For big and small companies alike, capturing leads and converting them into sales-ready prospects is essential for growth. Traditional marketing techniques rely on either broad, sweeping distribution or the painstaking work of identifying and categorizing an audience. This is not only inefficient, but also ineffective. By transitioning to an automated approach, you are able to better serve your customers by sending targeted content based on user behavior and interests.
But what is marketing automation, and do I need to be a computer engineer to implement it?
Marketing automation is essentially a collection of tools that help to streamline and bolster your marketing campaign through the use of customer analytics, data distribution, and dedicated triggering mechanisms. That being said, marketing automation is less about some complex software solution than it is about the human element. The key to marketing is creating engaging content; marketing automation just helps match that content with the most receptive audience.
The following five tips will help you create new automated campaigns as well as help boost the effectiveness of the ones already in action:
1. Segment Your List
Segmentation centers on separating customer lists, or potential prospects, into unique categories. Generally, these segments can be defined based on your industry or core objectives. They also help to discern the most important information from your data. For example, maybe you are interested in targeting customers who made a purchase within that past month.
Other segments include:
- Location. Categorizing site visitors or customers based on geography.
- Age. Categorizing site visitors or customers based on age.
- Source of lead. Categorizing site visitors or customers based on how they were captured.
- Sales funneling. Categorizing customers based on their phase of the sales process.
Ultimately, segments can be used to organize your email distributions to send the right content to the right people at the right time. Automating this process can quickly result in more productive lead generation while at the same time decreasing the likelihood of your email ending up as spam.
2. Utilize Form Triggers
One of the most effective tools in your automated marketing arsenal are the creation of triggers, conditions, or actions that automatically generate responses. Behavioral triggers, for example, may reveal where a customer is in the buying process by documenting which portions of a marketing email were accessed. This may help to move prospects further down the sales funnel or to generate more significant leads. Alternatively, repeat customers may be a valuable target group for new sales or promotions by rewarding loyalty and encouraging new conversions.
Form triggers, which may be connected to subscription pages or mailing forms, can capitalize on the most opportune moment for engagement. Automated email responses should:
- Avoid the use of spam-trigger words such as “click”, “buy”, or “sale”.
- Include form data, such as customer names, to personalize the triggered email.
- Include a long-term plan to nurture leads with follow-ups and continued contact.
Effectively utilizing triggers can help to generate significant interest in your business or products by approaching customers when they are likely the most interested. However, responses that are too robotic, or are not relevant to the customers’ behavior, may have an adverse effect on success.
3. Keep Emails Part of a Workflow, Not One-offs
Though your automated marketing may have started with email, your customers have likely interacted with your company in a variety of ways. Where in the sales funnel are your clients at the onset of automation? Where do you want them to be at the end? A successful marketing automation scheme will not rely on bulk, directionless emails. Instead, they will utilize emails that engage a customer based on their interaction with your company, ensuring generated leads will fit into a predetermined workflow, and help move them further down the funnel.
But what exactly is a workflow?
A workflow is the sequence of steps to move from initiating to completing work. This is based on your organization’s goals and objectives, and multiple workflows may be needed to achieve this goal or turn a lead into a customer. Workflows are part of a fully integrated marketing platform, designed to coordinate tasks between people and synchronize data between systems. Creating an email campaign that utilizes personalized or highly targeted emails will improve organizational efficiency and profitability, providing relevant content across all the channels your customers may use.
4. Make Quality Content
This may seem obvious, but, for customer retention and lead generation, it’s crucial. While the concept of “less is more” may not be the most viable in terms of a large marketing campaign, marketing automation can help reduce any redundancies in your system and replace them with effective solutions. At the same time, a commitment to quality content that appeals to different segments of your audience will ensure your efforts have the greatest impact.
But what distinguishes quality content from the spam fodder?
Though there are various definitions of quality, one sure-fire method is to incorporate dynamic content into your automated system. This allows you a certain degree of personalization in your emails and marketing material that would otherwise require hours of methodical work. For example, content that can adapt to a user’s industry, location, or interests will be much more likely to yield positive results.
5. Assign Points to Track Engagement
This last tip quantifies the points mentioned above and ultimately helps you shape your automated system into what’s right for you. In the same way that segmentation separated your users categorically based on interests or other metrics, creating a point system to track engagement can help to further prioritize leads and generate better results. For this reason, this process can be considered dynamic segmentation, where individual segments may be broken down further based on user engagement. While engagement will mean something different for each specific product, some example activities include:
- Logging into your site.
- Commenting on a post.
- Sharing a product with a friend.
- Opening an email.
- Contacting a sales representative.
Assigning points, or “scoring a lead”, is a grading system that can be used to indicate where a customer is in the buying cycle or their overall level of interest. For this reason, there is no uniform method of scoring engagement, but what is generally true is that the higher level of activity, the higher that lead should score. As a result, a highly engaged user is more likely to be converted into a customer or have an overall higher lifetime value within your company’s metrics.
Don’t Forget to be Human
Marketing automation is as much a set of tools as it is a way of approaching your overall marketing campaign. These tips have focused on creating a streamlined marketing solution that provides targeted content for individual users. While the world of automated responses, dynamic segmentation, and form triggers may seem daunting, ultimately the most important factors for success is the human one. Personalized, engaging content will always lead to more impactful results. Marketing automation just increases efficiency and makes connecting with your audience a little bit easier.
