Marketing technologies have the ability to streamline many of your processes and achieve your company’s goals in an efficient manner. This use of MarTech is never more useful than in marketing automation. As the name suggests, it allows you to automate a number of marketing actions in areas like email and beyond.
Harnessing the capabilities of marketing automation has multiple business benefits, one of which is seeing customers return again and again. With more than 4 billion internet users and over 3.5 billion social media users out there, you can’t afford not to use the tools that’ll help you maximize their potential.
Here’s how marketing automation can improve your rate of return customers:
1. Track user interactions
One function you can use marketing automation for is tracking a user’s interactions with your website. Not only does this give you a fuller picture of your potential customer, it also demonstrates their expectations of your brand. From this position of strength you can target them with content that’s more likely to convert.
2. Use data to personalize content
Even customers that don’t explicitly reach out to your brand leave clues as they use your website. When this data is collected through marketing automation it can be translated into personalized content. This has now become the norm and not personalizing content can actively put you behind your competitors.
3. Use data and AI to predict campaign performance
Marketing automation technologies are the closest thing you’ll get to a time machine to predict the outcome of your campaigns. Using detailed data and AI, your strategy can be informed in a way that almost guarantees success going forward.
4. Split test your ads
Testing and retesting which ads work can be done easily with automation so you can optimize them going forward. See which variants in your split tests get the most clicks and replicate them for the best results. This is an effective way to scale your lead pipeline.
5. Integrate your automation tools with your CRM
When automation tools are comprehensively integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, everything works more smoothly. As well as getting an instant overview of the situation, you can dive deeper into individual insights to help you deliver results.
To learn more about marketing automation best practices and how to implement it into your strategy, watch our interview with Daria Kravchenko on The Strategic Marketing Show:
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6. Make informed business decisions
From measuring the success of campaigns to understanding the impact of marketing and sales strategies on profits, automation should impact important business decisions. It gives you a firm basis upon which to change plans going forward without having to guess the outcome.
7. Don’t automate all customer interactions
While automating the majority of the business can save time and energy, as well as making things function better, don’t be tempted to overdo it. Customers need to feel a genuine connection with the face of the company and losing this authenticity can be costly in the long-run.
8. Allow audiences to segment themselves
If you want to use automated messages to address different pain points throughout your customer base, be sure they’re split into appropriate segments. A good way to do this is to send out a survey so they can identify for themselves which group they should be in. Then your automation will run more smoothly.
9. Use chatbots to mimic conversations
Finding the balance between automation and authenticity can be tricky, but chatbots represent a good way to get this right. That’s because the responses you put into the system are genuine and reused depending on the query typed in by a customer. This allows you to have multiple conversations at once while allowing your audience to feel understood.
10. Automate your social posts
It can be difficult to appear to be on social media all the time, but planning social media posts in advance and automating them to be published in future can help customers to feel your presence. That way you can leave the task to once or twice a week without having to check in every day.
11. Hack your design funnel
Great copy can be easily undermined by bad design and an off-putting looking website can easily lead to a high bounce rate. Check out the design choices made by your competitors and hack the structure, so you can add your optimized copy to automated versions of their design funnels.
12. Use date-based automation to say happy birthday
Adding a birthday field to a sign-up form isn’t difficult and once you’ve attached it to an automation to send a celebratory message or promo code, you can leave it be. It’s a good way to reward loyalty and feels personal even though it’s your automation that’s remembering your customers’ birthdays as opposed to you.
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