How to Amplify Your Sales Engagement with Sales Sequences in Freshworks CRM

Can you guess which marketing method has the best ROI?

No, it’s not social media.

Email marketing has the highest ROI. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you make $44 in return. No other digital marketing channel beats the power of email. It helps to effectively capture the attention of the audience, which is exactly what sales teams are constantly working towards. This makes email an important medium for salespersons.

Salespersons spend 21% of their day on emails—creating, editing, scheduling, and sending them. Studies show that it takes an average of 8 touches to get an initial meeting (or other conversions) with a new prospect. This, of course, does not mean you bombard your leads with countless emails.

Timing and relevancy play an important role in the effectiveness of the emails you send. Send the message too early, and you end up seeming eager or worse, aggressive. Send it too late, and you seem distant and aloof. It’s all about sending the right message at the right time. To master this, you should know more about your prospect and how they engage with you. Email engagement metrics are a game changer when it comes to planning your outreach campaigns.

If you use a CRM like Freshworks CRM you can harness the power of email metrics with its built-in email capabilities. You’ll be able to see the open and click-through rates to know the impact of your email campaigns, allowing you to target and personalize your marketing and increase sales.

Use context to drive your email campaigns in Freshworks CRM.

For a salesperson, Sales Sequences in Freshworks CRM is the best of both worlds. You can create and send personalized email campaigns that are automatically triggered when conditions are matched, dependent on the record property.

Sales Sequences allows you to define your audience for a campaign and set up a sequence of actions that will be executed in the order. For each step you define, you can add follow-up steps for every possible outcome. For example, if you’re sending a welcome email to new customers, you can trigger three different follow-up emails based on three outcomes—not opened, not replied, and opened but not replied.

There are two types of sequences in Freshworks CRM— Classic and Smart.

Prospecting using Classic Sequences

Prospecting is often a time and effort consuming task. You need to personalize your email and ensure that you don’t accidentally resend emails to your leads. It becomes a harder feat to keep track of follow-ups and responses as your lead list becomes longer. Sales Sequences automates your email marketing—choose an audience that matches a particular set of conditions, define the actions to perform, and let Freshworks CRM handle the campaign from there.

Here’s an example of how you can set up a prospecting email journey using Classic Sequences.

Step 1: Who will enter your sequence?

You can pick from three types of records—Leads, Contacts, and Accounts. In this example, let’s choose to add records from the Lead module to the sequence. Pick the target audience for your sequence. You can preview leads that meet this condition to know how many leads will enter the sequence. You can also exclude duplicate leads from this campaign to ensure that no lead receives multiple emails from the same campaign. Choose the time at which the action needs to be performed and exclude weekends if needed.

Here we want leads who are in the stage “New” and assigned to the sales rep, Donna to enter the sequence.

Step 2: Choose the type of sequence

You can choose between a Classic or Smart Sequence for all types of records. When you choose Classic Sequence, be sure to select the time at which you want to execute the actions. You can also pick a suitable timezone for a campaign.

Step 3: Define the steps to be executed

Now it’s time to set up the sequence steps. For each step, you can choose the day on which it must be executed.

Day 1: The default start date is day 1, which refers to the day a lead that matches the defined conditions enters the sequence. On day 1, you can send out a cold email with placeholders to personalize your outreach. The next steps can be defined based on the lead’s engagement with the initial email.

Day 4: On day 4, you can trigger two sets of emails—one is sent to the subset of leads who did not open the first email. The second is sent to leads who viewed the Day 1 email but have not responded. By setting up two triggers, you ensure that all recipients receive a follow-up email.

From there, you can choose to set up steps for subsequent days. Keep in mind that classic sequences have a time-range of 90 days, so you can schedule your touchpoints up until the 90th day.

Step 4: Who will exit your sequence?

Next, define the triggers based on which leads will exit the sequence so that they do not receive any further emails. This could be in the case that they replied to the first email. You can set up to 8 conditions based on which leads will be removed from the sequence.

Note: Choose the “Or” option to remove leads who match any one of the exit conditions.

You can set up similar sequences for time-sensitive emails like reminders for payment-subscriptions. Here’s how Chargebee uses Sales Sequences on a daily basis:

Every day, Chargebee gets numerous leads and personally looking at each and every lead and emailing them becomes time-consuming. To tackle this challenge, Chargebee has a set process in place to reach out to them. It sends four personalized emails to each lead. Once the process is over, it puts them into a sales campaign.-Priya V,  Chargebee

Retention using Smart Sequences

Not all sequences you run may be time-bound. Some are interval-bound and they need to be triggered within an interval of few days to see when a lead matches the mentioned criteria. For instance, an e-commerce company can have a cart abandonment email for visitors who added products to their cart but did not complete the purchase. These re-targeting emails would be sent each time a lead matches a condition. And the result? Compelling and personalized re-targeting emails will draw shoppers back and improve your e-commerce order fulfillment rates.

In such a scenario, choose Smart Sequence which checks the condition against all leads who’ve entered the campaign within a certain interval of time. Say you the set interval as two days. The campaign runs every two days and checks the leads who match the campaign and trigger the corresponding action you define. In smart campaigns, the actions are not completed in chronological order but according to the action that the recipient first completes.

Let’s take the cart abandonment email campaign as an example of how to set up smart sequences in Freshworks CRM.

Step 1: Who will enter your sequence?

To run a retention campaign on leads, we need to set the conditions based on which the leads will enter the sequence. We can use the same conditions that were set in the previous example.

Step 2: Choose the type of sequence

For smart sequences, set the interval at which the actions will be executed. The minimum interval value is 1 day (default value) and the maximum is up to 7 days. What this means is that the campaign checks the leads every 7 days to see if they match the condition. When the lead matches the condition, the action is triggered.

Step 3: Define the steps to be executed

When the “Checkout” field is set to yes, and the “Purchase Complete” field is set to no, the first cart abandonment email is triggered. You can set the initial conditions while creating Step 1.

The subsequent email is triggered only if the recipient hasn’t opened the first email and did not complete the purchase. The same filter is applied to the last email, which is sent two days after the second email. You can add more steps that trigger the right action in case of other conditions that get matched.

For instance, if the lead opened the first email but did not proceed with the purchase, you can send them a reminder email to prompt them to click purchase. You can set the conditions based on which the lead will exit the sequence. Here, the lead will automatically exit the sequence if the “Purchase Complete” option is checked as yes.

Analyze metrics for each step of your Sales Sequence

With Freshworks CRM, you can analyze the step-by-step metrics of your sales sequence. You can view the number of records that entered the sequence, currently in the sequence, and exited the sequence. For deeper insights, you can see the total number of emails that were sent and the engagement—opened, clicked, replied, bounced, and unsubscribed.

Here’s how Explara benefits from monitoring analytics for their Sales Sequences:

“In the old CRM, I would have no visibility or maybe our engagement would be more on the lines of task management. But with Freshworks CRM when I engage with them through a sales campaign, I’ll know how many opened the email, how many are interested in my business and even set up more meetings with them.”–Santhosh Panda, Explara

 

Make your sequences more powerful with Freshworks CRM

Sales is all about timing. With Sales Sequences, you can send the right message at the right time and nurture relationships effectively. Keep your leads and customers engaged and establish valuable business relationships. What’s more, you no longer have to do this manually. Set up a sequence and it will automatically add the right record that matches the criteria. This helps you improve customer experience by never missing out on onboarding or welcome emails. With engagement metrics, you can know what works and what doesn’t to run better email campaigns.

 

Cover illustration by Ashna Liza Sunny

Update: September 4, 2019 – Sales Campaigns is now Sales Sequences in Freshworks CRM.