A Different Kind of Lead: How to Nurture Your Employees with Pardot

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 would my employees need nurturing?

This is one of my favorite soapboxes.  I firmly believe that internal communications deserve as much, if not, more attention than our customer-facing communications.

It’s not just to get that warm, fuzzy kumbaya 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.

An ancillary benefit: if you’re just getting started with marketing automation, automating internal communications can be a great “low risk” experiment — and your HR team will likely be hugely appreciative of the extra comms help.

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 new employees on their “buyer’s journey” — aka their path from deer-in-the-headlights newbie to fully functioning team member? What are the key questions every new hire has on day 1, day 7, day 30?

Explore using Engagement Studio to schedule communications 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 during open enrollment season 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 that mean little to nothing to most of your employees

How might you break this complex message into bite size pieces, and leverage Engagement Studio to “nurture” employees as they build their understanding of their benefits options?  Could you break out key messages into weekly or bi-weekly communications leading up to the enrollment deadline?  Can you apply marketing best practices to cut through the corporate-speak and technical benefits jargon?

Fair warning: your HR may smother you in bear hugs if you offer to take this off their plate.

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 can 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 your fellow readers know in the comments!