you can proactively engage with customers while encouraging brand loyalty.More than 50% of B2B marketers use marketing automation for customer retention. Below are three ways automation can scale your retention:

Despite the high-touch sales process in B2B transactions, a welcome email series can leave a good impression on your customers’ minds even before your actual work begins. Onboarding messages are more than just one welcome email. For example, when you close new deals, you add the points of contact to an email campaign. You automate the campaign by sending initial welcome emails to customers. Intermittently, you could follow it up with emails that contain educational content, your contact information, and so on.

As your customer base grows over time, it’s normal that some customers may grow inactive. Automation helps you decide how to nudge such customers back to business. Marketing automation lets you set up triggers that automatically note inactivity and establish relevant touchpoints. Offering an exclusive discount, a gift with a purchase, or a coupon are some effective examples.

Automation lets you pick up points of friction in your customer experience from customer feedback and address them before they recur. For instance, let’s say you receive multiple feedback from customers. For a neutral or negative response, an automation system could trigger a notification to a customer support rep to intervene and take control. Similarly, a positive response could trigger a request to submit a testimonial.

These are just a few of the ways Higher Education Institutions can use marketing automation to have personalised and relevant touchpoints with prospective- and existing customers. An added benefit of this technology is that marketing automation is now promptly available to mid-size and even emerging institutions. Build a strategy, and marketing automation will do it for you!