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CRM marketing automation workflows are draining budgets without delivering results
Many businesses today find that their CRM marketing automation setups are failing. They’re allocating the required budget, but their audiences simply aren’t opening the sequences they send out.
Closer inspection reveals that the triggers these teams set up often don’t make sense for their business and audience, which leads to undesirable outcomes. The awe-inspiring automation the CRM rep showed them in the sales demo may have made sense at the time. But the key to marketing automation success is a workflow that aligns with how their specific audience actually behaves.
This Nutshell guide breaks down what solid CRM marketing automation should look like and what to fix when the workflow is broken.
Key takeaways
- The foundation of a great marketing automation workflow is clean customer data and well-defined goals.
- The right workflow trigger setup could be the difference between a sequence that converts and one that does not.
- There are three primary CRM marketing automation workflows that should be created first and cover most businesses’ needs: welcome, reengagement, and life cycle trigger sequences.
What is CRM marketing automation?
CRM marketing automation is the practice of using your CRM to trigger and deliver marketing actions based on your contacts’ actions. This could include test and email drip campaigns, SMS and email follow-ups, and automatic audience list updates.
CRM vs. marketing automation
Marketing automation and CRM are often confused due to the overlap between these tools, but there is a difference. A CRM is the tool used to store, organize, and manage your customer data. However, marketing automation uses your CRM data to execute marketing activities.
With marketing automation and CRM connected, teams can automate key tasks. An example would be updating a pipeline stage based on a contact’s behavior when they engage with your email marketing campaign.
Integration between the two is essential for campaign success. Without this connection, team members are left to complete related tasks manually, and that’s when human error creeps in.
Why marketing automation workflows fail before they start
A 2021 report by Nucleus Research determined the ROI for automated marketing campaigns is $5.44 per dollar spent. On the lead nurturing side, the payoff is 50% more sales-ready leads and 33% less in costs, according to Marketo’s 2019 Lead Nurturing Cheat Sheet.
So, why is it that so many teams never see numbers like these? The reason typically boils down to the following factors:
- Bad contact data
- Sequences that don’t match buyer behavior
- A lack of trigger and action assessment and optimization
- Poor follow-up processes
Leaning into automation for marketing through your CRM can eliminate these obstacles to workflow success.
Two things that must be in place before you build
1. Clean contact data
Clean data affects far more than just the data. Accurate contact data fields lead to more effective audience segmentation, which ensures better automation workflows.
For example, inconsistent industry tags result in empty life cycle stage fields. And when you have duplicate contacts across different mailing lists, your workflow has no idea who it’s communicating with.
The result? Teams may find themselves sending reengagement campaign messages to active customers or sending a welcome sequence to the same contact multiple times.
Avoid these hiccups by cleaning up your data before you build your marketing automation workflow.
2. Defined conversion goals
Setting defined SMART goals for each automation workflow gives teams clarity on what success looks like when things are working as they should. These goals need to be measurable and specific outcomes, so teams can evaluate whether the marketing sequence is operating successfully or simply going through the motions.
Anatomy of a CRM marketing automation workflow
All workflows include the same three structural elements, whether it’s a simple automation or a complex CRM marketing sequence. The following table provides more detail on what these components are and why they’re important.
Nutshell
Many marketing teams focus on the trigger and sequence components and completely overlook the exit condition. Skipping this step can result in a contact receiving nurturing emails after they’ve converted or newsletters after they’ve unsubscribed. Exit conditions are essential to avoid spamming your contacts.
3 marketing automation workflows worth building first
Not sure which marketing automations to build in your CRM first? Here are three ideas.
The welcome sequence
Example trigger: A new contact is added to your list.
Little do many teams know, but welcome sequences tend to see the highest open rates of any email marketing sequence. Sending a welcome email within the first 48 to 72 hours often results in the highest return.
You’ll want to include three to four emails in your welcome sequence, sent over five to seven days. A winning email sequence includes short emails focused on one specific goal each. A well-structured drip sequence can make all the difference between warming up a lead versus losing them completely.
The reengagement sequence
Example trigger: A contact hasn’t opened one of your emails in 90 days
Whether simply dormant or entirely lost, unengaged contacts can hurt your email deliverability metrics, painting a false picture of campaign success.
Your reengagement sequence should incorporate two to three short emails. If the contact fails to respond at all, it’s best practice to suppress them instead of deleting them completely. That way, your deliverability recovers, and the quality of your mailing list improves.
The life cycle trigger sequence
Example trigger: A contact reaches a specific stage in your CRM pipeline.
When a lead moves from one pipeline stage (like “new”) to another (like “qualified”), their entry to the destination stage becomes the trigger. Once they’ve entered the stage, it initiates a targeted email sequence relevant to where they are in the buyer journey.
Clear pipeline stage definitions and goals are paramount for this life cycle trigger workflow to function correctly. Here, your messaging will relate to the lead’s life cycle stage, with the end goal of moving them forward to the next stage in your pipeline funnel.
Measuring whether your workflows work
20%), click-through rate (> 2.5%), unsubscribe rate (> 0.5%).”
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Nutshell
Understanding whether your CRM marketing automation workflows are working is all about knowing which metrics to track. Regardless of the type of workflow, you’ll want to track these core engagement and conversion metrics.
Engagement metrics
Metric: Open rate
Determines: Subject line & send time relevance
Benchmark: Review workflows below 20%
Metric: Click-through rate
Determines: Content & CTA relevance
Benchmark: Less than 2.5% indicates a message-market mismatch
Metric: Unsubscribe rate
Determines: Frequency & overall relevance
Benchmark: Less than 2.5% indicates a message-market mismatch
Conversion metrics
Metric: Goal completion rate
Determines: If the sequence drives the defined outcome
Metric: Time to conversion
Determines: If the sequence is too long or too short
Metric: Drop-off point
Determines: Where contacts exit before the exit condition
Analyzing the results
Analyzing and acting on the data you collect here is vital to seeing these metrics improve and garnering a positive return. That’s why developing workflows with the means to track and assess metrics built in is table stakes.
Here are a couple of things to look out for:
- If you find your open rates look good but you’re not hitting your goals, it’s likely the problem lies with the structure of your sequence or your chosen exit condition.
- If your open rates consistently drop, evaluate your send frequency and list hygiene before picking apart the email content.
CRM and marketing automation that earns its budget
The important thing to remember is that the marketing automation challenges you face are most often related to data, goal, or sequencing issues. An automated workflow just makes those issues more prominent because it’s operating at scale.
As simple as it sounds, just getting your foundational elements right can lead to better-performing workflows. That means ensuring your data is clean, outcomes are defined, and exit conditions make sense.
Start with a simple sequence and build from there. And set and track specific, measurable goals. That’s the path to great marketing automation ROI that the demo never shows you.
This story was produced by Nutshell and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
