Posted On: Oct 15, 2019
Posted By: John Duff
marketing automation

Marketing isn’t a simple task. Especially when your customers evolve along with the technological revolution, it becomes highly unpredictable to judge the market place. You may have to spend more and more time on learning the latest trends. And, wasting your precious time on such tiring tasks does no good for your business.

So, what’s the way to simplify this process? The answer is – Marketing automation. Luckily, the adoption of marketing automation tools isn’t something new. Emailmonday revealed that an average of 51% firms are currently using this software. They use marketing automation tools to perform routine and repeating actions. It will make the job a little more painless so that one can focus the attention on other responsibilities.

Other benefits of marketing automation include:

  • Managing the sales process
  • Generating new leads round the clock
  • Acquiring personalized info about potential clients
  • Nurturing obtained leads with chatbots
  • Interacting easily with subscribers
  • Analyzing massive amounts of data
  • Spending less money on marketing
  • And so on

The advantages of marketing automation tool looks interesting. But, merely implementing it in your business does no wonder by itself. If you want to reap the desired outcome from it, you need to follow the well-built strategy. We suggest you integrate the below-mentioned key points while building it for your business.

1. Uninterrupted Lead Generation Process

Lead generation is a lengthy and ongoing process. It involves a lot of effort to generate even a single lead. That is, one has to:

  • Find the right contact among a large pool of data.
  • Repeatedly make the cold calls to lure the prospects.
  • Give details of products and services. Explain its advantages, features, and more.
  • Come up with the valuable offer to grab the attention of the audience.
  • Convert leads to sales.

And, if you do the above procedures manually, it will undoubtedly consume more time. So, go for the automation tool that lessens your marketing burden and produces a better outcome. According to a recent report by The Annuitas Group, firms using marketing automation experience a 451% increase in engaged and solvent leads.

Now you know that a good automated funnel helps your sales rate grow. But how to use it to guide your leads to the funnel? Once a lead comes to your website through context ads or other means, follow the below-mentioned tips:

  • Display a pop-up window with a win-win offer.

pop up windowImage Source: Kelly Harrop

  • Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter via email subscription form.
  • Provide live chat window for online assistance.

2. Automated Customer’s Buying Journey

Use a marketing automation tool to track the customer lifecycle as well as build a right relationship with the audience. The steps include:

  • Get as much information of your prospects as possible through email subscription form and create a contact card for each one of them. It helps you in personalized marketing.
  • Run campaigns and record the prospect’s behavior and preferences such as email opens, clicks, purchases, etc. Use this data for segmentation.
  • Trigger emails based on the customer’s lifecycle. It consists of a welcome email, birthday emails, order details, feedback requests, loyalty reward campaigns, etc.
  • Set up a reactivation campaign using automation. It lets you re-engage the inactive subscribers with the reminder or “we-miss-you” messages.

reactivation campaignImage Source: Duolingo

  • Track the website activities such as browses, bounce rate, abandoned carts, orders, and feedback/callback requests to provide customized communication and keep customers interested in your brand.
  • Learn the patterns of unsubscribes and come up with a creative design for that page. Offer such prospects more options to stay with you.

Email-Unsubscribe-EmailImage Source: Puma

3. Personalized Marketing Approach

Automation tools help you create personalized dynamic content. Here personalization is not just about referring to the audience by their name or surnames, but also including customized rollovers, AMP-powered elements, GIF animation, etc. Now let’s see how to begin with the personalized approach.

Start with personalizing your promotional emails. For example, send exclusive content for only women or men on your list. If you aren’t aware of their gender, make sure to ask it explicitly. It works much better than any impersonal message for all gender at once.

personalized-email-campaignsImage Source: Office

4. Multi-channel Collaboration

Your marketing approach works better when you combine your campaigns with other channels such as social networks, messengers, etc. Manually providing information to each customer by managing various communication channel is tiresome. But, with the help of automation tools, you can effectively follow this strategy.

For instance, combining email marketing with social media will produce excellent result. Create a subscription form on your Facebook or Instagram page to collect the emails from your followers and also the users caught by your ads. In social media ads, people are more likely to fill in the form as they don’t have to type all the info. The data are automatically generated based on their profile.

Later, you can use this info to nurture them through your email marketing campaign. It helps you generate sales and also boost revenue drastically.

5. Report Monitoring and Analysis

The marketing automation tool lets you see the result of specific actions in real-time. It is one of the undeniable advantages over other marketing approaches. In the offline or non-automated marketing system, detailed reports and in-depth analytics are not wholly trustworthy. The marketing decisions are most often based on assumptions and the intuition of a marketing professional.

But, automation tools report on actions in real-time. They give you full information on your initiated campaigns. You can see the performance of your currently running campaign right away. It accurately shows the number of visits, clicks, as well as purchases.

Campaign Performance DashboardImage Source: datapine

For instance, if you want to examine your emails at each stage of the campaign, you can perform automated A/B testing. You have to feed all parts of your email for this test. It includes:

  • Subject lines
  • Email content
  • Call-to-action
  • Email trigger
  • The time and date
  • Frequency

It helps you trace the performance of your email campaigns over a defined period. So, you can optimize the conversion rates moving forward and also research to improve the profits you earn.

Wrapping Up

Marketing automation is a prolonged process. But that doesn’t mean one need to stop embracing it or overlook it altogether. As mentioned above, companies are seeing a rapid rise in their conversions and revenue because of this tool. So, focus on how it can help your business as well. Follow the key points mentioned here to integrate this system into your marketing module smoothly.