In today’s fast-growing digital marketing environment, advanced automation technologies help to drive best-in-class marketing strategies and create more personalized content, marketing campaigns, and customer experiences. How can you develop a successful marketing automation strategy for your business and avoid the most common mistakes? Read on to find out.
Why it is necessary to develop a marketing automation strategy?
As a rule, most marketers and product managers realize what they exactly want to achieve by using marketing automation, and even succeed. But for a lot of them, the ROI of marketing automation is not so clear and they do not uncover the full potential of a marketing automation tools. And, this is obvious that a lot of marketing automation platforms do not provide the proper trainings or the know-how of leveraging their technology. By using a powerful marketing automation tool, that you can automate a wide variety of tasks for your Marketing, Sales, and Customer service functions.
Today, marketing automation is a must-have for any innovative marketing team, as it helps to outperform marketers that don’t have. Marketing automation will make your campaigns more accurate and empower your sales team with better leads. The secret is to have the right tools to get a clear vision about the entire sales and determine when leads are ready to buy more effectively.
Before going ahead, ask yourself the following questions, and if you don’t have the answers, then you obviously need a proper marketing strategy.
- Can you identify, track and engage individual buyers online?
- Can you look at a list of customers and prioritize them based on fit and the chance to buy?
- Are you filtering leads based on the level of engagement and interest?
- Can you measure the revenue contribution of every single one of your marketing campaigns?
- Can you do these things without wanting to tear your hair out?
How to create a marketing automation strategy in 5 steps
Before designing the marketing automation strategy, let’s understand what the sales funnel is. The sales funnel illustrates the idea that every sale begins with a big number of potential customers and ends with a much smaller number of people who actually make a purchase.
Let me bring your attention to 7 stages of the sales funnel:
- Awareness – When your customers are aware of your brand but are not ready to buy it.
- Interest – When your customers are interested in a product category and are in the phase of gathering information.
- Consideration – When your customers are comparing products, visiting various sites, benchmarking prices, and trying to find the best fit for their needs.
- Purchase – When your customers make a transaction on your website or application.
- Retention – When you’ve made your customers retain and repurchased your product.
- Advocacy – When your customers talk positively about your brand.
- Loyalty – When your customers repurchased your product and also speak highly about your brand.
While developing your marketing automation strategy, your final goal should move your customers from the awareness stage to the loyalty stage of the sales funnel.
Here are 5 steps you should make while designing your plan of action:
Step 1: Get focused on data and build a solid data-centric culture
A data-driven marketing approach is crucial for your strategy if your goal is the personalization of your target users with the right messaging. To build a strong data-centric culture, you need to first collect as much information about your customers as possible and then work on gaining user attributes to segment them for the future. Remember, targeted communication leads to higher engagement rates.
The next important point is to consider the data flow. This information should flow from your existing data system to your marketing automation platform. And when your users read your messages or make any action, that data should be streamed back to your data systems.
But you also should think about making this integration more simple, that’s why SaaS platforms that use APIs are better than in-house solutions and even more affordable.
Step 2: Go through the 7 stages of the buyers’ journey
Before defining the buying stages mentioned above, note that moving from one stage to another can have multiple touchpoints. For example, when buyers are in the consideration stage, they can take multiple actions, like visit your website, add products to the cart but still don’t buy them, or add to the wish list for later.
To take buyers from the consideration stage to the purchase stage, you need to target them at each of these touchpoints using a multichannel strategy. If buyers add a product to their wish list, keep them updated with offers and discounts, or send them a reminder automatically every day. If a buyer is searching for a product on Google, show them ads about the product on your platform. If they visit a product page for the first time, show them welcome deals. Brainstorm over all the variations that can make them purchase your product during the buying journey, then create automation rules for these touchpoints.
Step 3: Segment your potential buyers for a targeted communication
Why you should segment your target audience? Not all your users will be interested in the same products. This means you shouldn’t spam them with unnecessary emails. For example, you might not want to send an on-ground event invitation to a subscriber who lives six states away.
Segmenting helps you collect more information about your users and increases their retention. You can use different user attributes and create segments that best suit your campaign goals. With marketing automation, segmentation can be done easily. Basically, customers are segmented by:
- Demographic information
- Geographical information
- Past buying behavior
- Engagement level
Step 4: Make every channel count
Just because you have a variety of channels for communication with your customers, you obviously don’t have to use them all every time you want to inform your buyers about an upcoming offer, feature, or something new. Sometimes a simple push notification or even an in-app message is enough!
Excessive notifications will only result that your potential and existing will either be immune to your messages and ignore them, or they will just unsubscribe from them and move you to the blacklist. To avoid this, use a channel guide to select the best channels for your campaigns.
As a rule, it is recommended to use one channel and use the rest as backups. For example, if a user is not available by email, you can try sending them an SMS or push notification. And, of course, you don’t need to use all of them at the same time. But if you invite them to a major event or inform them about a flash sale, then you can use an aggressive communication strategy.
Step 5: Provide a hyper-personalized user experience
And finally, make sure your content is unique to each user. Personalize your communication with the information that the user likes the most. Factors such as personalized product recommendations, reminders, offers, and updates increase your conversion rate by 3 times compared to messages that only include the first and last name of your buyer.
The marketing automation platform can not only extract information from your recommendation engine and your data systems, but also intelligently insert it into your messages so that every interaction with a customer should be unique and individual. You can also test versions of your campaigns to determine which version of your campaign is working and which isn’t. Here comes the importance of A/B testing!
