15 Tips for Effective Marketing Automation
The number of companies that are implementing marketing automation have been on the rise. There are several reasons why this is the case. The good thing with marketing automation is that it helps you to measure your results and create effective and highly personalized marketing strategies for transforming leads into sales. If you are still a newbie in marketing automation or are struggling to record success, here are 15 tips for effective marketing automation.
Tips for Effective Marketing Automation:
Begin with a Strategy
Before executing any marketing method, you need to have a strategy. Think about what you would like to accomplish with your marketing automation. Think about the tools that you will be using and the frequency of use. When is time ripe to withdraw from automation and add a human salesperson?
Prepare to Save Time
It will take you some initial setup time to begin on marketing automation. However, if you do it properly, you will set all the tasks in motion and you will never have to think about them again. You can benefit from the time-saving element of automation by creating templates for the kind of campaigns that you often launch. Once you have these templates in place, you will be able to easily tweak the images and copy, for instance, your email series, so that they get updated for a particular campaign. Utilize personalization tokens in your content so that while it is automated, it will also be personalized.
Take Advantage of Reporting
Analytics and reporting will be your metrics for knowing the success of your marketing automation efforts. However, don’t only concentrate on, for instance, the number of users who opened your last email. You actually need to do something based on your data. If the numbers are not where you would want them to be, you can try another stock photo or a different copy and then measure the results.
Focus on Fundamentals
The features of marketing automation can easily overwhelm you. To begin with, only pay attention to the fundamentals; nurturing, scoring, and lead stages. You can only implement these additional features once you are confident that you understand these elements.
Love Integrations
Modern marketing automation solutions integrate with several tools that you use. Once you connect to this software, you will end up having less work and get smart results. Connect your CRM with your phone system to develop an online log form for the incoming phone calls to allow your customer service representatives to log your calls and view client data. Tie your SaaS platforms to the marketing automation tool to track the much you can about how your prospects are interacting with your products.
Develop and Utilize Personas
Buyer personas are very powerful but most people neglect this tool yet it can help you to tailor your campaigns to the correct individuals with a proper message. Marketing automation allows you to segment your message to reach each type of persona and increase your rate of conversion once you hit the mark while communicating the requirements of everyone.
Test, Test, and Test
You need to test your process, CTAs, forms, and campaigns. However, only make a single tweak at a time for you to measure the impact that the small changes have on your campaigns in an accurate manner. Take note of the messages, images, colors, and fonts that report the best results for you to replicate them.
Utilize Customer Data to Get a Better Understanding of Your Demographic
You will learn so much as people continue to interact with your social media profiles, emails, products, and websites. You should not neglect these insights. Once you analyze the data from your customers, you will drastically improve your results for your B2B marketing teams.
Utilize Lead Nurturing in Creating Sales
To get visitors on your site to convert to leads is only the initial step. You need to publish engaging content that assists the prospects through the purchase journey to make them take the desired action. Some of the actions include calling a sales representative, subscribing to emails, or buying a product. Mapping out the purchase journey of your buyer and addressing all their questions at every stage will help you to deliver the content they require at the right time to guide them through the process, close the sale and build trust.
Pay Close Attention to Your Lead Scores
The origin of your leads is important and keeps on changing over time. It is good to know where you get your leads from as this will help you to craft automated marketing campaigns. You will understand the sources that bring you the most leads and the ones that have the highest converting leads. Pay close attention to the details of the lead source such as the sources themselves and the categories.
Integrating the Platforms
You can have multiple databases that have customer data in your organization. However, this can make it hard to update your data across the board and get an overall view of your customer information. Integrate your systems the much you can to make sure that your marketing automation blends with the CRM and this also syncs with your financials or ERP. If you can’t do this, you may use a reporting platform that brings in all the data from various systems for you correctly track your KPIs and metrics across the lifecycle of the customer.
Focus on Capturing the Most Important Data
There is so much data out there and this makes it challenging to know what to use. Start simple and only collect the most important data such as zip code, name, and email. As your marketing automation continues to mature, you can use technology like Progressive Profiling and Smart Fields to get more data. Have a clear plan of what you want and why you need it.
Data Clean-up is Crucial
Develop processes to clean and update your customer data. For instance, you need to know how you will manage inactive, invalid, and unsubscribed email information. You should know how you will be handling duplicate accounts and how you will manage states. You can set up these data pieces and processes at implementation immediately to eliminate a lot of headache down the road.
Set Up Revenue Stages
You want to be sure that your marketing is generating revenue naturally. Make sure you set up revenue stages in the lead process pipeline to measure the contribution of marketing to revenue.
Assess the Lead Funnel
Automation moves like a machine that is well oiled and you may begin to realize squeaky wheels. These may be sections in your sales funnel that may not be delivering the results that you want. Make sure that you oil them so that they deliver the anticipated results.
The truth of the matter is that marketing automation takes a lot of time. Ignore some features from the onset and them add them as you process.
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