10 Ways to Make Sure Your Marketing Automation is Working for You
Marketing is an exciting field to work in, particularly with the explosion of online marketing and all its different channels over the last 10–15 years (email, social media, websites, etc.). Despite its intrigue, however, marketing involves many repetitive actions that take up too much time, reducing operational efficiency and revenue.
This is where automation comes in — marketing automation uses software platforms to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation and campaign management. According to research company Nucleus, marketing automation drives a 14.5 percent increase in sales productivity and a 12.2 percent reduction in marketing overhead.
Marketers are the obvious target users for tools that automate marketing processes, but developers also use marketing automation, particularly when enterprises need a fine-tuned approach to execute campaigns, implement custom triggers for emails, and build custom landing pages.
Even though the stats speak for themselves, there are some significant barriers to effective marketing automation, including using systems that are too complex, having no effective strategy in place, and budgetary constraints.
Let’s now turn our attention to 10 marketing automation best practices to improve your chances of implementing marketing automation effectively (but before you dive in, here’s a wiki page with several resources suggesting different marketing automation best practices).
1. It All Starts With A Strategy
As with most business initiatives, marketing automation success begins with a strategy. In fact, the number one reason that marketing automation fails is lack of an effective automation strategy. Before automating things, you need to ask questions, such as:
- What exactly are your current marketing goals, and how exactly can the functionality of an automation platform help achieve those goals?
- How can you measure whether your company’s chosen automation platform is a success?
2. Track Progress Regularly
The word automation implies a sense of passivity, but marketing automation is not a “set and forget” strategy. Most marketing automation platforms gather detailed marketing data which you must put to use if you are to refine your marketing automation efforts. Regular progress meetings are helpful to ensure everyone knows what’s working and what isn’t with current automation efforts.
3. Start Small
Marketing automation initiatives are often expensive investments for businesses, so it’s vital to prove its value to key stakeholders early on. B2B companies allocate approximately 10–39 percent of their marketing budgets on automation.
A clever way to prove the value of automation quickly is to start small and focus on specific problems which automation can solve, rather than trying to streamline and automate as much as possible from the outset. For example, you can improve communication with customers by automating personalized regular communications with the use of chatbots.
4. Use A/B Testing
Originally introduced in Claude Hopkins’ 1923 book Scientific Advertising, A/B tests have stood the test of time and they still remain a fundamental component of data-driven marketing. The beauty of automation platforms is that they make A/B testing easy to implement and monitor.
You can and should A/B test many aspects of marketing, including types of content for attracting visitors to a website, different forms for capturing contact information, different emails, and alternative landing pages for conversions.
5. Provide Additional Training
A significant barrier to implementing automation effectively is inadequately trained staff. Therefore, one of the most important marketing automation best practices is to provide additional training to marketing personnel in whichever automation software your company chooses.
You need to take steps to prevent a situation in which a small number of employees understand how to use marketing automation platforms. A lack of adequately trained staff slows down automation progress.
6. Customize Email Frequency Based on Interest
Email marketing is a huge driver of revenue in modern marketing. However, getting the frequency of emails right is vital — Hubspot research shows that 78 percent of people cited too many emails as their reason for unsubscribing from email lists.
It’s imperative, therefore, to fine-tune email frequency based on the level of interest shown by people. For example, automation platforms can segment email lists based on who clicked your emails and who didn’t, and you can set different frequencies for future emails based on these measurements of interest
7. Automate Upsells
One of the niftiest ways you can use marketing automation is to automate upsells, which are more expensive products that you can recommend to customers after they’ve made a purchase. For example, you can set up automatic email triggers to recommend complementary, more expensive products.
8. Create Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are imaginary versions of your prospects and customers. It’s vital that before deploying marketing automation tools, you create such personas and customize interactions with particular types of people because not all marketing techniques work universally.
9. Collect Input From Multiple Channels
One of the main marketing automation best practices is to fully utilize the tools at your disposal by gathering behavioral inputs from as many channels as possible to get a fuller picture of your leads and how best to guide them down the marketing funnel. Collect data from social media, website pages, email campaigns, and more.
10. Gather Meaningful Customer Feedback
One of the most valuable ways to improve marketing efforts is to collect meaningful customer feedback. Marketing automation software provides the means to efficiently gather feedback via surveys sent to customers after they’ve made a purchase or sent to people who’ve canceled a potential purchase.
Conclusion
Marketing automation, when done well, can allow businesses to interact with prospects and buyers in a highly personalized way which is difficult to do via manual marketing methods. Furthermore, marketing automation saves a lot of wasted time conducting laborious tasks which can be much more efficiently handled with software.
By following the marketing automation best practices outlined above, you can increase the chances of a positive ROI from implementing your chosen marketing automation solution.
