These marketing automation best practices can help you make the most of your efforts, whether you are just starting or want to improve your current activities.
Marketing Automation has been hailed as the answer to all your marketing problems — from increasing conversion rates to eliminating manual tasks to boosting customer loyalty.
Automation can be a powerful tool for marketing. Automation is only effective when done correctly.
You’re just one of many who need guidance on using your marketing automation tool. According to a survey, 61% of companies found implementing marketing automation difficult.
You may not get the desired results from your marketing software
7 Best Practices to Ensure Marketing Automation Success
Know your audience
Automated campaigns may seem impersonal. If you follow marketing automation best practices, the results should be anything but impersonal. It’s important to create campaigns that are tailored towards your audience.
It can be done by first creating buyer personas for your business. It describes your ideal customer, including demographics, interests, motives, and pain points.
Create your personas using your data on customers and market research.
- Focus groups, surveys, and interviews
- Audience analytics for websites and social media
- Contact Form Data
- Your sales team’s insights
You can avoid generic messaging by tailoring your automated campaigns to the needs of your target audience.
Understanding your customers’ journey
Your audience’s expectations remain dynamic. They change as people move from discovering your brand to becoming a client and beyond. Automated campaigns should be used to reflect this by providing the appropriate content at each stage of the sales process.
Create a Customer Journey Map. It is a visual representation that shows all the touchpoints your customers have with your business. You can use this to decide which customers you should contact and when. It is the basis for your workflows.
You could set up a series of Welcome Emails to send out when someone subscribes to your list. These messages will be sent to new leads, so they shouldn’t be too promotional. Instead, building trust with them before trying to convert them is best.
Your automation software can tailor the following steps depending on how your contacts interact.
The buyer’s journey should continue once a customer has converted. Continued targeted campaigns help maintain their engagement and keep your brand loyalty.
It could be an onboarding process which guides newly converted customers through setting up your product or service. You can also target existing customers service who have lost interest in your product with content that will reignite their passion, such as the email campaign below.
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Data collection is important
Marketing automation does not mean more than running campaigns at a grander scale. Instead, It should ensure you only send relevant messages to the right people. You need to know the correct information about your audience.
You can begin to build a profile of each lead at the sign-up stage by asking questions in your form. The information you will need depends on the nature of your business.
What traits affect your customers’ motivations and needs? In a B2C marketing context, demographics can be a significant factor. However, for B2B, the company’s profile, such as its size and industry, is more important.
Continue to collect customer insights throughout their interactions with your business. These behaviour data, such as the content users interact with and their purchases, can provide valuable insights into a customer’s interest.
List segments can group contacts based on similar qualities and create automated journeys tailored to each contact.
Set up the lead score
Contact behaviour can also provide an indication of the level of interest they have in your business. It will allow you to better target your campaigns based on where the customer is in the sales funnel.
By creating a Lead Scoring Model, you can eliminate the guesswork. It involves assigning different actions numerical values based on their importance in demonstrating a customer’s interests.
The actions could range from reading a blog to participating in a webinar or visiting your pricing pages. You can assign points to your leads based on their actions using automation workflows. Their score will indicate their potential as a customer.
You can then identify which leads you are ready to pass on to sales and which ones need further nurturing to maximize conversions.
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Create multichannel experiences
Email Automation is a common way that marketing teams automate their campaigns. If you want to maximize the potential of your software, you need to integrate other channels into your workflows.
If you limit yourself to a single channel, you need to take advantage of opportunities. You can maximize engagement by reaching out to your customers in different ways. Depending on your message, specific channels may be more suitable than others.
SMS Marketing, for example, is more immediate than email. Therefore, it is ideal for sending time-sensitive information, such as reminders or follow-ups.
Imagine you are creating an automated workflow for event registrations. Start with an automated email to share information leading up to the event. Then, send an SMS as a last reminder.
You could thank attendees via SMS immediately after the event and ask them to complete a feedback questionnaire. You could follow up with emails to maintain the relationship.
Email marketing can be combined with social media advertising to increase customer touchpoints. If you run an ecommerce site, you may already use automation to send emails about abandoned carts.
It could be taken a step further by adding an extra step to your workflow to add those who still need to be convinced to purchase to retarget them via social media ads.
Want to know more about how automated campaigns can engage your customers? Try our B2C Marketing Automation with example workflows.
Automate your internal processes, not just campaigns
The promise of saving time is a big selling point, especially for small businesses looking to maximize efficiency.
Many people limit themselves to automation campaigns when they could also eliminate other manual tasks, depending on their automated marketing service
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Segmenting contacts
You can automate adding contacts to your list based on specific triggers, such as actions taken by the contact. The workflow below, for example, creates a contact list that includes contacts who are now customers. It is done by tracking the purchases.
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- Cleaning your lists
Regularly removing subscribers who don’t engage will ensure that you only contact those who still show interest. It can be done by marketing automation in the background. Set up a workflow to remove contacts that meet the criteria of being inactive.
- Assigning Leads
You can automatically assign qualified leads to a representative to ensure your sales team follows up with prospects as quickly as possible. Add criteria to the assignment process, such as company type or geographic location. It will ensure that the correct person is assigned to each lead.
Track your performance
Keep the software from running your business once you have set up automations. You should continue monitoring your marketing automation results to determine what is working and what is not. These insights can help you refine your marketing strategy and make necessary changes to your workflow.
You can tell if your content is relevant to your audience by how they interact with your campaign. For example, Open and click-through rates indicate your messages are on target, whereas unsubscribes indicate a lack of relevance.
Remember to look at your results on a segment-by-segment basis. You can then determine if you are effectively dividing your audience.
Marketing automation is meant to help you guide people through the buyer’s journey. It needs to be better that they engage with your content without converting. You can identify drop-offs by tracking the rate of conversion at each stage. It will allow you to adjust your workflow.
After identifying an improvement opportunity, you can conduct A/B testing within your workflow to test new user journeys and content. You can then compare performance statistics to determine the most effective approach.
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Use these marketing automation best practices to guide your strategy
Are you ready to put theory into practice?
Begin by laying down the foundations of success. Be clear about who and how you will be targeting. Once you have the data you need and your workflows set up, you can look at other ways to optimize your campaigns.
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