You have a marketing automation platform. You’re now using it to increase the number of qualified leads, boosting the number of subscribers on your blog, raking in more revenue than before. You’re also monitoring your social media campaigns, running multiple email campaigns and using drips to re-engage cold leads. You’re doing so much more with marketing automation, and you have started tasting success first-hand. But guess what, you can improve marketing automation further to take things to the next level. Here’s 5 ways to improve your existing marketing automation system:
#1. Improve Lead Generation
Almost every other business invests in advertisements. However, there is no way to directly control who views these advertisements. But in case of marketing automation, you have a greater control over who views your advertisements. If you want to improve your lead generation further, you will have to target the right consumer at the right moment.
For example, the number of mobile devices have increased, and more people are accessing the internet on their smart phones. To improve your lead generation, you should use your marketing automation platform to develop a mobile platform marketing strategy. This will help you drive up your mobile traffic.
Another angle that you should cover is social media. Even though you have a social media presence, you need to understand the power of social conversions. Not only do you get to advertise your brand on social media, but you also get in improve your presence and increase your traffic based on the likes and dislikes of your audience. Target the most promising consumers on social media, the ones that fit your ideal customer profile and improve your lead generation over time.
If you want to strengthen your marketing ROI, you need to improve your lead generation capabilities with marketing automation. Increasing your traffic will definitely result in improved lead generation, and if all goes well, the end result would be a well-deserved boost to revenue.
#2. Improve Engagement
As marketers, we should always try to improve. It is satisfying to see that things are working out well currently, but getting complacent might prove to be costly in the future. Marketing automation already helps improving customer engagement, but when you are actively trying to improve it even further, you will get rewarded automatically for going that extra mile.
One of the primary methods of improving engagement would be to conduct multiple drip campaigns. Use these drips strategically to select groups to whom it will be relevant. See, customers want relevant information all the time. They hate it when they get something irrelevant in nature. Since you know each and everyone’s preference, appealing to their likes and dislikes will not pose to be a problem anymore. This added relevancy will improve email open rates as well.
In order to strategize better, build and segment lists using lead segmentation. That will help you create smaller groups of leads who are interested in the same things, and you can conduct a separate drip campaigns for separate groups. This will make your targeting more efficient.
Use social media to your advantage and interact with customers there. Not only is it a great chance to create good relationships in an informal atmosphere, but it will also give you insights as to how you can improve your social media presence. See what posts appeal to your audiences the most. You can create such posts more and more to engage your audience.
Marketing automation systems have a nifty module called dynamic content. You might already be using it. However, with the above segmented lists, you can further personalize their customer experience using dynamic content on your landing pages and email content. Based on who is viewing it, the content will be altered. So, leads will see information relevant only to them.
To further improve engagement, you should use progressive profiling to collect necessary information from customers rather than swamping them with an overwhelming form with too many fields.
Whatever you do, you should always focus on the methods that work best for you and look for ways to improve them, so that the end result keeps improving. Take a note of what engages your audience the most and then proceed accordingly.
#3. Improve Customer Retention
Although till now we have primarily been concentrating upon gaining new leads and in turn new customers, it will be wrong not to focus on our existing ones. Existing customers are your walking-talking testimonials. They are your best advertisements. They already have faith in you, so it would be beneficial to take advantage of that. Customer retention is as important as gaining new customers, if not more.
In order to retain existing customers, you need to make sure that they are always getting what they need. A seamless end-to-end experience will go a long way for both parties. If there is anything that people hate is a seller who forgets a customer after the sale is done. It creates a poor experience for customers and negative publicity for your organization. Providing your customers with top-notch after-sales service will give them an incentive to purchase another product or service from you in the future.
However, you have to strike a balance when it comes to engaging your customers. Do not push your product all the time or over-sell it. Help them out whenever needed, so that you can stay on their minds all the time.
Analyze their dynamic lead scores to see where they stand in the sales and marketing funnel. Give them an incentive if they are stuck at the bottom of the funnel for a long period of time. Continue on personalizing their experience, more than anything else. Many marketers stop assigning lead scores to their leads once they become their customers. If you want to cross-sell and upsell, don’t stop scoring them.
Identify your supporters and advocates. These customers are valuable assets. Not only have they placed their trust and faith in you but they keep on encouraging other people to do the same. Value their actions and encourage them to continue doing what they are doing.
Always lend an ear to hear what people have to say about you. Feedback is necessary if you want to improve. If you want to improve your customer retention, you will have to listen to what your customers have to say about your products and services. You will know what they want, and at the same time you will be able to improve your product and render them better service.
#4. Improve Your Content
Content is fuel for marketing automation. If you want to improve marketing automation, you will have to improve your content. Any good marketing strategy that involves marketing automation should have a well-defined content strategy.
If you want your content marketing to improve, keep an eye on lead scores and establish a firm scoring system from the start. Use marketing automation to define buyer personas so that you have a clear idea of what you are looking for in a consumer.
Create landing pages for every content. This is where you will be hosting this piece of content and capture relevant information from visitors through forms. Furthermore, you can feed in the captured information to your CRM which will automatically update your databases.
A/B/X test your landing pages all the time to figure out what resonates the most with your customers. This will help you improve the quality of your content as well. Use captured information to your advantage by crafting relevant content for every lead. Segment them according to the information provided and prioritize accordingly.
Another important aspect of content is timing. When you are sending out content, you must keep in mind where the lead is in the sales funnel. Every stage of the funnel requires different content, that is relevant to the stage, and to qualify a lead you will have to adhere to these stages.
When you connect your database to your website, marketing automation will be able to recognize visitors and alter the content visible to them using dynamic content. Your goal should be to give your visitors and customers the best possible experience more than anything else.
Monitor your interactions so that you know how each lead is progressing through their journey. This will indicate how they are responding to their content and what type of content should you concentrate on.
#5. Improve Workflows
Workflow optimization is a crucial aspect of marketing automation. To improve your marketing automation workflows, you need to kill the ones that are not necessary. See how many active contacts are enrolled in a workflow. You will be able to identify which workflows are under performing due to overcrowding. This is a problem usually restricted to the top of the sales funnel.
Your marketing success might be affected by how a contact enters your workflow. In other terms, since contacts are automatically entered into a workflow due to a submission or a smart list, you will have different levels of information available depending on the source. Identify whether you can add a field in the website form to gain more insight on a visitor. See, if you can provide some incentive to get more information out of a visitor. The more information you have, the better.
If your workflows are based on smart lists, you can group and segment your contacts to manage your workflow effectively. Be aware of what is happening, and you will see that you can improve your workflows effectively.
Start using goal-based workflows to improve your efficiency. These workflows will make sure that irrelevant content does not make its way to a certain lead. However, do not think that you will hit bulls-eye with a workflow. The workflow will help you, but you have to put in efforts in other places in order to reach that goal.
Most marketers use workflows just for email, but if you want to improve them you need to use them for other purposes as well. Use workflows to notify your sales reps with important information pertaining to certain leads. Clean up your CRM with workflows on a regular basis. This will make both marketing and sales happy and it turns out to be a win-win for both parties.
However, workflows too just like marketing automation need constant monitoring. You need to check it from time to time, and tweak it whenever needed.
Marketing automation opens up a world full of endless possibilities. There are so many ways you can improve it to benefit your organization. So, how are you planning to improve your marketing automation? Share your views with us in the comments below!
