Most people think of marketing emails and lead nurturing when you say “email automation.” Yes, email automation is mostly made for communicating with customers, but it’s also important to be able to automate emails with your own employees.

In B2B lead generation, the chance of getting a customer is directly related to how quickly a business responds to a lead. This means that sales teams need to know right away when they get a new lead.

It also means that the sales team needs to know as much as possible about the lead, such as how they have interacted with marketing materials in the past, in order to have a conversation that is tailored and useful.

If the process of notifying leads is done manually, meaning that someone from the marketing department has to send an email with the lead information, this will cause delays. Even small delays like these make it less likely that the lead will turn into a paying customer.

Email automation helps with this.

At its most basic, marketing automation software sends an email to all relevant users when a new lead comes in. This could mean that each member of the sales and marketing management teams gets the same email.

It works well because everyone on the team knows right away who is in the lead, but there is still time for things to go wrong. It still requires talking about who will be in charge of following up, as well as emails or phone calls between team members to share the marketing history of this particular lead, such as what content they’ve downloaded, what web pages they’ve looked at, etc.

Email automation will take care of all of the above for a smarter and more efficient way to do things.

First, the system will be set up so that new leads go straight to the person who is in charge of making contact, based on the lead’s information, such as the region it is in.

Second, automated emails can be sent with a list of all the prospect’s past activities. This way, the assigned team member can see how engaged the lead is and learn more about their pain points and interests.

Third, now that the lead is assigned to a specific team member, that person can choose to get more automated emails that will help them keep track of valuable lead actions online. For example, they could choose to get daily emails that tell them what their assigned leads are doing online. Or, they could choose to get email alerts every time a lead is active on the website.

This is just one example of how internal teams and processes can benefit from email automation, but you can see how it leads to;

  • Streamlined how leads are handled.
  • Better sales and marketing alignment.
  • A faster rate of leads following up.
  • A higher rate of making sales.

Of course, automated emails can be used in many ways for internal communications, such as nurturing programmes for your employees, contractors, suppliers, and others.

Have a new worker coming on board? Send them automated emails to take care of all of their onboarding.

Running campaigns to hire people from within? Use automated emails to handle the application process for candidates.

Offer a programme to encourage sales? Use automated emails to tell people about the benefits and how things are going.

A marketing automation expert does have one piece of advice, though: keep your internal contacts very separate from your prospects, leads, and customers. You don’t want to make your marketing email data hard to understand by putting all of your contacts in one place.

Email automation can be used for a lot more than just sending marketing emails to prospects and customers. I hope this article will give you ideas for how to get more out of your marketing automation tool and also improve your internal processes.