Marketing automation was designed to support sales and achieve efficiency in reaching prospects at scale. But the benefits don’t stop there! Nurturing can be used for many other types of business relationships – including customers, partners, suppliers, and even your employees.
Why Employees Need Nurturing
I firmly believe that internal communications deserve as much, if not, more attention than marketing outreach. It’s not just for the warm, fuzzy feeling – it’s just good business. In today’s war for talent, your employees have options about where to invest their blood sweat and tears.
According to CareerBuilder, 5 in 10 HR Managers say they have open positions they just can’t find candidates for. Effectively engaging the employees you do have and rallying them around a shared purpose is critical to getting ahead.
Opportunity #1: New Employee Onboarding Program
The first 90 days at any organization are going to feel like drinking out of a firehose – but a little empathy can go a long way toward making this less painful.
Can you leverage lead nurturing principles to help them on their buyer’s journey? What are the key questions every new hire has on day 1, day 7, day 30?
Explore scheduling things like:
- Paperwork requests
- A welcome letter from the CEO
- Company background & history
- Automated tasks at set intervals to remind their manager or HR to check in
- New kid logistics questions like dress code, where to eat in the area
- Information on employee perks
Opportunity #2: Employee Benefits Communication
Another fabulous use case for drip nurturing is open enrollment communication for employee benefits. At most companies, the main communication tools for annual benefits renewals are:
a) the dreaded enrollment meeting where everything’s thrown at you all at once
b) a bunch of stock brochures from the insurance company
Drip nurturing is great at breaking complex messages into bite sizes. Why not break out key messages into weekly or bi-weekly communications leading up to the enrollment deadline?
If you’re a marketer and you’re reading this, trust me – your HR will most likely love having some help with this!
Opportunity #3: Analyzing Success of Training & Internal Messages
Pardot has great analytics on prospect engagement – who’s opening and clicking emails, time spent visiting a page, how long people are watching videos (if you’ve got the Wistia integration in place.)
This can give you some great intel on how employees are reacting to different kinds of content. Leveraging Pardot, you could start to understand:
- What training materials people actually use
- Who’s reading monthly reports
- Link click activity on an employee intranet
- Engagement rates with leadership communications (CEO updates, “state of the union” type comms, etc.)
What Other Non-Traditional Ways Can You Leverage Pardot?
Have you found success leveraging Pardot for something other than prospect engagement? What ideas do you have for expanding the impact of marketing automation in your organization? Let us know in the comments?