Marketing automation is an investment, not a cost.
Who are the people that you want to reach? What’s your desired outcome for these contacts? How do you measure success if they don’t connect with you after being contacted through marketing automation tools like emails and SMS?
In this article, we will cover the four key phases of a successful marketing automation plan.
1. Identify the People You Want to Reach
In order for your marketing efforts to be effective, it’s important that you identify who are the people you want to reach.
This may seem obvious but consider how many times we see companies trying to sell products or offer services to people who don’t want them.
For example, let’s say you’re a realtor and your goal is to sell houses but you’ve spent the last year trying to get in touch with everyone from young families to retirees – this doesn’t make sense because those groups of people are not the ones that will be moving house any time soon.
If you’re targeting the wrong audience, your marketing efforts will fall flat and be a waste of time.
To identify the people that you want to reach, there are two main questions that need answering:
- What is their demographic?
- What do they need right now?
For example, A tech company might advertise to people who are looking for a new laptop, while an online grocery store might advertise to mothers of young children.
Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
Nucleus Research
2. Define Your Marketing Automation Outcome
What are you trying to accomplish with marketing automation?
For example, if a company is looking for repeat customers then they might define their desired outcome as the number of people who buy from them on two separate occasions.
On the other hand, someone may want to reach out to companies and grow leads that result in sales, so their desired outcome might be the number of people who convert into customers.
Once you have your goal defined, it’s important to lay out a plan and timeline for how long this campaign is going to run over.
If you’re launching a new product or service then you may want to set an endpoint in say six months’ time – but if you’re looking for leads then you may need to set a longer timeline, like one year.
Lastly, it’s important to define what success looks like in the context of the desired outcome.
What are your conversion rates? How do you calculate them? What is considered a good number? These numbers should be defined before launching any marketing automation campaign.
3. Plan your Marketing Automation Campaigns
Now that you know who your desired audience is, what the outcome of success looks like and how long this campaign should run for, it’s time to plan out your campaigns.
This may seem like an overwhelming task, but it doesn’t have to be!
There are a number of tools on the market that will help with this part if you don’t want to do all the work yourself.
A good marketing automation tool should allow for segmentation – meaning they can divide up your audience and send relevant messages to different people on the list.
For example, if you have an eCommerce business that sells clothes for pregnant women and mothers with young children, then they could use segmentation to send out two separate email campaigns – one for mothers of infants (newborns) and another campaign targeting moms-to-be who are in their first trimester.
The marketing automation software should also be able to track the success of what’s been done and provide insight into how your campaigns are performing – which is helpful for future campaign planning!
There are a number of different types of messages you can send out using these tools, including:
- Emails (personalized and dynamic)
- Newsletters
- Social posts
- SMS
- Online ads, such as Facebook Ads or Google AdWords.
Different types of marketing automation tools will offer different options so you want to make sure that the tool you’re looking at has all these features before signing up.
Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
The Annuitas Group
4. Monitoring Performance and Tweaking
Now you’ve set up your campaign and are hopefully seeing a number of conversions, but how can you tell if it’s going well?
The first thing to do is track the success of what has been done – this will help inform future campaigns.
Tracking performance includes measuring conversion rates (i.e. what percentage of people who receive your email end up purchasing something).
Tracking performance also includes evaluating how often people are opening the emails or clicking on links and seeing what landing pages they’re going to.
It’s important to keep in mind that these rates may fluctuate, so it helps if you have a number of months worth of data – at least three months – to truly evaluate the success of your campaign.
This is also a good time to tweak what has been done and make changes, based on how people are interacting with emails or landing pages that have been sent out.
For example, if you notice that people are opening emails but not clicking on links then it may be time to change up the content in your email and offer more detail.
Alternatively, if a landing page is being visited often by visitors who stop at just looking around without actually making any purchases or filling out contact forms – this could mean that the landing page is too cluttered and needs to be redesigned.
Conclusion:
I hope that this guide has helped to answer some of your questions about marketing automation and what key phrases to consider while creating your marketing automation plan.
Keep in mind that this process is very individual to the goals and objectives of your business, so some steps may not apply at all!
However, by following these four key phases you should be able to create an effective marketing automation plan for whatever goal you have set out!
For more information on how to set up an effective marketing automation campaign, visit the following link: The Ultimate Guide To Marketing Automation.
Ali is a digital marketing blogger and author who uses the power of words to inspire and impact others. He has written for leading publications like Business2Community, Inc. Magazine, and Marketing Profs. When not writing, he enjoys spending time with his family.