Innovation & data-driven digital marketing.
Marketing automation strategies can be efficient and cost-effective for businesses at any level. As marketers, we tend to get caught up in delegating processes that can easily be simplified. Salesforce’s 2017 State of Marketing research found that 79 percent of top-performing companies use marketing automation tools in some way. Not only does marketing automation increase production, but it allows marketers to streamline lead generation, customer retention, measuring ROI and much more. Above all, it allows you to be more efficient – the key to profitability and your bottom line.
Here are five marketing automation tactics you should be using:
1. Email Marketing
Automated emails make your life easier, appeal to your customers and increase revenue. Consider these campaigns:
- Drip Campaign – A Drip Campaign is a series of emails that drills down the interest of a customer. It starts with a “Welcome” email usually triggered from a landing page click which stores the customers email address in your email blast system. Drip campaign emails engage customers with YES or NO questions requiring clicking. Engaging with customers is an excellent way to capture interest and collect more information about your customers. After the “Welcome” email, the customer will continue getting YES or NO or THIS or THAT emails for the following few days either until the customer stops engaging completely (in this case the emails will stop for a bit and then resume some time later to try to recapture the customer) or they will stop when enough information is gathered to correctly target that customer. Drip campaigns have about 80 percent higher open rates and 3X click-through rates than a message that’s blasted to everyone at the same time.
- Review Your Purchase Emails: Through your website and email blast system, you can automate an email to be sent out to a customer within a certain number of days of purchase. First, send an email to make sure your customer is happy with his or her purchase. Then, periodically send emails based on past buying behavior with any new products or services they may be interested in. Pay special attention to those customers with a high engagement rate; these could be your brand advocates.
- Abandoned Cart Emails: These automated emails can help to remind those customers that were once interested in the product/service, that it is still available and to keep top of mind. The cost of getting a new customer is 5-25 percent higher than marketing to a current customer.
- Membership/Club Emails: Automate club or membership emails to remind members about expiring memberships, specials of the month etc. This will help save you time and increase revenue as emails will constantly be going out to your most loyal customers on autopilot.
2. Filter Your Inbox
Checking emails all day long can drain your productivity levels. Automate your inbox so you never miss an important client – but you also won’t be distracted by every other junk email that comes through. You can set this up with any email provider typically by setting rules for your inbox.
3. Social Media Posting
The key to successful social media profiles is of course, creating engaging content that resonates with your audience. But what good is engaging content if you don’t share it often enough or when your audience is paying attention? There are several third party services you can subscribe to in order to schedule your social media ahead of time. If you’d rather use the platforms directly, Facebook has a scheduling option that is user-friendly and will save you time in the long run. There are also apps that you can schedule to auto-respond to certain requests from customers.
4. CRM Tracking
Investing in a CRM tracker to track calls, emails, meetings etc for each client/customer can be time-saving and very beneficial for customer service. There are several systems you can connect to your CRM system to automate this process but most CRMs have this capability built in to the system.
5. Marketing Analytics
Setting up automated analytics can help you monitor successes/losses and ultimately prove ROI. Don’t spend hours investigating analytics week after week. Instead, start with a list of KPI’s specific to your marketing goals. Next, find a software that will do the work for you. Google Analytics offers the ability to set up a dashboard customized to your needs that can be sent to you on a daily or weekly basis. Cyfe is another great tool because it pulls together numerous platforms/softwares (Google Analytics, Facebook, Moz, Salesforce etc.) to track all digital marketing campaign activity on one dashboard.
It’s easy to get into a routine and not realize what you’re doing could be done for you. Marketing automation helps to decrease human error and make marketing initivates more repeatable in the future. Don’t be left behind – start automating now. Don’t know how? Let 10x do the work for you.