Marketing Automation: Best Practices for Your Business Success

Marketing automation is the use of technology to automatically handle marketing operations and multifaceted campaigns across several channels. To boost income and maximize productivity, marketing and sales teams employ marketing automation to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities. Employees are freed to work on higher-order issues when repetitive jobs are properly handled by automation and human error is decreased. Marketing automation allows marketers to offer real-time, targeted, data-driven campaigns along with enhanced efficiency and output. 

A few examples of marketing automation are:

• Onboarding emails
• Email blasts
• Lead scoring
• A/B testing email campaigns
• Meeting reminders
• Cold outreach
• Birthday & Anniversary greetings
• Abandoned cart marketing automation
• Re-engagement email marketing campaigns
• Transactional messages

Best Practices of Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation shouldn’t be seen as the solution to all your problems. But, when done right, it can certainly bring significant benefits to your strategy. These best practices below will give you actionable tips for how to make marketing automation work for you and your organization.  

• Visualizing Marketing Automation Strategy for Organized Working  

By using visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization tools provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data which will in turn help in arriving at a Marketing Automation strategy.

Mind maps 

Mind maps are a great way to outline and organize the ideas and information in our minds that are easy to remember. They are structured to pattern the brain’s natural thinking pathway, and this similarity fosters creative thinking, leading to the formation of new ideas which form the basis of Marketing Automation.

Flow charts 

Flow charts are one of the greatest tools for visualization. They help not only in determining the strategy but also in formulating the process flow to achieve the desired results. 

• Finding the Right Frequency to Nurture Your Leads  

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Understand the behavior of your customers at different touch points to send them more personalized content to grab their attention. Formulate different Marketing Automation strategies to acquire leads at various touch points. Consider the various possible responses from the leads to your marketing efforts and formulate the strategy accordingly.   

• Hyper-Personalization for Improved User Retention

Marketing leaders must recognize that providing a superior customer experience is not only expected but a competitive advantage. Experience is critical to capture new customers and retain existing ones in today’s crowded digital landscape, while also maintaining or increasing the share of the wallet. Focus on Subscription forms to collect user data to gather demographic information. Use this data to hyper-personalize campaigns to increase the engagement rate.  

•  Categorize Lead Types for Targeted Messaging 

Segment your leads to roll out personalized messages. This allows you to send different messages to different groups of people. This is done in order to improve the targeting and marketing of products and services to specific segments. 

• Keep the Contact Database Clean 

The success of your marketing and sales campaigns relies heavily on your contact database. Any errors or inconsistencies in your contact data could lead to undelivered emails, unanswered phone calls, or missed social media connections. Manage your contacts by checking if they are in the right segments and for any duplication of records to decrease the subscription-cancellation rate. Keep the contact database updated to ensure that the right customer is receiving the right message to keep him engaged with your brand.  

•  Drive Multi-Channel campaigns for Consistent User Experience

Consider omnichannel experience to engage with customers on the platform that they prefer. Multi-channel marketing mixes many distribution and promotional channels into a single, unified strategy to attract customers. This approach efficiently and effectively communicates a product or service’s value using the unique strengths of specific marketing channels. These channels include but are not limited to, email, direct mail, websites, social media, display adverts, and/or a retail storefront. Marketers may use several distribution channels so customers can procure products in their preferred way 

•  Use Drip Campaigns to Nurture Leads

Drip campaigns are highly customizable. You can choose the exact cadence they’re sent with. The content of the emails can also vary based on actions the person has performed. Send pre-drafted emails at specific time intervals to nurture leads present at different stages of the sales funnel.  

• Build Workflows Based on the Buyer’s Journey:  

For people to build a sense of trust towards a brand or business, 90% of the time they follow this pattern of awareness, consideration, and decision-making before purchasing a product. Build workflows based on these journeys to send personalized messages and get better customer engagement at different customer touchpoints.  

•  Reduce Spam Rate by Focusing on Domain Reputation and Deliverability Rate

For this, determine the exact volume at which emails stop landing in the inbox. Perform an in-depth analysis of end-to-end email programs including domain name, infrastructure, customer segmentation, etc. 

•  Keep Your Forms Short to Capture Potential Leads 

If you want to drive potential customers to your business and increase conversions, you should include a lead capture form on your website. Lead capture forms can help generate high-quality leads and move potential customers through the sales funnel. Create easy-to-fill forms, provide your lead with an avenue to contact, and provide only one call to action.   

•  Evaluate Your Marketing Automation Performance

First and foremost, you will want to check whether your automation software is being used, and, hopefully, being used right, otherwise, you can’t expect any meaningful ROI.  Moreover, you need to have enough activity to ensure that your sample sizes are large enough to obtain statistically valid measurements. Then formulate the KPIs to measure your performance if it is in accordance with your objective.  

Here are a few things you should check for, that could clearly tint your measurements: 

• Poor segmentation* 
• Your current win rate and if it is acceptable – i.e. is the sales team doing its job?
• The level and scope of your content arsenal. 
• Sales and marketing alignment  
• The reliability of your marketing automation software and the data it generates 

Do you know of any other enlightening marketing automation tip that can benefit the other readers? Feel free to comment!