Announcing sales engagement automation: connect the customer experience

It’s impossible to deliver a truly connected customer experience that builds relationships when marketing and sales conversations are disconnected.

Current sales engagement solutions have gaps that keep both sales and marketing in the dark. Sales reps aren’t aware of nurture campaigns while marketing doesn’t have visibility into 1:1 sales conversations — leading to fragmented customer experiences.

We’re changing the way you connect your sales & marketing, making it easier to build and maintain better experiences that nurture ongoing customer relationships.

Sales engagement automation is the only solution that combines the best of account-based marketing (ABM) and sales engagement, to center customers for a unified engagement strategy.

Keep reading to learn:

• What sales engagement automation is
• Send one-to-one emails for integrated engagement
• How it boosts your sales and marketing results
• Why it should be part of your customer experience

What is sales engagement automation?

The first question you might have is, what is sales engagement — and how is sales engagement automation different?

Sales engagement is about nurturing customer interactions. Sales engagement creates a customer experience personalized to your audience’s needs, and improves the relationship with your leads through:

• Strategic communications
• Sales data
• Customer feedback

Sales engagement automation goes beyond that by using rich customer data from every sales and marketing touchpoint, so you know the right time and channel to automate unique and timely messages. Sales engagement automation helps you close more deals by leveraging:

• Strategic communications across every touchpoint and channel
• Unified sales and marketing data
• Providing the human touch at scale
• A complete picture of every customer

Send one-to-one emails for integrated engagement that nurtures relationships

Sales engagement automation gives you integrated engagement functionality, like the ability to automate personal sales one-to-one emails through a connected account.

Integrated engagement lets you combine all the channels that can be leveraged within an automation — marketing campaigns, sales follow-ups, text, voice, and more.

You can now send one-to-one sales emails as part of your integrated engagement strategy. Sales teams get the right data to make every conversation count, while increasing productivity by automatically sending emails using their own inbox.

• An automation action lets you easily send a personal email through a connected account, like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and more.
• Use personalization tags and hyperlinks in your automated one-to-one emails to nurture stronger relationships.
• Combine marketing and sales emails to create more personal experiences across the lifecycle, retain more customers, and increase the efficiency of your teams.

Integrated engagement means you can leverage more customer data in your marketing and sales efforts to personalize an experience. One-to-one emails let sales reps engage sooner with qualified prospects, know the right time to reach out to existing customers for personal conversations, and follow-up with the personal touch at scale when it will be the most effective.

How sales engagement automation boosts business results

It’s not enough to have good products and a great sales team. You need a holistic strategy to develop an excellent customer experience, or you’ll lose customers to companies that prioritize it.

ActiveCampaign gives businesses of all sizes the sales engagement and automation tools they need to do create better customer experiences, like:

• Complete customer view — Always communicate the right message. Unify data from every touchpoint in the apps used most, for automation that intelligently reacts to a complete view of every customer using custom objects.
• Lead scoring — Deliver dynamic messages that understand where customers are in their buyer’s journey, and alert sales when leads are ready to engage — and convert.
• Pipeline automation — Automate sales pipelines with unique experiences that move deals through stages more quickly. Stay on top of every task, shorten the sales cycle, and close more deals.
• Win probability — See how likely each deal is to close, and use that knowledge to segment leads so time can be focused where it makes a difference.
• Site tracking — Track and automate off of site visits so every lead can be offered exactly what they’re looking for.
• Sales integrations — Integrate with 870+ apps, including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, which bring data visibility, actionable insights, and sales engagement automation across a business’ entire sales tech stack.

You should be able to use the sales software that makes sense for your business, which is why ActiveCampaign’s stackable approach connects with your most-loved tools.

Creating a customer experience strategy ensures you put the right amount of effort and resources toward cultivating a good customer experience. Sales engagement automation makes it easy to prioritize customer relationships by giving sales the right context to build and maintain trust throughout the entire lifecycle, so every customer feels personally catered to.

Why sales engagement automation should be part of your customer experience

“Since we’ve started using ActiveCampaign, our sales, marketing, and customer support teams are much more aligned and productive, thanks to having a complete view of the customer and pipeline automation, our sales team is spending less time cold calling, and more time with the leads most likely to close. The conversations they’re having with customers are much more informed, which makes for a better experience for our customers.” — Miguel Horta Camacho, Digital Marketing Specialist at Dalton.

76% of customers expect a personalized experience from the brands they interact with. Customers want to feel known and seen by companies. It’s important to treat them as individuals, not just sales numbers.
Customers expect a connected and cohesive experience across email, SMS, landing pages, social, and more. ActiveCampaign makes it easy to extend amazing, automated customer experiences through every touchpoint.

Crafting a good customer experience doesn’t happen by accident. You need to think purposefully about how each interaction adds up to create that customer’s experience — sales engagement automation helps connect those dots and eliminate gaps.

• Stay aligned for better results. Make marketing and sales more efficient with personal and integrated multichannel campaigns that seamlessly span the customer lifecycle.
• Optimize 1:1 communication. Incorporate two-way email conversations into your multi-channel strategy; give sales teams the right data to make every conversation count.
• Capture more of the right leads. Know your most qualified leads and confidently take action faster. Boost close rates with data from emails, SMS texts, your website, and more.

While it’s common to think of the customer journey as linear with a one-time pass of a lead from marketing to sales, the reality is that the customer journey is more complex. With ActiveCampaign, businesses of all sizes can reap the benefits of robust sales engagement and marketing, ensuring the best possible customer experience and maximizing growth potential.