10 mistakes to avoid while developing a marketing automation strategy
Now let’s look through the 10 reasons your marketing automation strategy could not deliver the results you are expecting.
Incorrect automation workflows
Omnichannel marketing can influence both online and offline shopping, and this makes it difficult to develop the ideal customer journey. Every customer will act absolutely differently before making a purchase, and as a marketer, this makes your life difficult. How do you choose the right touchpoints for automation? How to design an automation workflow that is accurate and efficient? Implement the right automation workflows, and you’ll save 80% of your time, energy and resources on repetitive tasks and increase your marketing ROI.
Lack of a centralized data platform
In order to make your marketing automation tool working, it should be possible to add context to your messages by analyzing user actions and then sending relevant messages.
For example, when your buyers have been inactive for 30 days, then it is worth to send them a 20% discount coupon to bring them back to your platform. This information must flow seamlessly between your CDP and your marketing automation platform.
Complex tools
Complex solutions often create a lot of pitfalls in your campaigns. Somewhere (in most cases) there will be one flip switch hidden that missed your attention, and your campaign will be sent to the wrong segment of users.
How long and how many clicks will it take you to segment users and send them an engaging email campaign? The seller who sold you the platform made it easy, and now you’ve gone astray and everything seems too complicated. If you need to “google” how to work on a certain platform, it might be time for you to look for alternative solutions.
Spending too much time on your content
Sometimes you need dedicated resources to develop content for your campaigns and then sometimes you need to launch ad hoc campaigns. Just by changing a couple of banners, some text here and there, and you are set to go live. Spending too much time obsessing about your content can slow down the process. In the long run, it will not give you the expected results from your marketing automation strategies.
Lack of a lead scoring framework
Another mistake that can lead to marketing automation strategies failure is the lack of a lead scoring mechanism. When you score your users based on their activities, you see how to gain revenue. Besides, you can identify buyers based on their activity status. Highly active users are easier to retain, while inactive or less active users are much harder to retain.
For D2C (direct-to-customer) brands, there is a high chance of churn of paid customers with low activity scores. So you can develop retention strategies for these customers. Free users with high engagement rates are more likely to become paid customers if you offer them the right value proposition. Lead scoring is an amazing technique for further improving your conversion rate.
Using the wrong channels for the wrong purpose
Basically, you can use multiple channels for your campaigns. However, a good strategy would be NOT to select every channel for every message. Choose one primary channel and use 2 additional channels as backups.
Here’s a list of commonly used channels:
- Email – to share announcements, updates & reminders.
- Mobile Push Notifications – to get your users to open the app through push notifications and access the content.
- Web Push Notifications – to update your users regarding their recent activity.
- In-App Notifications – for critical account updates, shipment tracking information, etc.
- Web Overlays – for offers, flash deals, sign-up forms, or any other top-of-the-funnel action you wish your visitors to take on your website.
- SMS – to send transactional updates, account updates, renewal reminders, and promotional messages.
- WhatsApp – to send transactional updates, account updates, renewal reminders, and promotional messages.
- Facebook Adverts – to target users who are interested in a product/category but may not immediately convert
- Google Adverts – to target users with a high intent to purchase.
Incorrect user segmentation
Segmentation based on incorrect attributes or parameters can affect your engagement rate, and even offend your customers. All the effort, time, and resources invested in creating a campaign will be wasted if it ends up in the wrong inbox. That’s why relevance is one of the decisive factors in the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Besides incorrect segmentation, your automation strategy can fail if your segmentation either doesn’t work or is performed on out-of-dated data. What may apply to the user today may not be relevant tomorrow. Real-time segmentation helps provide your customers with an operational experience.
Failure to identify early signs of campaign optimization
Right time optimization of campaigns and A/B testing will lead to higher engagement rates. It is extremely important to test your campaigns. Test them on multiple devices, and multiple form factors. Take a smaller size and run variations of your campaigns with them. Identify the highest-performing campaign based on engagement rates and trigger that for the rest of your audience.
Poor campaign personalization options
In this age of hyper-personalization, it’s not enough to just personalize your messages just with buyers’ names. They expect better use of their personal data. Show them deals that interest them, show the product recommendations that they need, and show them you care.
With artificial intelligence and predictive analytics shaping the future of consumer business, brands are now predicting what shoppers might buy with greater than 80-90% accuracy. However, there are big brands that are still struggling with the basic problem of managing large amounts of customer data.
Absence of real-time analytics & reporting
Real-time visibility in performing your campaign plays a significant role in the success of your campaigns. Overdue reporting, misreporting, or even limited reporting can cause your campaign failure. That’s analytics and reporting are the main factors for the success of a marketing automation strategy.
If you had real-time information about your campaign performance, like engagement rates showing low numbers, high unsubscribe rates, and spam reports, letting you know there is a problem with your setup, then you can make necessary changes and restart your campaign. In addition, analytics and insights enable you to make strategic decisions about upcoming campaigns. You can analyze past campaign trends and adjust existing campaigns based on their performance.
Basically, a marketing automation strategy comprises 4 parts: Who, When, What, and How. “Who” handles the right segregation and targeting. “When” helps identify touchpoints along the customer journey that require timely actions to move users to the next stage. “Which” matches the content, messages, and format in which you want to communicate with your customers. And “How” is the secret to creating the perfect omnichannel user experience strategy.
Keep in mind all the 5 steps when creating a strategy and all the reasons your strategy might fail, and you have all you need to create a best-in-class marketing automation strategy.
