How to Leverage Marketing Automation?

Yes, the technology that helps marketers achieve their objectives.

It is a fact- marketing automation is the marvel solution of the 21st century. And perhaps the most crucial aspect –it is worth the price and helpful for all organizations. At a time when businesses are looking to cut down costs and invest in technologies that give the best ROI, marketing automation stands out as that priority solution.

Here, you can see more than 45% of the users think it is fairly priced, which shows the technology could be integrated into many small businesses.

The solution is changing the entire marketing process: reaching out to customers, nurturing the relationship with them, upselling, cross-selling, and many more. With so many user cases, marketers just love this technology.

The statistics show:

Almost 80% of marketing automation users found the technology increased their lead flow.

Besides that, 77% witnessed an increase in the number of conversions.

But still, a few marketers find it challenging to leverage this technology. They aren’t aware of the right tactics needed and have difficulty integrating at the best place to get maximum benefits. For example, you can find automation tools for email marketing, social media marketing, and for different pages on a website, such as landing pages. As a marketer, you need to figure out where to integrate automation.

Once you get the answer to this question, the entire process becomes a piece of cake.

Marketing automation strategy

Defining goals

Don’t blindly follow your competitor. Many organizations just try to implement a technology or tactic just because their competitors did. This will just lead you nowhere.

While it’s essential to keep track of competitor’s tactics, you need to also understand why they integrated the technology in the first place. You also have to decide why you need to integrate the same in your process, whether it would give the same results as it did for your competitors, whether it will help improve brand promotion and so on. Once you have answers to all the crucial questions, you can take the next step.

Identifying your target audience

You should know whom to target. Great content, the right strategy, beautiful design –all falters if your target audience isn’t appropriate. In the business world, where time is directly related to money, you also end up investing your valuable time in connecting with the wrong type of audience.

Making the right use of flow

Now, most marketers have observed although their target audience visits the website, reads the content, they don’t take the right action. This significantly hampers the marketing efforts and eventually the business results.

If you’re looking to resolve this challenge and planning to integrate marketing automation, it’s the right decision. The technology can provide more information to customers so that they move down the funnel. Marketing automation fills this gap, which most marketers have overlooked.

Isn’t it disheartening to lose a customer only because they needed more information?

After including all these steps in your strategy, you could move on to the next stage.

Implementation of marketing automation

A stitch in time saves nine

Heard of this adage?

Yes, it means resolving the challenge at an early stage to avoid a difficult to resolve issue later on. Marketing automation finds the loopholes in a manual process and automates the tasks to get better results. Let’s take the example of a welcome email sent to subscribers after signing up for the service.

Don’t you think marketing automation is more suited for this process?

It is difficult to send individual emails through a manual process, and if delayed, customers might not give the same importance than when received immediately. Marketing automation automates these tasks –as soon as the sign-up process is complete, it shoots out the email to the recipient’s inbox. This technology helps nurture the relationship with the customer. With better service, you even save time by not having to put extra effort into winning their trust!!!

This is one of the welcome emails sent by Uber. Every time a new customer signs up, the organization sends out these emails to the individual customer.

This is only possible with the automated marketing system. To encourage their new customers, the brand even offered a free ride worth up to $15.

Following like a shadow

Most customers aren’t even aware of their needs. They would browse the websites, go through the offers, research about the products, but still, they can’t finalize the product. In such a scenario, marketing automation follows them like a shadow. It lists out the pages the customers visited, the time they spent on the offer page, the time spent reading the content, and many more. With this, it could read the customers’ minds.

This technology would then reach out to the customer with the content which they would be interested in. You could bet that the customer would now purchase the product.

Following the customer helps, as you could understand their subconscious minds or needs, which they aren’t aware of.

This tactic has worked for many organizations, and you could also implement it in your process to see the results.

The great reminder

Emails that remind customers about something eventually help increase revenue. Some customers might feel you’re stalking them, but that’s far from the truth. For example, an e-commerce organization is accountable if the customer abandons the shopping cart. Here the marketers need to delve deep to find the exact reason — why the customer did so?

To understand the why you need some time, but before that, the brand has to shoot out the reminder emails to these customers instantly. The email with the products, pages customers checked or visited needs to be included. As the experience is a recent one, customers could still opt to purchase.

Marketing automation could take over the entire process, from tracking the customer when he visited the website until he left it. It helps accelerate sending abandonment cart emails or reminder emails to the customer at the right time.

For example:

As you can see here, Amazon sent this cart abandonment email to a customer. So, do you think every time, a customer abandons the shopping cart, marketers sit down to send these emails to customers?

Not really…

Marketing automation does its job.

As a customer-centric organization, Amazon can feel the pulse of their customers and send emails that motivate them to purchase the product.

According to a quote by Danny Brown, co-author of Influence marketing:

“Customer service is not the same as being customer-centric.”

This implies customer service only provides the required service to customers while customer-centric adopts the approach that revolves around the customer completely. And in the present market, automation technology is helping organizations to become customer-centric.

Hyper-personalized marketing

You must have used personalized marketing in your strategy. Now we have hyper-personalized marketing that helps super targeting your customers. You just put the information that the customer wants to read and instantly connect with your brand.

You refer to them by their name, showcase how your product would help their business and other useful solutions. To put it simply, the emails are precisely designed for the individual customer with the information that would make them read.

Although the process isn’t easy, having detailed information about the customer surely helps.

Have you ever noticed that Facebook sends an email to its users if they haven’t logged into their account for quite a while? So, how do you think they do it?

It’s obvious they track their user activities, and if the users aren’t active, the automation tool instantly sends out an email. They include bait content such as “A lot has happened on…..last logged in.” Now, most users would surely be motivated to open their accounts to know about the latest events, actions, etc.

The brand knows how to focus the automated content around the user’s curiosity.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is an essential technology for any organization.

So why not use it the right way to get the best ROI possible?

Over time, this technology is continuing to evolve, giving marketers an advantage to outreach a broader customer base across the world. It makes the process streamlined and eases the workload so that you can concentrate on more cognitive tasks in the organization.

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**About the Author: Robert Jordan, a seasoned marketing professional with over 12 years of experience, currently working as Media Relations Manager at InfoClutch Inc, which offers most sought after technology database including Netsuite customers list, Salesforce client list with other services. Have expertise in setting up the lead flow for budding startups and takes it to the next level. Have a deep interest in marketing, b2b & technology related discussions. Always open for new ideas & discussions.