You think you’ve got the hang of marketing automation. You’ve had your platform up and running for a few months, your team is saving time by not manually sending content to prospects, and you’ve started seeing higher engagement levels on your website. Fantastic!
So what should you do next?
As nice as it would be to kick up your feet and relax on the couch, you know that there’s more you could be doing to improve your efforts and start seeing even more results.
Without further ado, here are 3 tips to help you take your marketing automation efforts to the next level:
1. Maximize the ROI on your marketing automation investment through integration
In today’s digitally enabled world, we now have more tools and platforms available at our fingertips than we know what to do with. CRM, marketing automation, digital asset management, analytics, web personalization, and the list goes on.
To utilize all of the features your marketing automation tool provides, you need to think about what other tools and systems you have in place that can provide the information your marketing automation platform (MAP) needs. With more information flowing into your MAP, you can personalize your marketing messages and provide content exactly when your prospects need it, all leading to a shorter sales cycle and more revenue, faster.
Here are a few tools you should integrate with, along with the information that you would send to the MAP:
- CRM (Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Hubspot, etc.)
- Prospect + Customer Data ←→ Contacts + Accounts
- CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, etc.)
- Juicy web form leads → New contact in MAP → Automate confirmation email → Add to nurturing campaign
- Most enterprise MAPs have the capability to create forms and landing pages directly through the platform that can then be embedded directly on to your site. Using these offerings ensures your critical prospect data is sent to the right place and saves your dev team by not having to build out new contact forms and landing pages every time you start a new campaign (you’re welcome, developers!).
- eCommerce (Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, etc.)
- New purchase → New contact in MAP
- Cart abandonment → Email reminder sent from MAP
- Automated emails alerting contact of promotions/offers → New purchase online
2. Align your sales and marketing teams
One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is saving your team time and effort personalizing and sending emails and content to prospects and customers, but if the inputs into your MAP aren’t agreed upon by both teams, then your efforts could be wasted.
To reap the benefits of marketing automation, ensure your sales and marketing teams are aligned on:
- Target audiences
- You should be talking to the same user personas and prospects, or if you’re an ABM organization, the same accounts.
- Messaging
- If your sales reps are creating their own content (personalized decks, articles, etc.) each time a new deal comes in, and they aren’t sharing what content is and is not working with the marketing team, then you’ll have misaligned content efforts and wasted time replicating another team’s efforts.
Once you have alignment, your content efforts are maximized and your teams are focused on accomplishing the same goals (net new logos, current client upsell, signing up for a webinar or free consultation, etc.). Additionally, you can leverage lead scoring to give both marketing and sales clear indications when a lead is qualified and ready to be assigned to a sales rep.
3. Improve engagement with your prospects and customers through personalization
Our attention spans are shrinking and breaking through the clutter is harder than ever before. So how do we get an audience to read our message? By personalizing the content and giving readers the content they actually care about and want to read.
But don’t take our word for it! Campaign Monitor found that personalized emails drive 18 times more revenue than email without personalization.
Segment your database, create content variations, and get personalizing. Here are some examples to get started:
- Subject line
- Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
- Images
- This is an especially valuable form of personalization if you are segmenting by location data.
- Body content
- Again, even something as simple as using the recipient’s name (or any other personal detail) can be incredibly effective.
- Product recommendations
- Leveraging browsing history or past purchase data from your customers allows you to provide tailored recommendations encouraging new purchases.
Need to take it back to the basics? Check out our introduction to marketing automation post. And if you’re ready for more, read how to maximize your efforts.
Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash
