Is automation just some word you’ve heard thrown around in digital marketing conversations?
If it’s currently in your peripherals and you’re trying your best to ignore it because it sounds too complicated and time-consuming, then we hate to break it to you; it’s time to make it front-and-centre.
Most marketers are still in the early days of automation adoption. While spending as of 2019 sits at $15.6 billion USD, it’s expected to leapfrog to $25.1 billion USD in 2023, according to a report by Forrester.
Whether you’re a small business owner that’s short on time, or you run a large corporation with too much data to handle, automation is about to become your favourite new toy.
Did you know? The best automation practices are personalised. Find out this and more in our Impressive Report: Personalising the Customer Experience.
What is marketing automation?
Let’s start with the basics.
Marketing automation is all about taking advantage of software that automates your marketing activities.
It could cover various departments – from social media to email marketing to ad campaigns – to enhance personalisation for your users.
What it takes is a solid strategy combined with reliable software. When properly executed, marketing automation should help you nurture prospects thanks to a series of useful, personalised content. It puts customers at the centre of everything you do and ideally reduces customer friction points.
Sounds good? Read on and let’s find out how automated campaigns are helping companies grow faster than old-school methods ever could.
How can automation software help grow your business?
Marketing automation is the savvy way to understand your customers’ digital footprints. Where are they hanging out? What blogs are they reading? Which emails do they open? Have they checked out your pricing page yet?
You can use this invaluable data to get a deeper knowledge of what they like and want. That’s how you create a more customised marketing campaign that improves engagement and delivers a better return-on-investment (ROI).
Let’s take a look at 6 ways you can build an automation campaign for business growth.
Drive growth with these automation best practices
1. Map out your lead stages or user journey
Knowing where each lead is (within the awareness, consideration or decision stage) helps you visualise how quickly they’re moving from one stage to the next. You can create custom fields to track this, helping you identify bottlenecks and create a smoother-flowing path for your prospects.
Just some lead stages you might want to use include:
- Anonymous: A user that has visited your website but hasn’t yet provided you with any personal data.
- Known lead: A user that has identified themselves and can now be targeted with your marketing strategies.
- Engaged: A user that has engaged with your website in some way, such as downloading an eBook or opening an email.
- Qualified lead: This stage can be broken down to MQL and SQL.
You can add stages to track leads once they’ve passed the SQL (sales qualified lead). It’s important to know whether they became a customer, whether they need further nurturing or whether they’ll never buy from your business.
2. Lead scoring process
There’s no point in handing leads over to the sales team until you know they’re qualified.
You do this with a lead scoring system. Choosing how to score leads depends on your business and campaign type, but it often depends on information like demographics and online behaviour.
You can then decide on the score a lead has to have in order to be passed over to sales. Re-evaluate the threshold regularly and get input from your sales team to make sure you’re passing over the right leads at the right time.
3. Establish a fast-track lead qualification
There are certain actions a user can take that makes them undeniably ready to make a purchasing decision, such as requesting a free trial of your product.
Decide what these actions are for your strategy to qualify leads like this more quickly. You can assign more points to such actions and your automation software will fast-track qualified leads for you.
4. Personalisation and segmentation for better targeting
Nearly half of all consumers would be more likely to engage with a business that sends relevant offers by email. Relevancy is achieved through segmenting your database and making content more personal.
Your marketing automation software gives you the power to organise large volumes of data, to create targeted email campaigns that speak the specific language of each type of user.
Addressing the pain points of a particular audience segment leads to a much more successful strategy, compared to a generic blanket email.
5. Utilise email drip campaigns
You know those days when you have blogs to upload, social media posts to write and emails to send? But you also have back-to-back meetings in your calendar…
Yep, those days. Automation is the tool that keeps things ticking along nicely in the background, to remind your user database that you still care.
Email drip campaigns are a major part of a good automation strategy. They’re pre-written and pre-loaded into the system and can be released at specific times or following set actions of a lead.
Leverage them to keep customers updated of any promotions, introduce new prospects and nurture existing ones.
6. Attack multiple channels
Depending on your product, your ideal customer will generally head to a particular place to get their information – whether this is social media, emails or somewhere else.
Run multi channel campaigns to incorporate touch points through all the right channels. Remember, just because the majority of your audience is young, this doesn’t mean a particular strategy won’t be effective. Everyone is different.
Take a broad approach and push out information through various channels to avoid missing out on potential sales.
Get a customer-focused automated campaign
Knowing which automation tools are best and how to put a campaign into action might leave you feeling stumped. That’s what we’re here for. Impressive’s automation specialists work closely on your campaign to understand your goals and execute best practices, to make you more sales and build a loyal customer base while you continue to grow your business.
If you want to learn more about how we can personalise our automation campaigns, take a look at our Impressive Report: Personalising the Customer Experience today.
To speak to one of our experts, call 1300 191 943 or contact us online.