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Marketing automation uses software to automate monotonous marketing work. Tasks like SMS marketing, email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns are automated by marketers to improve efficiency.
With marketing automation, everything is done by software or a set of tools. This goes in tandem with quick replies, quick actions, quick responses to customers’ queries, quick updates to customers in case of any changes in the services or products offered, and any other essential communication regarding the company itself.
Marketing automation simplifies and shortens the marketing process seamlessly. As a result, communication and conversions happen a lot quicker. You can optimize your marketing efforts to drive targeted visitors to your website. This allows them to readily discover, consider, and even make purchases without leaving their homes. The strategy helps you effectively engage with all your customers and steer them successfully through your sales funnel.
Marketing automation helps simplify and makes your work easier, reduces wastage of time, and delivers in time. Marketing automation is a set of tools to bring marketing activities down to their most accessible simplicity. Marketing automation makes work easy because messages, ad campaigns, emails, and posts are sent automatically without independently sending each item.
The Best Marketing Automation Practices
Below are the best practices to help you maximize purposeful communication with your clients and keep them coming back.
1. Personalization
Customization is now the thing. Therefore, what is not personalized is not given attention. Emails that are not personalized are ignored by clients most times. Because people have a lot of work at hand and are busy, people read only what has directed them or a message meant to be theirs. And one of the easiest ways of letting a customer know that the news is theirs is by personalizing it.
You have to customize a customer’s journey depending on the variables. You can use recommendation engines to get personalized product recommendations. You can find suggestions based on location, shopping and browsing history.
Additionally, you can use exit-intent pop-ups, abandoned cart messages and discounts to excellent your customers and improve their experience. Customized messages and content may include:
Emails
Landing page content or messages
Newsletters
Offers
Graphics on landing pages
2. Provide an omnichannel customer experience
If many people know your company, you have customers present in several regions and social internet channels. The presence of your customers all over the internet requires you to ensure that you deliver a successful omnichannel customer experience.
Omnichannel presence helps to harvest more conversions. It is also advisable to make your contact details and email address available on your website page. This becomes easy for website visitors who would like to contact you directly or send an email message.
Additionally, you can add a live chat on your website for customers—this aids you communicate with customers 24/7. Chatbots have been invented and could do their best to ensure full-time availability. Therefore you have to avail chatbots for your customer service function to ensure general time availability. Chatbots also automate responses to FAQs.
Research shows that SMS Marketing creates a better immediate intuitive awareness among customers than email. Therefore, it remains one of the most effective marketing automation best practices for time-sensitive messages like follow-ups, reminders, etc.
3. Create your buyer persona
Knowing your target market and the audience is very crucial for your business. To know your business, you might need to have a buyer persona; this helps you know your target audience, what things they like, where they are, and their preferences. Additionally, your buyer persona should include demographic information about your supporters or purchasers.
A buyer persona is a complete description of your ideal customer. The description should include highly relevant details like:
Interests
Pain points
Demographic information
Motivations
You can develop your ideal buyer persona through:
Interviews
Surveys
Contact form data
Focus groups
Insights obtained by your sales team
Social media and website analytics
After defining your buyer persona, you can easily tailor your content for your clients.
4. Understand your customers' journey
A well-planned customer journey helps you build trust with your customers at an early start as an entrepreneur. This lets you dig deep to know their interest before they even come to you for further negotiations or consultations.
To understand what the customer journey means, let us first define what exactly customer journey means; a customer journey refers to a process by which a customer interacts with a company to achieve a goal. Of late, maintaining a customer and walking with them through a successful journey requires you to do lots of follow-ups and are not limited to sending thank you messages and follow-up emails about the performance of a product.
To address the issues or problems of your customer or lead, you need first to understand their journey clearly. Trying to get to know their journey deeply involves knowing why they want your products and probably why they have chosen you and not any other.
Once you understand aspects rotating around your lead and perhaps what they want from you, you will have them as your customer. You need to understand that customers love people who guide them with truth and honesty. Creating a relationship during a customer’s decision-making process is very important. It would get you more leads that will ultimately become customers when you take them through a truthful and honest journey. For example, you could set up a series of automated welcome emails for when people first subscribe to your list. For newly converted customers, this might take the form of an onboarding workflow that guides them through getting set up with your product or service.
5. Provide valuable content
Salespeople are involved in the groundwork to know the customer’s preferences and interests. It makes sense to advertise or market something in line with what customers want to hear or see as contrary to something that would sound new in their ears. In addition, it becomes easy for the salesmen if the target customer already has prior knowledge about it, which would be easing their work.
Marketing content is what draws customers and potential buyers. It acts as the first point of contact long before a salesperson steps in. But, it is not only used by the marketing department. Salespeople utilize the marketing content as they go about their business. Therefore, marketing content should first be evaluated before it is put out, and these are some of the areas that should be given a core focus.
What content is available?
What content should be used for marketing?
Who should use this content first?
Where should this content be used?
Why is this content preferred over the other?
Will this content give us the best we expect out of it?
Finally, is there anything left untouched?
Both teams should evaluate to ensure there is no contradicting information. Some studies have found out that sales teams, at times, create their information, and honestly, this would impact your performance on the market.
Today, 60-70% of the content in B2B organizations is not being used. So this is an excellent opportunity to get sales and marketing teams aligned.
6. Track your performance
Marketing automation software feeds on data. The numbers and information in the software help management and business managers make decisions that benefit their companies. These insights will help you refine your strategy going forward and make any necessary tweaks to your workflows.
Higher open and click-through rates indicate that email marketing campaigns have positive results. On the other hand, unsubscribes suggest that clients are not interested in what you are selling, hence leaving. An unsubscribe rate below 1% is a good thing. Once it starts rising above 1%, you need to look into improving your content marketing.
The conversion rate is one of the most vital metrics for sales and marketing teams carrying out automation. Marketing teams nurture leads and hand them over to the sales teams. A high conversion rate is an indicator that the nurturing process is working.
Revenue generated is a question of how effective your marketing automation is in converting to actual revenue. Revenue is the most tangible metric of marketing automation. It is the best measurement to justify Return On Investment (ROI).
The amount of revenue generated by each customer indicates the quality of leads generated from marketing automation. High-quality leads translate to significant profits. In addition, revenue generated can identify redundancies in the marketing automation system and rectify them.
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