Take Control of Your Marketing Funnel with Automated Scheduling

You’re already automating your marketing to move prospects down the marketing funnel — why not automate scheduling, too?

As marketing and sales professionals, you likely understand the importance of moving prospects from acquisition to activation. After all, this is the core metric that so many of us are measured on in our day-to-day role. Marketing automation is an integral tool in the buying process. By creating smart campaigns and developing targeted content, you can move your prospects in the right direction.

Scheduling — often a rote, administrative task — can also be automated to give you more control over the marketing funnel. It also helps save time when you reach the point where a prospect wants to speak to a sales rep. Your end users can schedule time with you at their convenience, in turn speeding up the sales cycle and increasing conversions.

You can implement automated scheduling without interrupting current processes or programs by using a tool like Calendly, which cuts down the back-and-forth email tag associated with scheduling a meeting.

Integrate Workflows for Optimal Efficiency

Robust automated scheduling tools can easily integrate with your current marketing efforts. Whether you’re using an automation platform, like Marketo, or an email marketing tool, like MailChimp, to build your campaigns, scheduling can fit nicely into that process.

There are a couple ways to do this. You can embed a scheduling link as the CTA within your emails (we’ll go into this further in just a bit). The best part is you can sync your scheduling tool with your current tools to automate actions and trigger campaigns in your marketing and email platforms when leads schedule. Further, you can integrate with your CRM so all systems speak to each other.

Say you want to remove a lead from an email campaign once they schedule a time with your team because they are now in an active sales cycle. You don’t want to disrupt the prospect with top of the funnel awareness content, and you want to ensure all of their campaign history is pulled into your Salesforce instance so your sales rep is prepared when they speak with them. With a scheduling tool such as Calendly, this process can be fully automated.

Incorporate Scheduling Links Within Your Email Campaigns

As previously mentioned, you can incorporate your scheduling tool as a call-to-action within your email campaigns. Whether it’s a nurture campaign via your marketing automation platform or a one-off email from a sales rep at your organization, including a link is simple. Populate your scheduling URL within any email signature as a quick and easy way for your prospects to schedule time with you.

This empowers warmer leads to connect with your team instantly, while those who need more nurturing can engage further down the funnel at the time that’s right for them. Make your link a standard in all email campaigns, allowing prospects to connect with you at their convenience.

Align Your Scheduling Platform with Current Branding

With automated scheduling tools, it’s super easy to embed a scheduling link within your website. This is a nice way to incorporate scheduling without disrupting your current UI/UX or voice and tone on your website.

For example, it may make sense to embed your link on your pricing page so a prospect can schedule with you if they have questions when purchasing is top of mind. Since they’re inquiring about pricing, you would then know they are nearing the decision-making process and be able to target your conversation with them appropriately.

Track Success

Although it depends on your platform, tools, such as Calendly, can integrate with your CRM to update Salesforce once meetings are scheduled. Custom questions can be asked upon scheduling the meeting. Once you sync up to your CRM, it can automatically collect that information, giving you even more intel as to exactly where the prospect is in their journey.

You can use a few additional tracking tools as well. Adding UTM parameters to your links in campaigns allows you to track which emails are generating the most scheduling activity. Then, adjust your content and campaigns accordingly based on the results and what’s resonated most.

In short, those of you in customer-facing roles have to regularly schedule meetings outside of your organization. It’s a no-brainer to cut out those hours spent scheduling meetings each week. With automated scheduling you can enhance your current workflows and build campaigns that move your prospects further down the funnel — allowing you to work smarter, not harder.

This article was contributed by Calendly. Calendly is a simple, yet powerful scheduling platform that helps business professionals save time, control their schedule and delight invitees. The tool connects millions of people through its enjoyable, customizable and flexible features. For a seamless experience, users can simply integrate Calendly with their Google, Office 365 and Outlook calendars and apps like Salesforce, Zapier and GoToMeeting.

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Originally published at www.growthlabs.marketing.