Marketing automation: Build valuable relationships with your leads and customers.
A day consists of only 24 hours. A day you fill daily with repetitive tasks: social posts, lead nurturing, sending newsletters, etc. But as your organisation grows, you want to make sure you spend as little of your valuable time as possible on these tasks, without neglecting them (after all, that's to the detriment of your business). With marketing automation, you turn these repetitive tasks into automation, allowing you to work more efficiently and help your leads and customers in a more targeted way. In this blog, you will find out how marketing automation takes over the work from you to further grow your organisation.
In this blog, you will discover:
- What marketing automation is
- The difference between email marketing and marketing automation
- How to get started with marketing automation
- Examples of marketing automations
What is marketing automation?
In short, marketing automation is a methodology where tools help you automate certain marketing activities. By automating repetitive marketing activities, you save time, but you also communicate in a targeted and consistent way with your target audience.
Actually, marketing automation is a summary of the following points:
- The right message
- At the right time
- To the right person
- Through the right channel
With marketing automation, you not only save time but also make sure you are there when your target audience needs you with the content they crave. We believe in the principle of 'stop selling, start helping'. You help your target group in their experience journey. This allows you to generate new leads, nurture them better and also qualify them automatically. So you can use marketing automation within the entire funnel. This makes marketing automation valuable not only for your marketing team, but also for your sales and service teams. In this blog, we focus on all automations for marketing, in the following articles we will talk more about automations for your sales and service.
The marketing automation software we love are ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. These are also the tools we use at Sterc to help our clients automate their marketing activities - in addition, of course, to the many other cool features these software bring.
E-mail marketing vs marketing automation
Because marketing automation often focuses on sending emails automatically, we still sometimes see it confused with e-mail marketing. Yet these two tactics fulfil different needs and goals, so it is important to know what you are using which tactic for.
E-mail marketing is entirely focused on sending e-mails. Either manually or automatically. So the only information you need for this is an e-mail address. Of course, you can supplement a contact with other data to personalise your e-mails, but the basis lies with the e-mail address. Besides newsletters, you can also send automatic e-mails that follow up or nurture a lead. For example, after someone fills in a form or subscribes to the newsletter, you can welcome them via e-mail or send the requested download to their mailbox automatically. Then you can follow up this lead with even more interesting content. This is a pretty simple example of email marketing automation.
With marketing automation, you go one step further. Here, besides e-mails, you can also create tasks, schedule social posts, send an internal notification or automate any other marketing activity. So it is not just focused on emails, but on automating the entire marketing process. Moreover, these automations are often not a linear path, but contacts with different data flow through other workflow ramifications. Using marketing automation, you capture more data, allowing you to personalise your marketing activities in addition to automating them.
Getting started with marketing automation
As you have read, marketing automation allows you to automate the entire marketing process. However, we always recommend starting small and looking at which processes you can actually make more efficient by automating them.
We always recommend starting small and looking at which processes you can actually make more efficient through automation.
To determine this, you can look at the following steps:
1. Document all processes
Document all marketing activities that currently exist in your organisation. Both small and large processes. Look at the entire funnel and determine what you and your marketing team are doing at each step to get website visitors from leads to customers.
Look not only at the processes that contribute to the experience journey, but also look at processes that occur at the back end. This could be, for example, notifying a specific sales team colleague within a particular region with a particular product knowledge about new leads of interest to him or her, or tasks created to follow up on a lead.
2. Create overview
Now that you have documented all the processes, it is important to create a clear overview of them. Which processes are interrelated? Which processes are internal and which external? Put all the processes in a clear order, for example in the order of a funnel.
Following this, you can also look at which workflows you consider most important by using the MoSCoW model, for example. The MoSCoW model is a method where you start prioritising and divide the different processes into Must have, Should have, Could have and Won't have. Which processes will ensure the best results, free up as much time and convenience as possible for your marketing team and ensure that you convince and help your leads through the funnel in the best possible way?
3. Building workflows
After you have created a clear overview, you can get to work creating workflows. You can do this using marketing automation software such as ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.
This can be done using marketing automation software such as ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.
Examples of marketing automation
You are ready to get started! Below we show you some well-known marketing automations that you can use for your business.
Schedule social posts and newsletters
The most well-known automations are those of scheduling social media posts and newsletters. This way, you can easily format your posts and newsletters in advance and put them online or send them at any time, without having to look at them.
Schedule posts and newsletters in advance.
Automatic email after leaving shopping cart
For e-commerce, you can also send automatic emails and notifications. For example, when a visitor has added products to his shopping cart and then leaves the website. Then you can send a reminder that there are still items in his shopping basket, ready to be checked out. If that doesn't work, you can always offer a coupon to reduce the barrier.
Follow-up emails
Also, after someone has signed up for your newsletter, you can immediately send them an email with the latest updates, so they know what to expect from your newsletter. In addition, right after someone fills in a form to download something, for example, you can send them the download. This way, it immediately makes sense why they need to leave their e-mail address to receive the download.
Lead nurturing
After you have generated leads, you obviously want to make sure you help them further through the funnel. You can convince these leads to make a purchase from you by providing them with further information. For example, when a lead has indicated an interest in a specific product, market, action, event or topic, you can automatically send them in-depth content about it. This could be in the form of fact sheets, blogs, e-books, webinars or landing pages. Ultimately, you can convince them to do a demo, request a sample or even make the purchase right away. After all, you have shown that you are a true expert and that your product or service is the best choice over your competition.
Data enrichment
Your leads can be given a new 'label' after clicking on a specific subject in an e-mail, enriching your data further and further. With this enrichment, you can increasingly personalise your emails and other content and better respond to the lead's needs and interests.
importantly, though, you have to take into account that someone could be given a label that they don't meet later. This could be because they end up making a purchase or request, for example. Then you don't want to approach them again with marketing emails. Very confusing when you are engaging with sales and still receive marketing emails.
Meeting or webinar reminders
Using a meeting scheduler, a lead can instantly see when you are available for a call or a face-to-face meeting. After scheduling, the visitor gets an email immediately and automatically to put the appointment in your calendar with a click. With you, it is immediately placed in your calendar. Of course, you can also automatically send reminders for the appointment so that it is never forgotten. And of course you can use this for many more things: webinars, trade fair appointments, demos, master classes, etc. Anything where you and your lead or client have agreed to meet at a certain time and date, you can send automatic emails to put it in the calendar, reminder and, of course, still send the recording including summary.
Lead qualification
As you have read above, not every lead is ready to make a purchase with you right away. With lead nurturing you can convince them, but with lead scoring you can automatically qualify them before they go to sales. With lead scoring, you give each desired action and data a certain number of points. For example, for visiting product pages on your website, opening e-mails and clicking on links contained therein, engaging with your social posts, contacting your organisation or requesting a demo, quote or sample. You decide what you consider important to label someone as sales-fit. With lead scoring, you can make sure this happens automatically, so your marketing team spends less time on this.
For every organisation, there are different automations of interest to make the marketing process more efficient. Of course, sales and service teams also use many automations. In subsequent blogs, we will show automations that these teams can use to work more efficiently.