Simplify, Streamline, Succeed: Essential Marketing Automation Best Practices

When you view the consumer world through the eyes of a marketer, you find yourself hard-pressed for time. With a million probable prospects of different demographics, geographical locations, likes, and preferences, you find yourselves at your wit’s end, wondering about divvying up leads and warm prospects to the sales team while simultaneously ensuring that the email marketing, socials, and content game are on point. 

While there are a host of marketing automation tools and platforms available in the market, it goes a long way if you are abreast with the latest, cleanest, and sharpest best practices. Without any further ado, let’s delve into some of these tips and tricks that will help you ace your marketing automation game without midnight jitters of failed campaigns and unrealized ROIs.

1. Get to “really” know your audience. 

You might have access to the best marketing automation software, but it might amount to nothing if you are not rattling off buyer personas in your sleep. Ok, that’s a marked exaggeration, but you get the drift. This seemingly simple step holds the foundation of a solid marketing automation endeavor, right from gathering data from multiple sources on consumer behavior to building personas, segmenting buyers, and building simple yet effective workflows.

Designing customer experiences, from the initial interactions to product delivery, enhances engagement, expedites processes, and ensures customer satisfaction. However, thorough research is essential before implementing this marketing automation strategy to segment the market effectively and align marketing objectives with customer journeys. This approach allows the customization of customer journeys based on each group’s preferences and purchasing habits, streamlining internal and external workflows.

Several starting points for customer research exist, conveniently accessible within marketing automation platforms. Current statistics indicate that 85% of shoppers conduct online research before purchasing, leaving data trails that automation platforms can capture. These platforms also collect online profiles from social media, Google, and other sites.

Collecting Data:

Begin by gathering data on the target audience through various strategies, such as:

1. A/B Testing: Utilize marketing automation systems for split testing, segregating leads and customers based on demographic data, online search terms, and social media activity. Test results form the basis for customer journey groups.
2. Social Media Analytics: Marketing automation platforms analyze social media data, providing insights into your followers and potential markets. Social media sites also offer insights about your business page’s followers.
3. Web Analytics: Platforms like Google Analytics offer information on website traffic, visitor activities, conversion rates, and search terms related to your product. Similar websites like Alexa and SimilarWeb provide valuable data.
4. Collaboration with Sales Team: Work closely with the sales team to access data about different customer types and common customer concerns. Identify customer groups and address these concerns through automated workflows.
5. Customer Surveys and Interviews: Conduct interviews and surveys to gather detailed information about customers’ concerns and preferences. Use this data for refining automated workflows.

Creating a Workflow:

After gathering information, process the data into reports displayed on the dashboard, which can be used to build workflows. Each workflow stage represents a milestone in the customer journey. It is advisable to create multiple pathways to address various scenarios.

Plan content for each stage on social media, new web articles, blog posts, or landing pages. Sequence and schedule these materials accordingly. Similarly, map and sequence customer communications like emails, instant messages, and SMS for each relevant stage. Once everything is set, your operations will run seamlessly, leading to more engaged customers and significantly reducing your workload.

2. Segment, segment, and segment some more!

Customers exhibit diverse interests, and even individuals sharing similar demographic details can have distinct preferences. Consequently, employing a uniform email approach for the entire customer base may alienate many recipients. This underscores the vital role of segmentation, a task easily automated through marketing software.

Segmentation involves scheduling customers into groups based on shared traits, preferences, and locations. These segments then become the focus of specific strategies within campaigns, ensuring promotions, invitations, and messages resonate with their interests. Consequently, each segment becomes more engaged with a company and its offerings, potentially resulting in purchases and brand loyalty. Moreover, segmentation simplifies communication as marketers no longer need to send personalized messages to each segment member manually.

Marketing automation platforms can effortlessly segment customers using several criteria, with the following being most commonly applied:

1. Demographic Information: This includes fundamental customer details such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, and income.
2. Geographic Information: This pertains to customer locations and their proximity to your nearest branches.
3. Engagement: Measures customers’ interest levels across various channels, including email open rates and social media interactions like likes, shares, and comments.
4. Purchase History: Groups customers based on their past purchases, as they are likely to buy similar products in the future.

3. Set up & automate a solid content repertoire/library

At the core of any effective marketing automation strategy lies compelling content that engages customers and encourages them to support and make purchases from a brand. These messages take various forms, including social media posts, videos, blog articles, newsletters, and emails, and they need to be pre-organized before they are channeled to the appropriate platforms at the optimal times. To streamline this process and prevent confusion, it’s crucial to systematically categorize and sort different types of content based on the platforms where they will be published. This facilitates easy integration into the workflows for each platform and enables automated scheduling.

In addition to routine messages, it’s essential to maintain a library of action-based content such as landing page pop-ups, abandoned cart reminders, and post-purchase promotions. This approach allows for last-minute adjustments to be made to the content and its triggers before customers see the messages. The platform provides comprehensive visibility into every content type, with engagement metrics quantified for analysis. Armed with this data, you’ll be well-equipped to craft more effective campaigns in the future.

Summary

Setting up the perfect marketing campaign can be a piece of cake, albeit one needs to regularly check for chinks in the armor and oil those nuts and bolts that creak! If you’d rather delegate the task to experts, look no further! Marketing mavericks, aka Mavlers, are well-equipped to look into all your marketing automation needs, from email automation to social media marketing. We can do it all and with Elan! Hit us up now!