Marketing Automation, the automation and personalization of marketing processes, is an important part of improving customer experience but it involves certain challenges. Factors such as the correct implementation of CRM and Marketing Automation software, understanding potential moments for powerful communication, acting in accordance with GDPR and other privacy regulations and the commitment of your own business are just a few of the challenges that can hamper a marketing automation programme. A correct implementation can do a great deal to boost sales and customer satisfaction, not to mention the cost and time savings it can bring.
Here we’ll review several of the main marketing automation tactics that can help your business to connect with clients and prospects and take your one-to-one marketing to the next level.
Respond to leads and sort them automatically with lead scoring. Although it sounds unbelievable, according to the Harvard Business Review, 23% of businesses do not respond to leads they receive. We are all busy at work, and sometimes we respond late or not at all, and we end up losing those business opportunities. We also get leads in our pipeline that are only just beginning their customer journey and are far from making a purchase decision. Marketing automation software can help us to sort and order our leads, even assigning them a score in order to differentiate immature leads from hot leads who are ready to purchase. This means we can treat them differently.
This differentiation between lead types also lets us focus on lead nurturing: the process of educating and taking care of an early-stage lead. We can nurture leads by sending them information, tools, discounts, guides, etc. in order to start forging a relationship and gradually convert them into a client. With leads that are more mature, we can assign them priority, act quickly and give them an offer in record time– before our competitors can steal them away!
Provide buyers with personalised offers. Your marketing automation tool or platform does something really useful: it tracks on-site navigation and behaviour, even among anonymous users. We can see where they’ve clicked, what products are the most visited, when they abandon the shopping cart, etc. This provides useful information when it comes to engaging and connecting with visitors. With this information, we can automatically personalise content served on the web, even in the case of the anonymous user. When a user is logged in, we can also use marketing automation to follow up via email, encouraging them to return to their shopping basket, offering a discount or recommending other similar products.
As we accumulate data on user navigation, we can classify visitors, segmenting them into groups we use to show them relevant products, services or information tailored to their specific interests.
Simplify all those emails. Email marketing is certainly not a new tool in the marketer’s toolkit, but it still is very effective. As mobile continues to dominate our internet use, our relationship with email has shifted: we skim our mail quickly, always at the peril of becoming distracted by one of the other thousand things on our smartphone. Here is where marketing automation in email can help. It offers the opportunity to send totally automated emails that respond to micro-moments, contain content relevant to prior navigation or emails, give personalised offers for individual users based on their behaviour and what we know about them, and of course we can track which messages have worked well and which haven’t.
You’ll do more upselling. Imagine you run an online pet supply store and I buy some puppy food and a book entitled “Everything you need to know about your new puppy”. With a robust product classification and marketing automation in place, you can start impacting me with content, offers or products that are of interest to a puppy owner. You can also start to upsell to me: if you see I’ve bought dog food a few times, you can send me an email detailing the best in natural and organic dog foods. Or maybe your store has a complete line of puppy toys. You can cross-sell these items to me as you already know I have a puppy. Finally, you can even accompany me throughout the lifecycle of my dog. As my purchases evolve, so will your personalised offers to me.
Nurture the relationship you have with both old and new clients. The points detailed above all serve the same end for your business: foster and strengthen the relationship you have with existing clients and convert prospects into long-term, loyal clients. Beyond prospect lead nurturing, you’ll need to also nurture existing clients since these people can potentially do business with anyone else, and they require useful, reasonable and relevant communication on your part if they are going to stick with you. Marketing automation makes this possible and even easy.
Analytics is another pillar of marketing automation and the nurturing of client relationships: tracking behaviour, engagement and interactions across channels is going to help your business understand consumers and adjust offers and communications accordingly.
Marketing automation not only allows us to create long-term, solid relationships with clients, but it helps us to efficiently establish a customizable path, stretching from a prospect’s first visit to the website to their transformation into a loyal customer.
If you’d like to learn more about how marketing automation can help your business save time and gain new clients, contact us.
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Client Success Manager
Alexis is our Client Success Manager at All Around. She is a Digital Marketing Specialist and Manager with 15+ years of experience in international markets. She is a dedicated client partner, ready to take businesses to the next level, with vast expertise in digital strategy, operations, project management, reporting, budgeting and negotiation.
