3 Smart (and Easy) Ways to Use Your Website to Automate Your Marketing Workflows

The marketing technology landscape is surprisingly complex. As a marketer, there’s no shortage of tools designed to help you tell your organization’s story, reach prospective clients and advance your brand. But how do you make them work together? How do you harness their full potential? And can you automate the manual work you’re doing to streamline the process and ultimately improve your results?

Your Content Management System (CMS) holds the answer to these questions — especially if you’re using Drupal. Drupal provides easy ways to integrate various platforms and make them work in tandem. This enables you to nurture leads more effectively as you move prospects through your sales funnel.

Here are three ways to harness the power of your MarTech stack within Drupal. Doing so will automate your workflows, save you valuable time and energy, and strengthen your marketing program. 

1. Capture and Analyze User Journeys to Qualify Leads

Your sales team is responsible for selling your products and services to your prospects. But in order to do this, they need qualified leads — and in many organizations, it’s the job of marketing to provide them. Leads can come as a result of users visiting and interacting with your website.  A good lead is made up of more information than a name and email address. Effective sales teams want to understand what their prospects are interested in so they can follow up in just the right way and at just the right time. 

Thankfully, Drupal — combined with Analytics and Marketing automation tool integrations — makes it easy to provide your sales professionals with qualified leads that show exactly who your prospects are, what they’re looking at on your site, how long they spend on each page, and how often they’ve visited. 

For example, say you’re a manufacturing company that sells big-ticket, complex products. Your sales team is assigned to prospects based on the products they’re interested in. In order to match each prospect with the appropriate salesperson, you need to know which products your site users are researching. Consider capturing this information using Drupal and automation systems or a CRM using tracking scripts or hidden fields.

Providing insight into each prospect’s user journey will help your sales team meet them at their point of need and move them through your sales funnel toward a buying decision. 

2. Create Automated Lead Nurturing Through Email Drip Campaigns

Are you managing leads on a spreadsheet or some other manual way? Or have you invested in a marketing automation system but are still working through how to use it effectively? No matter what your current lead nurturing process looks like, it’s time to evaluate your current processes and identify where there are opportunities for automation. 

One common opportunity is integrating a marketing automation system with Drupal to create automated lead nurturing sequences based on user behaviour. This can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want it to be. 

For instance, let’s think back to how you might interact with prospects as a manufacturing company selling a variety of complex products. Perhaps you decide you want to nurture prospects digitally prior to submitting them to your sales team for personal follow up. This will involve creating automated drip campaigns to move them deeper into your sales funnel.

How to Set Up a Drip Campaign

If you’ve never done this before, start by taking these three steps.

1. Load your prospects’ email addresses into your marketing automation tool. This tool should be integrated with Drupal so that anyone who fills out a form or joins your email list is automatically added. Be sure to gather any email addresses stored manually, too. And consider asking your sales team to submit email lists they may have accumulated over time, ensuring compliance with anti-spam and privacy regulations
2. Send out an initial email to your list. You can break this down into multiple segments based on whether you’re promoting a product, sharing a helpful piece of content, highlighting a case study, or something else.
3. Establish sequences based on user actions. If one recipient opens the email but doesn’t click through, they might receive a basic follow up a week or two later. On the other hand, if a prospect clicks through to your website, you can tailor the follow up message based on what they view and what you want them to do next.

Don’t overthink this. You’ve likely been manually supporting this type of workflow for years. This simply automates that manual process and allows technology to do the heavy lifting. Start with a small segment and keep the initial sequence simple. As you learn how the process works, experiment with the options available to you. Then work toward developing more targeted campaigns over time. 

3. Integrate Your Customer Relationship Management System 

You probably have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Salesforce to store important data about your prospects. Names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, job title — all this useful information lives within each prospect’s record. Your sales team leverages all available, up-to-date data to move the relationship forward. 

But how do you currently capture new information from website visitors and input it into your CRM? Do you receive email notifications of new leads that then must be manually updated? Are you running reports and uploading batches?

If so, integrating your CRM with Drupal (or any CMS) is a must. Integration allows for automatic data transmission of nearly any kind. Whether you want to sync payments, registrations, contact submission forms, or user history, Drupal makes it easy for data to travel between your systems in real time or on a set schedule. For example, the YMCA of Greater New York uses this integration when members sign up for classes online. Registration information flows from Drupal to Salesforce, and the YMCA is then able to further customize each member’s experience based on their unique interests and needs.

Integrations like this may be readily available, sometimes free of charge, and open source. And that means they are customizable to your organization’s particular situation and requirements.

The Future of Marketing is Personalization through Automation

If you want to support your company’s business goals, it’s time to embrace the power of personalization and bring it to life through automation. From the very first site visit all the way through to the sale and beyond, you have powerful tools at your fingertips to reach your target audience in ways that resonate with their wants and needs. 

Your CMS is the glue that holds all your tools together and enables you to thoughtfully move your personas through your website using smart integrations, customized pathways, and automated nurturing techniques. Putting automated systems in place today will help you position your company and your brand for greater success in the future.