NGR's Blog

B2B marketing automation, if done right, is an efficient and cost-effective tactic for engaging your prospects and helping them move forward in their buying process; ultimately generating more of the qualified, sales-ready leads that your salespeople and channel partners need to meet your company’s sales, revenue and growth goals.

The bad news is that when it comes to implementing marketing automation for generating, nurturing and qualifying leads, many B2B marketers are daunted by the perceived complexity.

The good news? Putting marketing automation to work doesn’t have to be an overwhelming effort. You can start simply, building the sophistication of your marketing automation campaigns as you go.

I call it the Crawl, Walk, Run, Win Approach to Putting Marketing Automation to Work.

You can file this under “things so obvious that it feels stupid to even mention them”, but it’s still an important difference. In setting up a consumer marketing system, the primary discussion is always around where the data will come from and how it will be managed. This accounts for most of the work and most of the cost. By very sharp contrast, B2B marketers rely primarily on their CRM system (that is, Salesforce.com or a competitor) as the primary data source, and complement that with information captured directly by the marketing automation systems’ own landing pages and Web tracking tags. The CRM integration can be set up in days, if not minutes, and next to no time is spent worrying about the marketing database design or update processes.

Marketing Automation has matured from a stand-alone "blasting" solution to a truly integrated communication medium. Many companies have been using stand alone-email blasting solutions for some time and are beginning to realize that the value of email marketing is dramatically improved when used in a "Nurture Marketing" fashion.

NGR has built a powerful yet easy to use solution the NGRPulse for B2B marketers that puts the power of nurture marketing in their hands in a manner that allows even the novice marketer to be successful. NGRPulse supports a variety of email marketing requirements from the most basic bulk email to the most advanced nurture marketing campaigns.  Our pricing structure allows for companies large and small to take advantage of the same enterprise-level feature set that has historically been reserved for only the largest companies.

As customer travel expenditure starts to slowly bounce back, travel marketers are moving more of their advertising funds toward interactive channels like email marketing so as to maximize ROI and interact travelers carefully researching for those best deals. Because of this, NGR, the world's only provider of both email marketing and marketing automation solutions particularly tailor-made to the unique needs of B2C and B2B marketers, has helped new and existing tourism clients expand their programs and much more effectively engage with their audiences.

Not all prospects are 'ready to buy'. However, these prospects have to be kept engaged, if you want them to ultimately buy your product. And keeping them engaged is all about conveying the right messages at the right time, to make them choose you. And this is what 'lead nurturing' is all about. From the time you identify a prospect, till the time they are convinced that your product is what they need, you have to keep their attention with a series of time-appropriate messages.

Often, in marketing, inappropriate or untimely communication may lead to a leaky sales funnel, which can increase your customer acquisition costs, and make your marketing efforts ineffective. And this is why mature marketing processes try to plug these gaps with suitable lead nurturing programs. While this is easier said than done, with marketing automation entering the arena, lead nurturing programs have become much simpler to design and launch. However, rolling out an effective lead nurturing program still rests in your hands, because you need to employ the right channels, send out the right messages at the right time.