Marketing automation is the process of continuously improving two core areas – generation of prospects and lead management.
Automation of your marketing processes helps you to get to a state, where you’re able to achieve personalization at scale i.e., being able to craft your messages effectively, so you're able to engage and build better resonance for thousands (or even, hundreds of thousands) of customers. That means higher engagement from your customers, which in turn leads to higher volumes of leads.
How You Can Optimize Marketing Automation
The design of your marketing automation system depends on your business. It's all about bottom-line -- measuring success constantly, identifying what's working and what's not and taking the right approach accordingly.
Before you begin to optimize your marketing automation system, you need to know what you're optimizing for. And then, you need to tie it very nicely with your inbound marketing strategy.
We can compare inbound marketing to a funnel, where we can map out the different stages someone is in. For example, if you have an e-commerce website, people don't just like directly come to a product page and buy it unless they’ve performed a research. In all probability, their search for the product begins with a visit to your website.
Once they visit your website, you try to capture their email address, and they become a subscriber. But then, they're probably reading your blog or newsletter; it doesn't mean that they're going to buy. They are not leads.
But once they come to a product page, click it, read some reviews and abandon the cart, then you can call them leads because they're closer to buying. It is a part of their buying journey.
So, once you've mapped out this entire journey, you realize you’re getting subscribers, but they're not becoming leads. This is where you need to go in for marketing automation to fix the lacunae in your funnel.
You Must Adopt a Strategic Approach to Marketing Automation
You need to delve deep into marketing data to develop the winning strategies for your marketing automation initiative. Proper analysis of data helps you find out where prospects are dropping off and why. How can you do this using automation?
Data helps us differentiate each person who has visited your website or used your mobile app. You can use Google Analytics to assign a unique ID to everyone who visits your website or opens your app, if they don't clear their cookies or their cache. This enables you to uniquely identify everyone and keep track of his buying journey.
Armed with this information, you can plan and run a campaign, specifically to follow up with all those individuals who have exhibited a particular interest in your products, and thereby, increase the likelihood of the individuals buying the products.
It's a process of acquiring and accumulating leads, so that you can plan your next move.
How You Can Begin Your Marketing Automation Initiative Effectively
The first thing you must do is set clear goals of the marketing automation effort – what do you intend to achieve by automating your marketing activities? Is it increasing the number of subscribers, or do you want to maximize website conversions? You must be absolutely clear about what you want to get. Once you finalize your goals, you must begin evaluating various platforms that help you reach the goals.
When we talk about choosing the right platform, most of us believe it's an engineering activity. But you must remember your marketing platform needs to achieve a sales and marketing outcome. The person who typically controls it needs to know how marketing activities are carried out. To do this, he must be able to understand both technology and marketing, so that he can fully leverage the platform and understand the risks involved.
Community Marketing and Automation
Marketing automation tools help you automate your e-mail and Social Media Marketing (SMM) activities (and do much more). But I’d like to highlight a key benefit of using these tools – automate community marketing activities. Community marketing is one of the key constituents of SMM; it calls for the creation of a customer community on social networking platforms such as WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook and so on, to keep in regular touch with customers and directly communicate with them.
However, as a business owner or manager of the marketing activities of an organization, you might have different priorities. At SunYello, no matter what your priorities are, we can help you make the best use of marketing automation tools. Our unrivaled marketing technology expertise coupled with a strong focus on understanding your specific needs allows you to deliver the ideal solution to automate your marketing function.
Hope you liked this post. How do you use marketing automation tools? We’d love to know.
