5 Integral Keys to the Marketing Automation Process

Marketing automation helps marketing teams do more with less. According to Bold Digital, over 480,000 websites were using marketing automation software in 2017. According to the Ascend2 Marketing Automation Trends Survey, 63 percent of businesses expect to experience benefits from marketing automation within 6 months of implementation.How can you maximize your benefits from your investment in marketing automation? A good first step is to understand these five integral keys to the automation process:

1) Data and analytics

Effective marketing means sending the right message at the right time to the right person on the right channel. Therefore, you must know a prospect, lead, or customer’s interests, preferences, and needs to properly personalize your marketing. This requires data, as how else would you be able to understand, emphasize, and connect with your audience without that precious information? Data is what helps your marketing resonate with customers. And you can never overstate the importance of digital analytics. They tell you how customers are interacting with your brand on every digital channel, what is working, and what isn’t with your marketing.

2) Testing and personalization 

The right data and the right software make it easier for you to experiment and try different types of content, emails, subject lines, offers, themes, designs, landing pages, demos, contests, and so on. Testing helps further optimize your marketing by telling you what your audience best responds to and what you need to tweak, revise, or drop all together.

3) Lists and segmentation

You can’t do marketing automation without a targeted audience list. Such lists can include prospects, leads, and already existing customers. You segment them according to multiple criteria, such as demographics, geography, buyer persona, what channels they seem to prefer, the business/industry they are, job title and position, and other relevant information. The more you can segment your audience down, the more you can properly target and personalize to them.

4) Lead nurturing and scoring

Knowing how to manage your lists and the leads you are getting is essential. If you send the wrong communication on the wrong channel at the wrong time, you risk losing customers. Your role as a marketer is to prime and nurture leads to eventually turn them over to sales so that team can close the deal. You score your leads to determine how close they might be to wanting to buy in or if they need more nurturing.

5) Triggers and Actions

A trigger is when customers do something, and the action is your system’s automated response to those actions. If they sign up for a newsletter, you send them a confirmation email. If they attend a webinar, you follow up by sending a related ebook. It’s about paying attention to what your audience is doing and responding accordingly to keep them interested and moving down the marketing funnel.

                                                                           

Find out more about what you can do with marketing automaton with “Marketing Automation 101.”

 

 

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