2. Engaging in the Research or Decision-Making Stage
In the engagement stage, there is one channel that consistently proves its unquestionable value – email.
No matter the business type or model, email is often the most important channel to engage customers throughout every stage of their journey.
Marketo offers extensive Email Marketing Software to automate personalisation across channels and at scale. Marketers can leverage A/B testing to compare various versions of an email template and its effect on the same audience segment.
Marketo offers a variety of functionalities when it comes to Personalised Emails as well.
Once you narrow down your audience, you can start building your perfect email using Marketo’s drag and drop interface.
Then, you can employ tokens as placeholders for names or locations and even dynamically change content for each customer.
Based on the behaviour your customers exhibit, you can set Triggered Emails that will record that behaviour and prompt a response email at the right time.
Alternatively, if you have sales teams aligned with Marketo – you can set notifications for your sales reps to call if the lead behaves in a certain way.
Lastly, you can measure your email performance using Email Insights that will allow you to drill down to individual email metrics.
Marketo’s capabilities are even more put to use if you have a CRM extending on the platform. Then you can easily link the performance of the emails directly to revenue with its powerful Marketing Analytics tool.
3. Nurture Customers to the Purchase Stage
In the spirit of bringing more clarity, we will define Lead Nurturing as the process of deepening relationships with customers through every step of their journey.
It’s important to note – it is not only before the purchase stage of the journey you need to charm your buyers.
By this stage, you should already be their new best friend. Or at least, aim for that.
Building the Nurture Program in Marketo is possible with the use of its engagement program type and nurture channels that contain predefined program statuses.
You are free to create the streams in the nurture program to ensure your communication is consistent and relevant to their stage in the journey.
Furthermore, Marketo’s Lead Management has everything you might expect in a marketing automation solution.
It will enable you to connect, interact and analyse the insight throughout the customer’s journey.
On top of collecting leads and nurturing them with suitable and personalised campaigns, Marketo offers a Lead Scoring feature to track any behavioural and demographic attributes for future use.
By utilising lead scoring functionality in Marketo, you will be able to stay on top of your lead qualification from marketing to sales.
Additionally, by connecting Marketo with your CRM, you can integrate the entire lead management workflow of both marketing and sales users of the platform.
This will help you provide a more seamless journey to your customers.
On top of that, utilise Marketo Sales Insight to ensure your sales reps have a prioritised list of quality prospects who are ready to be converted.
Marketo places much emphasis on aligning the two departments. Therefore, the platform ensures your sales reps can view customers’ ‘moments of truth’ and even send marketing emails.
4. Keeping an Eye on the Post-Purchase Stage
Marketo is a marketing automation platform designed to satisfy the needs of both B2B and B2C businesses. However, it shines brightest when used in the B2B environment.
With that in mind, we must consider the post-purchase stage of the customer journey where we must ensure customers are leveraging your service or product in the best possible way.
Thinking beyond acquisition is all about making and keeping the customers happy.
Also, there are a lot of missed opportunities when it comes to cross- and up-selling your product or service.
Just because your customer has bought the product doesn’t mean their journey with your company is over.
So, to support this stage of the journey, Marketo has brought us Account-Based Marketing as well as Customer Base Marketing.
Account-based Marketing (ABM) features ensure you don’t forget your customers after they have made the purchase or signed the contract.
The ABM method is especially prevalent in the B2B environment.
The aim is to identify high-value accounts, nurture them and eventually cross- and up-sell further.
Customer Base Marketing, on the other hand, is designed to bridge the gap from customer to advocate. It covers everything from increasing adoption of the sold service or a product to marketing additional solutions to the same customers.
With its marketing automation engine, Marketo puts the emphasis on increasing customer’s retention and adoption for the benefit of your business.