Marketing automation companies and providers have been gaining presence for almost a decade now. And the reason it keeps on growing has nothing to do with trends or preferences. It is because marketing departments and agencies around the world see the positive effects on the KPIs such as lead conversion, forecasting, and customer segmentation.
Turns out, putting some of the routine tasks, countless iterations and troubleshooting on autopilot has its merits.
In most cases, marketing automation is the best tool for lead nurturing, as it takes the time-consuming job off your hands and deals with a lot of possible inconsistencies resulting from doing tedious work manually. Plus automating audience segmentation is actually a requirement nowadays rather than simply a recommendation, as the amount of customer-related data that companies work with is simply incomprehensible for a human and must be filtered digitally.
But even if a company utilizes marketing automation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that its conversion is “through the roof” and everything is taken care of. Just like with any other tool or business process, it’s all about execution rather than the concept.
And this is exactly what we’ll be discussing in this article – what workflows and strategies you can utilize with marketing automation from the start to boost your conversion rate.
#1 Dynamic content
This is actually one of recurring points in our articles – personalization to individual lead. Most companies have quite a lot of customer-related information stored in the CRM database, so why not put it into practice. The dynamic email campaign is the most straightforward way to use this kind of data. You can easily integrate your CRM with email marketing tools and send out a newsletter in which the customer’s history and unique information will be reflected.
Dynamic content is also something that the ecommerce sector has been utilized very efficiently, by putting out recommendations based on your actual preferences that are concluded from your past search and purchase history.
Personalization of the content is effective yet very simple marketing automation solution to boost the conversion rate. And the beauty of it is that any type of business, no matter the industry or the organization’s size, can implement it with just a few simple adjustments in the software.
#2 Branching nurture campaigns
Branching lead nurturing is a new way to look at your sales funnel. The main idea behind this marketing automation process is to allow your audience to do segmentation for you via branching paths in your campaign. It’s similar to the dynamic content in your emails but it serves a different purpose.
The same way your email will change according to the CRM data, a nurture campaign will automatically segment the audience based on their interactions, sending them on a different branch and adjusting further communications.
The main challenge of such campaigns is, of course, the design and development of each individual path, as well as coming up with a model of campaign progression. This process can take weeks and even months, but after your business gets the hang of it, it can be just left to run automatically.
The result – you get a greater number of qualified leads at a lower cost when compared to non-targeted static campaigns. Nowadays even tools that are aimed at marketing automation for small business include these sort of features, so you are welcome to try it out.
#3 Staying in touch
One of the most obvious mistakes that many businesses have in common is the assumption that when a contact becomes a customer, the job of sales and marketing departments is done.
Nothing can be further from the truth because retaining a customer is much more efficient than acquiring a new one. Some studies even suggest that by simply increasing the customer retention rate by 5% your business can boost profits by more than 25%.
And here is where marketing automation comes in handy, by keeping the existing customers engaged with your business. It can be done in a variety of ways such as tutorials, product updates, newsletters, exclusive offers and so on.
And again a great example of the industry that has practically perfected this method is ecommerce. Most online shops are giving out coupons to their existing customers who weren’t active for a while. It’s simple yet it works very well.
#4 Sales rep notification
This particular workflow is very different from the ones listed above, because it doesn’t target the customer, but it sends an internal notification to your sales team.
Every website has pages and conversion events that signify an interest in the product. Most commonly those are pricing and product pages. You can set up automatic triggers that send a notification to your sales reps whenever the customer engages with these pages, informing your team of potential prospects and giving information about the customer that can be used in further outreach.
This strategy saves time for your salespeople and allows them to contact leads at the most appropriate time.
How to Build an Effective Marketing Automation Workflow?
Allowing your clients to be in charge of how they interact with your business is the future of marketing. Hopefully, these strategies have sparked your imagination and you now have new ideas about how the modern technology can be implemented to grow your business. These workflows can be effective stand-alone campaigns but bear in mind that they work best when in tandem with a broader marketing strategy.
Contact us today to find out how you can implement our marketing automation solutions for the benefit of your business.