Whether you’re just starting out or looking to improve on your existing activities, these marketing automation best practices will make sure you get the most from your marketing efforts.
Marketing automation is often lauded as the solution to all your problems as a marketer — from improving conversion rates, to eliminating manual tasks, to boosting customer retention.
And it’s true, automation has the potential to bring significant benefits for your marketing strategy. That includes higher open rates, improved customer experiences, and stronger customer relationships. But only when it’s done right.
If you’re in need of some direction on how to make best use of your marketing automation tool you’re not alone. According to one survey, 61% of companies said they found the process of implementing marketing automation difficult.
Maybe your automated campaigns aren’
Getting the engagement you expected or you feel you’re not using your marketing automation software’s full capabilities. The best practices below will give you actionable tips for how to make marketing automation work for your business.
Further reading: 10 Best Email Automation Tools for Growing Businesses
7 Best Practices for Marketing Automation Success
1. Know your audience
The word automation might make you think of impersonal campaigns churned out en masse. But if you’re following marketing automation best practices the result should be far from it. The key is to make sure you’re creating campaigns with your target audience in mind.
The best way to do this is to first come list of norway cell phone numbers up with buyer personas for your business. These are descriptions of your ideal customers, including details like demographic information, interests, motivations, and pain points.
You can create your personas based on your own customer data and market research, using tactics such as:
Surveys, interviews, and focus groups
Website and social media audience analytics
Contact form data
Insights from your sales team
Once you’re clear on who you’re 7 mother’s day email marketing ideas to drive more sales targeting, you can tailor the content of your automated campaigns to their needs and avoid messaging coming across as generic.
2. Understand your customer’s journey
Your audience’s expectations don’t remain static. Instead, they evolve as individuals go from first discovering your brand to becoming a customer and beyond. Your automated campaigns should reflect this by feeding contacts with the right content for the stage they’re at to help them move through the sales cycle.
Start by creating a customer journey map, a visual representation of all the touchpoints a customer goes through with your company. This will help you decide what customers should receive and when, to build out your marketing automation workflows.
For example, you might set up a series of automated welcome emails for when people first subscribe to your list. Since these will target new leads, rather than being overly promotional your messages should build trust before trying to convert them. You can then use your automation software to customize the next steps based on how contacts engage.
Once a customer converts, the buyer’s journey shouldn’t end there. Further targeted campaigns will help sustain customer engagement and keep them loyal to your brand.
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. Meanwhile, you can target current customers whose engagement has dropped with content to reignite their interest, like the email campaign below.
Automated email campaign by Aillea targeting inactive customers
Source
3. Collect the right data
Marketing automation isn’t about simply running campaigns on a larger scale. Instead, it should ensure you only send relevant content. And for this you need the right information about the individuals making up your audience.
You can start building up a picture of each contact in the lead capture stage through questions on your signup form. What you need to know will vary depending on your business. Ask yourself what traits influence your customers’ needs and motivations. For example, in a B2C context demographics are often an important factor, whereas in B2B marketing the company profile like its size and sector is more relevant.
You should continue collecting customer insights as they interact with your company. This behavioral data, such as what content users engage with and any purchases they make, offers valuable clues about a customer’s interests.
With the information you gather, you can use list segmentation to group contacts by shared qualities and create different automated journeys tailored to them.
Bonus: Brevo gives you ready segments to use to save you time and send engaging content.
4. Set up lead scoring
Contact behavior can also give an idea of their level of interest in your company. Knowing this will help you determine where they are in the sales funnel so you can better target your automated campaigns.
Creating a lead scoring mode bahrain leads removes the need for guesswork. This involves giving different actions a numerical value, depending on how important they are in showing a customer’s interest. Actions could be anything from viewing a blog post, to attending a webinar, to visiting your pricing page. Then, using automation workflows you assign points to leads based on their actions and their score will tell you their potential for your company.
Once your lead scoring is in place, you’ll be able to identify which leads are ready to hand over to sales and which require further nurturing to maximize your conversions.
Marketing automation workflow for lead scoring based on contact actions
5. Create multichannel experiences
Email automation is the most common way for marketing teams to start automating their campaigns. But if you want to use your marketing automation solution to its full potential you should explore integrating other channels into your workflows.