Businesses more often face the need to speed up processes and increase conversion rates. To do that, people often implement innovative marketing solutions. Marketing automation helps build stronger relations with the audience and attract new clientele. However, any changes, especially those that relate to marketing, require a professional approach.
Today, over 80% of companies use marketing automation tools to generate new leads and focus on their customers better. However, according to marketing experts from Essaypro, marketing automatization is only effective when the business knows how to use it.
In this article, we are going to discuss several useful ways to implement marketing automation into business and maximize its positive effects.
Before Implementing, Define
A decision to automate your marketing efforts costs a lot. Thus, before spending your corporate money on it, define what goals you are pursuing. It really helps in planning your investment and selecting the best tools.
Many companies believe that every tool they choose is designed to grow revenue. However, marketing is more complex. More personalized customer experience and a simple buying process are appealing to customers. But it will not impact sales directly. Thus, it is wise to start with defining what marketing success means for you before actually making an investment.
Create a Plan
Yes, you need a new plan. This plan has to cover all stages of marketing automatization. Moreover, it must be aligned with your general business strategy. Sounds difficult? It may seem like a tough task, but it needs to be done to forecast some adverse effects.
While planning, try to take different sides. Think of what problems your customers may encounter and how you can help solving them. Also, define triggers for some actions and think about a typical customer’s response. For example, a single click on an icon can automatically send an email with a discount to the client’s email.
All this planning and thinking will definitely help in developing a consistent marketing automatization plan that will seamlessly fit into your business strategy. In this case, a systemized approach is very important.
Set Success Criteria
It is always hard to measure success when there are no milestones defined. Thus, to measure your performance, you need to have specific criteria.
These checklists will depend on the goals you set for the entire campaign. For some companies, such indicators as conversion and customer value will be more important than ROI and revenue increase.
Mind Your Content
If marketing is a car, content is a fuel. If a business struggles to develop high-quality and engaging content, its marketing automation is likely to fail. Thus, before implementing any changes, make sure your content is good enough to appeal to people.
Marketing automation means that people will deal with your blog posts, emails, and website more often. Your content needs to be powerful enough to convert visitors into customers, retain the existing clients and attain the new ones. Thus, try to launch an internal audit of all information you have ever placed online to identify clear gaps and deal with them.
Work Cross-Functionally
If you decide to implement changes and automate your marketing efforts, do not focus on the ideas submitted only by the marketing team. Work with other staff who also deals with customers and sales. Analyze data collected by different people and make sure that cross-functional collaboration is achieved in this mission.
Collaboration is needed to avoid losing potential revenue generation opportunities. Specialists from other areas can help you notice things or come up with ideas that would not be possible without the common effort.
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Implement Marketing Automation
It is difficult to choose the best ones in a wide variety of marketing automation tools and techniques. Let’s have a look at several most popular ones to grab an idea.
Dynamic Content
This automation tool allows adding extra interaction with your leads. You can automate aspects of the website or the body of your email so that it changes based on the interests or behavior of your customers.
People will not even know that such changes occur. However, those who were interested in cutlery will read about it, whereas visitors looking for bed linen will eventually find all associated offers.
Drip Campaign
A drip campaign is also an automation tool that is based on the customer’s behavior while they are on your website. For example, when leads choose to subscribe to your emails, an automated welcome letter will be sent. If they visit your online store again, promotions and offers related to these products will be emailed to them.
This is only one example of such campaigns. They can be applied in different ways to meet all the various needs.
Nurture Campaigns
Not every visitor is a buyer. However, they all are potential customers. To cut down on the number of leaving visitors, you should nurture them. How?
You can combine dynamic content and drip campaigns to reach out to people who left their emails or phone numbers. However, it would also be wrong to bombard your customers with emails. You should strike a balance and sense the best time to reach out.
List Segmentation
Marketing automation is not always about customers and content. It also serves to help specialists work effectively. Things like list segmentation can be done manually, but they take lots of time. Automation saves it and helps to get more accurate results.
Such automation tools as list segmentation can group customers based on different criteria. When this is done, you can tailor your promotion campaigns to meet the needs of each group better.
Team Collaboration
When the number of leads grows, communication gaps between different departments can affect your sales. Lots of marketing automation tools help businesses collect and store all the information they have on a particular customer.
Such tools basically streamline team collaboration, joining all information sources, processing them, and coming up with a clear data set. This makes information available to all departments across the company.
Final Words
Medium and big businesses will no longer sustain competition if they do not implement marketing automation tools. Even though it usually means extra costs for companies, such an improvement promises revenue increase and improved work efficiency.
However, before actually making steps towards process automation, it is really important to analyze your goals and expectations. The tools you choose and the actions you make should be aligned with your business strategy.
If done right, marketing automation will have amazing results. Your marketing team will no longer struggle with unnecessary manual workload, while your leads will only receive the information they need.
