I have been writing about Marketing and Sales niches for over 3 years now. During the course of this time, I have seen numerous brands utilizing the power of Marketing Automation to streamline their sales and marketing efforts. .
At the same time, I have also noticed how under-utilized it is as a discipline. Open any B2B or B2C website and you’ll find all kinds of lead magnets — from simple sign-up prompts to highly targeted messengers and light box messages. However, most of these communications are below par at best when it comes to execution and usefulness
Scattered emails and push messages, irrelevant product and content recommendations, random support tickets, the list goes on and on.
Businesses should consider Marketing Automation as an investment. If you implement it strategically, you might not just get back the principal amount you invested but a hefty interest as well!
Marketing Automation can play an important role in your business, provided you do not under-utilize it.
If you want to setup your automation efforts to yield proper results, make sure that you do not make the following mistakes:
Marketing automation mistakes that most marketers fail to notice
Failing to segment visitors into users, prospects and readers
This is quite a common issue faced by marketing automation beginners. They fail to understand that segmentation of visitors is crucial before setting up automation rules.
Here’s how you should ideally segment your website/app visitors –
- User/Customer — A visitor who lands on your website, learns about your services, looks at your product’s page and its features, reads a few blog articles and then signs up. It can also be a direct sign up without much activity.
- Prospect or lead– A visitor that might visit your website, go through the same flow but does not sign-up for your product or services immediately. Instead he or she might, download an eBook by entering contact details like name, phone number and email address. Or, maybe he/she signs up for your newsletter.
- Reader (Plain-visitor) — Generally this constitutes a majority of visitors on your website. They either land on your website via organic search or through social media channels or other referral websites. They are on your website to look for something specific, read it and leave. In most instances it might take them a couple of weeks or months to come back to your website. These users can be classified as readers.
The different kinds of users who land on your website can be further segmented. For example, prospects can be segmented as –
- Hot Prospects — Prospects who sign up with you soon after their initial interactions with your customer facing channels (website, mobile app etc). These prospects have a higher chance of becoming your customers since they have shown interest in your products/services. The time period to close these deals are fairly short; in most cases, it is under a month. Hence, they must be prioritized above other incoming prospects.
- Cold Prospects — On the other hand, cold prospects are the folks who have been on your website or have used your mobile app multiple times, have signed up for a newsletter, but haven’t engaged with your communications over a considerable amount of time. Such prospects require better targeting via marketing collateral like email, social media interaction and other offerings. The process is called Lead Nurturing.
Bottom line — It is very important to use your marketing automation platform to segment your users. Most platforms provide user segmentation as one of their primary features.
Wanna do one better? Read — Personalization is meant to perfect your user segments.
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