We live busy lifes. We skim through news articles, we find our lovers by swiping through candidates online, we order our food through all sorts of apps and we communicate with family through video calls. The world is more and more accommodating to the fact that we don’t have time for anything – and things should be easy and fast including marketing automation.
And this goes for our marketing campaigns in general too. With so much to focus on, the amount of content we produce and the number of channels we reach our customers in, we often don’t know where to start. We have to send our new subscribers welcoming messages, we have to nurture leads to conversions, we have to follow up with customers and send reminders about empty shopping carts? Wouldn’t it be nice to sit back while all of that would happen automatically?
With marketing automation becoming easier than ever, we can take a lot of these repetitive tasks of our shoulders. And together with that, automation allows us for one of the biggest advantages of automated processes: we can focus on highly personalised messages, targeted to specific segments of your leads, that we can communicate within different stage of the marketing process.
Marketing Automation gives you a lot of new opportunities. Here are some of our favourite examples:
- I can show my customer a Facebook Ad about the blue dress she viewed on my website 2 weeks ago
- I can send my customer a personalised discount code to buy my latest ebook on their birthday
- I can send a push notification about a carpet that matches the lamp they bought yesterday
- I can send text messages after people signed up for an event, providing them with location updates and starting times
Does this all sounds like a distance future controlled by robots to you? No need to worry. We will guide you through the basics of marketing automation and its main advantages for your business.
Benefits of marketing automation
Highly personal
Like already mentioned, marketing automation gives you the opportunity to send very personal marketing messages to your customers and leads. By automating we can send 100 different messages to a 100 different leads, ensuring they will see the products or services that best fit their needs.
Customer retention
Great, you obtained a new customer! A long-term customer is of much more value than a new one, so we want to keep them close. By sending some automated campaigns, with reminders, new offers or promotions or just a simple birthday card, we make sure we stay on top of their minds.
Time-saving
Once set up, marketing automation makes sure a big part of your onboarding processes, customer retention and customer relation can run automatically. And when you don’t have to focus on that, there is more room for other fun and creative stuff for us to work on.
Easier use of omnichannel marketing strategy
Using an omnichannel marketing strategy means that you are reaching all of your customers at the right time, on the right channel and with the right message. And all of these messages have to be coherent. In order to achieve this easier, automated retargeting campaigns or personalised purchasing campaigns can assist. Furthermore, it helps you to keep your brand image more consistent.
Simple marketing automation for your company
You might not be the next Amazon. So you might not need marketing automation that complex. But even if you’re a small or medium-sized business, marketing automation can be a useful tool for you. Here are some examples how it might benefit you:
Welcome campaigns and onboarding campaigns
Somebody just signed up for your services, app or video tutorials. That’s great – a new customer for your business! Now, the first thing we want to do is make them feel welcome. We can send them an introduction email thanking them to sign up and offering them some free content or services. Then 4 days later, you might want to send them some interesting blog articles. After 10 days, you notice that they haven’t used your product or opened your app. You might want to ask them if there is something wrong, and if they need some assistance in setting up.
Customer retention campaigns
Your customers just bought your product in your e-commerce shop or app. After the purchase confirmation, we might want to move them to a different segment of our customer list. Maybe this person is interested in outdoorsy stuff? If we know this, we can send them new products that would interest them, or tips and tricks how to use their products.
Abandoned Cart campaign
A customer put one of your products in their shopping cart but then got distracted by a phone call, a crying baby or an interesting YouTube video. Or maybe he or she just wasn’t convinced yet. By creating an automated abandoned cart campaign we can trigger a series of events that happen after your product was forgotten. Your target will be exposed to Facebook ads with that or similar products, you can send them a reminder email, or you can even send them a discount for these products.
Event marketing
You hosted an event and sold tickets online. Once people have bought the tickets, you want to keep communicating with them. You can send text reminders on the day itself, follow-up emails with summaries or other interesting relevant content.
Lead nurturing campaign
Your lead signed up for a free consultation, an ebook or a newsletter. This is the trigger to start a lead nurturing campaign. You can send them an email a couple days after with some links to your product landing pages. Then you can let the workflow decide to send them a discount code if they actually visited the landing pages, or you might want to send them some interesting blog posts or content if they didn’t click on the link. The possibilities are endless, but by sending your leads these automated messages – the changes that they will convert will increase significantly.
Does this sound like it could help your business? Are you interested in seeing how some of your marketing processes could be automated? We love finding the most innovative ways to automate your marketing strategy, with a strong focus on personalised customer message. Make sure to get in touch so we can see what suits you best.