4 Reasons Why Automated Outbound Should Be on Your Radar
It’s no secret that marketing automation is the magic elixir that makes personalized campaigns scalable and customer experiences more responsive and satisfying. However, have you ever considered using automation to give your outbound campaigns a boost in performance? Even if the mere thought of outbound campaigns leaves you cold—thanks to poor performance on previous occasions—when mixed with the alchemy of automation, you gain a remarkable opportunity to bring new life to an old revenue stream. There are a host of other well-documented results that automation produces, and in today’s blog, we’ll cover the top four you should be taking advantage of now.
- Automated Outbound Campaigns Increase Leads
Keeping the sales pipeline full of qualified leads is a fulltime job. Moreover, depending on whether you purchase leads or generate your own, it can become quite an expensive endeavor. Every marketer knows that leads are the lifeblood of a company’s future growth, so hunting and gathering a steady supply of high-quality leads is a never-ending quest.
Use High-Quality Data to Personalize Outbound Campaigns
If you haven’t used automated outbound campaigns to help your team generate leads, you are missing an economical and extraordinarily productive opportunity. In fact, automation has been proven to increase leads by as much as 80 percent! And who couldn’t use an 80 percent boost in leads?
To see awesome results (like an 80 percent increase in leads) when using outbound campaigns, you will need to use high-quality data, either your own or from a third party, to personalize your campaigns. Naturally, automation is the only way to make campaign personalization a DIY success story.
2. Automated Outbound Campaigns Increase Engagement and Conversions
Turning cold leads into warm and inviting prospects is accomplished by providing personalized content that resonates with the people on your segmented lists. Think of yourself as a target audience member, and answer these questions:
a. How likely are you to open generic emails from an unknown company?
b. How likely are you to open a personalized email from an unknown company that features content that is personally relevant to you and your business?
Statistics show that 80 percent of customers are more likely to engage with and buy from a company that offers a personalized experience. In addition, 15-20 percent of prospective customers, who aren’t ready to purchase, are converted later, thanks to personalized lead nurturing. What’s more, automation alone has been proven to produce a 77 percent increase in customer engagement and conversions. When you use automation to personalize your emails, the efforts you make are rewarded with higher levels of engagement and more prospects making the leap to become loyal customers.
3. Automated Outbound Campaigns Increase Sales Productivity
Building a better relationship between sales and marketing through sales enablement is on the perpetual to-do list of every marketer. After all, when sales and marketing join forces, research shows that good things happen such as:
- An increase in sales of 6% to 20%
- A 49% win rate on forecasted deals
- A 15% improvement in low-performing salespeople
Conversely, when the two teams work independently, money, opportunities and future customers are lost. According to G2, “Enterprise organizations lose over $2.3 million each year because of opportunity costs associated with underused or unused marketing content.”
Add a Message Orchestration Tool to Your Martech Stack
To encourage your sales team to make the switch from never using outbound campaigns to regularly sending personalized outbound campaigns, create an easy-to-use library of email templates that they can personalize and send on-demand. A good content or message orchestration tool is the easiest way to make this happen. These innovative tools easily integrate into the many places content lives within your company and can be used to create and store dynamic campaign templates. Sales folks can access these template libraries on most sales platforms, and send personalized outbound campaigns via a variety of marketing channels, i.e. email, SMS, MMS, messaging apps, etc. Best of all, outbound campaigns that are automated lead to an increase in sales productivity of 14 percent. This flurry of activity also means more customers and more sales enablement goals are being reached, and better relationships are being built between sales and marketing.
4. Automated Outbound Campaigns Reduce Expenses
Generating fresh content on a regular basis can require a hefty portion of your budget, but it’s an investment you need to make in order to ensure you are able to keep up with the personal interests and concerns of potential buyers. To get more bang for your buck and more mileage from your content investment, it’s always a wise idea to recycle and repurpose your latest content in automated outbound campaigns, which can reduce your expenses by as much as 12 percent. Recent studies show that the types of content that produce more leads and customer conversations were:
- Email—46%
- Video—44%
- Social Media—42%
- Webinars—40%
- Articles/Blogs—31%
- Case Studies—30%
- White Papers—30%
- Infographics, 17%
As we mentioned earlier, a message orchestration tool is a must-have when it comes to automating personalized content for a variety of marketing channels. These tools automate the process of pulling the right content for the right channel and can be set up to send that content automatically or at the will of your sales and marketing teams.