As senior living providers continue to face headwinds, they’ve internalized key learnings and adapted new ways to operate through the pandemic. This ‘new normal’ for senior living marketing and sales teams has led to new ways of connecting with peers and prospects.
Consistent with the environment, the Senior Care Sales & Marketing Summit (SMASH) adjusted its in-person conference and programming, transforming it into a weeklong virtual event. During the SMASH virtual conference, Linkmedia 360 senior living and Cappella Living Solutions/Christian Living Communities presented ways to communicate effectively with all stakeholders: by leveraging email marketing automation.
Anticipating the evolving needs of prospective residents and ACIs requires a marketing automation strategy that goes beyond surface-level reporting metrics like clicks and opens. In the event your community missed the presentation, we’ve outlined the most important insights and takeaways.
Continue reading this recap to gain powerful insights to fuel your senior living marketing team’s lead generation and growth in 2021 with email marketing automation.
Automation provides several distinct benefits for senior living providers:
…and much more. To receive these benefits and more importantly, key insights about your prospects and how to engage with them, your community should chart a forward outlook or roadmap based on your audience and the key service line(s) you wish to impact.
This combined effort keeps marketing and sales teams aligned and focused on scaling its automated efforts. To properly evolve and elevate your marketing automation program to meet marketing and sales goals, your team can refer to and check its progress against the stages outlined below:
Stage 1: Setup and Launch (Months 1-3)
During the first stage, your team will want to focus on the following items:
Stage 2: Optimize (Months 3-6)
Once your marketing automation platform has the foundational and technical elements setup, it can optimize for the following items:
Stage 3: Elevate (Months 6+)
Over time, your senior living marketing team has created efficiencies and obtained specific insights into its audiences. Your emails guide users to helpful content and your sales and marketing teams are acting on this data and engagement. An elevated marketing automation strategy looks to check the following items off:
As your organization is working through each stage, refer to this checklist to see how your program stacks up against a best-in-class email marketing automation strategy that surpasses results.
Competitive and experienced sales counselors and sales teams can attest it’s difficult to relinquish any control over a lead and its stage in the prospect journey. Receiving internal buy-in and adoption from the sales team is often the difference between a successful marketing automation program and one that underperforms.
Angela Green Urbaczewski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Cappella elaborates on this point further stating, “Our salespeople hold tight to their prospects, so we have to make automation transparent every step of the way, and show them how it’s helping them get the tour or the sale.”
To obtain the constant collaboration with sales that is necessary to advance through the stages outlined above, Angela Green Urbaczewski offers the following best practices to get your sales team to adopt a technology like marketing automation.
SMASH 2020 was filled with provocative thought leaders, engaging experts and peers to set senior living marketing and sales professionals up for an incredible 2021. For additional insights about SMASH senior living 2020 or key takeaways from our presentation, contact our team. We’ll be happy to help your senior living community receive buy-in and make the most of its technology investments leading into 2021.
