4 Email Marketing Automation Tactics to Grow Your Sales Pipeline

Start discovering how to build marketing automation customer experiences that feel natural, relevant and in the moment. Using Marketing Cloud and a recruitment marketing campaign as an example, we’ll walk you through four email marketing automation tactics to fill the candidate funnel. The good news? These marketing automation tactics can be used for any campaign where you’re using email to build your sales pipeline.

Let’s get started.

1. Align your email campaign to a clear goal

To kick off an email campaign, you need to have a clear understanding of your success metrics. For this exercise, imagine you work for a recruitment company. Your company’s main goal is to build their pipeline with highly interested candidates to pursue once the company lifts its current hiring freeze. 

The aim: to spend less time on candidates who aren’t yet interested in making a move.

Having this context helps you use Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder to identify those highly interested candidates and share relevant content with them as quickly as possible.

Learn on Trailhead: Manage Campaigns with Journey Builder

2. Customise automated experiences for each stage of the customer journey

As the marketer for the recruitment company, you decide to email a welcome message to prospective candidates and ask them to complete a form to gauge their interest in changing jobs. 

Since Journey Builder can help you meet the needs of multiple audience groups within a single email campaign, you set up three paths that candidates will automatically be sorted into based on their form responses. Those paths include:

• Actively searching
• Passive but open to switching
• Interested in our company but not looking for a new position

Because this work will allow you to develop appropriate marketing messaging and calls to action for each group, you choose to invite those who are actively searching to submit an application, while those who aren’t actively searching can sign up for your company newsletter. All these journey initiatives are helping candidates stay connected without feeling pressured to take a step beyond their interest level.

But as a savvy marketer you don’t want to just personalise the journey path — you want to customise content within each journey for each prospect. Here, you turn to Marketing Cloud to store a host of data in your system and incorporate those data points into your campaigns to help prospects feel like they are having a conversation with you.

For instance, you might know the departments and job titles prospects were interested in, so you decide to customise updates to those areas. You also might decide to personalise content based on a prospect’s office location. 

With time, these tactics should see an uptick in relevant leads and with a continued use of Journey Builder to track engagement, update current paths and add new ones. As marketers, we should always be willing to adapt our customer journeys to ensure that every communication resonates.

Learn on Trailhead: Journey Builder Campaigns – plan, build, and launch a welcome campaign in Journey Builder.

3. Write for people, not personas

Which brings us to our next point: communicating with empathy. Whether you’re building a sales pipeline for your recruitment team or another area of business, customers and prospects are all looking for a personal and real connection with a brand. That means cutting the fluff. 

To do this, you will need to ask yourself what you’d want to see from a brand like yours. As the recruitment marketer, it might mean considering what perks prospects and employees want from a company. Question what authenticity sounds like.

Learn on Trailhead: Create Compelling Content with Content Builder

4. Put your email marketing platform and community to work

There’s no denying relying on manual email sends for distributing different messages to multiple audiences is a difficult task. It’s also nearly impossible to personalise email messages this way. 

More companies should invest in marketing automation technology to develop customer journeys at scale. But it can be a daunting task for a marketer to convince an executive who’s comfortable with older technology and processes.

Check out Trailhead to understand everything Journey Builder has to offer. Connect with influencers in the Trailblazer community who are excited to help you succeed. Learn from them and share what you have to offer, too. We’ll all benefit in the long run – together.