As more organizations embrace online learning, there’s never been a better time to be selling learning management systems.
The global LMS sector is accelerating at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21%, according to market research, expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2025.
If you’re fortunate enough to be in the learning management systems industry, your sales team probably has no shortage of opportunities. More likely, their challenge is following up with them all in a timely manner.
A strategic marketing automation program can help you offer personalized attention to each prospect in the most efficient way. It’s like having a sales team that never sleeps. It’s always working for you, sorting out unqualified leads and nurturing the best ones through the sales cycle so your team can close deals faster.
Here are five automated workflows every learning management system should have.
Chatbots are transforming the way marketers and prospects communicate. Research by SurveyMonkey and Drift (a chatbot software) found that 75% of consumers preferred to use a chatbot over filling out a form. Chatbots can help prospects get information quickly and easily, whether they’re looking for a specific service or requesting a quote.
Eighty-nine percent of customers who responded to the same survey said they had struggled to find answers, navigate a website or get basic details about a company in the past month.
Source: SurveyMonkey and Drift 2019 survey, The State of Conversational Marketing
For a busy professional trying to get information about your LMS platform, this is incredibly frustrating. They likely just want to know a few basics—like whether your LMS is compatible with their videoconferencing system—before they go any further.
A chatbot can answer these questions and provide additional details about your prospect’s interest before someone follows up with them.
This is not only a better user experience for them; it’s also much more efficient for your sales team. Rather than scheduling a 30-minute demo only to find out at the end that their system doesn’t integrate with yours, you’ll have a better idea of which prospects are a good fit before you do any vetting yourself.
While some learning management systems are designed for specific industries like healthcare or education, others are more general. Still, everyone wants to use software that feels like it was made just for them.
Of course, your sales reps do a fantastic job of putting together personalized demos, but what if some prospects don’t make it that far?
What if they just glance at your website and assume a platform that looks like it’s designed for everyone must not be a great experience for anyone?
Personalized email workflows can help educate prospects on what you have to offer specifically for their industry after that first quick look.
Prospects just need to share their industry using your chatbot or a form on your website. If you’re using a marketing automation platform like HubSpot that captures and sorts that data, you can create personalized email workflows to share with them later.
A good lead-scoring system makes it easier to prioritize your prospects and weed out people who aren’t the right fit. That might be due to their company size, budget, timeline or other factors. Someone may appear to fit all your criteria, but they might not be in a position to make a decision. Knowing who is ready to buy, has the budget and is in a position to act will help your sales team have more productive conversations.
Lead scoring allows you to identify top prospects based on explicit factors (like company size) as well as implicit factors (like which pages they visit on your website).
When a prospect takes certain actions to indicate they’re getting closer to making a decision (such as requesting a demo), lead-scoring workflows will update their lifecycle so your sales team can take the next steps.
Behavior-based workflows are often a part of lead-scoring, but they can serve other purposes, too.
For instance, if you recently hosted a webinar, you can send all the attendees a recording afterward, followed by an invitation to see a demo of your learning management system a week later.
Another example of a behavior-based workflow might be following up with prospects who recently completed a free trial to ask if they have any questions or would like to speak with someone.
If you’re using a marketing automation platform that is connected to your CRM, you’ll have a record of all emails, conversations and interactions that prospect has had with your team.
You can create custom lists of contacts who have opened an email in the past 30 days, downloaded a resource from your website, or scheduled a demo so you can tailor your follow-up communications to their recent activity.
When this is done well, your prospects won’t feel like they’re part of any marketing automation workflows—they’ll just feel understood.
Get more examples of behavior-based email marketing here.
You might notice plenty of prospects are interacting with your website, but few are actually taking that next step to request a demo or a consultation. Internal marketing automation workflows can help.
One example is a workflow that notifies a sales rep when a prospect visits a certain number of pages without taking any further action. This could indicate they were unable to find what they needed, so having a sales rep reach out to them can close that gap.
We implemented this type of workflow for a power cord manufacturer whose website primarily serves people who are ready to order. Because the manufacturer offered such a wide variety of items that looked similar on the surface, some customers had a hard time finding the right one. Within a short time, that workflow led to at least one significant sale.
Another example of an internal workflow is one that notifies a sales rep when a prospect visits the demo request page but doesn’t schedule a consultation.
Your sales team has enough on their minds without worrying about whether they forgot to follow up with someone interested in using your LMS.
These marketing automation workflows will make your team much more efficient and effective.
Implementing them, however, takes careful planning and technical expertise.
Just because you have 20,000 people in your database doesn’t mean you should email all of them. You need to be sure you’re starting with a clean email list and complying with legal requirements like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the CAN-SPAM Act.
You also need to cross-check your marketing automation workflows to make sure you don’t have people receiving multiple emails each week (a fast way to frustrate them).
As a digital marketing agency and a HubSpot Diamond partner, Kuno Creative works closely with your team to develop a plan for attracting new prospects, nurturing them through the buyer’s journey and streamlining the sales process with marketing automation.
We can help you create automated email workflows triggered by specific actions—such as filling out a form or replying to a chatbot—and support your sales team with next steps so they close deals faster.
Want more strategies for nurturing leads using marketing automation? Check out this guide.
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