Strategic Fundamentals on marketing automation

Marketing Automation

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In this, marketing automation, is an important enabler and takes care of the details. So, you can focus on the stuff you love. Automation saves time, stands for effortless data collection and reporting. It gives you the opportunity to connect with contacts using multiple channels and enables you to precision-target content to the right person at the right time and place. 

Automate irresistible offers

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if you want to collect email addresses through your website you will need to create irresistible offers. Offers they receive after signing up web forms. How do you collect email addresses on your website for email marketing purposes? 

You could provision a website page with a newsletter signup form. In addition it is advised to setup additional multiple 'bribe' offerings with specific chunks of value on your website. Automation under form of email responders makes sure contacts get what they want. 

An irresistible bribe offering is a specific chunk of value to give a prospect in exchange for their contact information. Here the asset is delivered through an email responder with the asset attached (PDF's, videos, jpegs, docs, audios, etc...). This is in fact the most basic automation you could setup for your business.

The Lead Magnet as we call it in marketing parlance, helps you to maximise the number of targeted leads you are getting for an offer. It's the first step in the Customer Value Optimisation process.

Impactful email sequences

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Once they received an irresistible bribe offering in the form of specific chunk of value you could start the process of getting to know your contact through impactful email sequences. By receiving their email address you got approval from your audience to engage so they are dying to get more info about you as a person, your business, your case studies, your incentivization, your offering etc…

So you can leave the path of the simple email automation responder. Instead you could start engaging with your new subscribers by sending a series of emails.

A good idea is the sending of emails to welcome your new subscribers introducing your business and what they can expect from you. So they know what they are going to get, how often they can expect to hear from you and what type of information and offers they are going to get and yes the reason they are on your list. 

The welcome email automation consists of pre-written personalised emails so that welcoming new subscribers is as easy as pie!

Once welcomed you could take advantage of other email automation sequences. Like there are nurture sequences, educational sequences, drip fed email courses, product follow up, re-engagement, webinar follow up sequences, etc... All this to understand and get to know your most engaged contacts.

Timing is everything. Your marketing campaigns are always impacted by your ability to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Failing to meet those criteria negatively affects your marketing results, whereas fulfilling those conditions sends your conversions through the roof.

Contact Engagement

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Do you know who of your visitors got disengaged in your content? Who of your audience has not interacted on your emails or website for a long period of time? Do you have systems in place to re-engage your disengaged users? 

Perhaps you need to reach out personally through another channel (mobile or social channel) or reduce frequency of emails. How about encouraging the  share of your newsletter campaigns on Social Media by placing a call to action at the bottom of all your newsletter campaigns along the lines of "Forward this campaign to a friend and get a 10% off coupon!"  A great way to encourage & reward ambassadors.

For people landing on your pages from Twitter or Facebook (lead ads) you could email invite contacts to follow you on social media or sharing your campaign on social media?

Contact management

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Do you know that of your email list 25% will depreciate each year? If there is no engagement it hurts deliverability of your campaign. Why not removing uninterested contacts from your list by politely inviting them to unsubscribe if they haven't shown any signs of engagement in two weeks. If they decide they still want to hear from you, all they need to do is click a link and they will stay subscribed.

Have you a system in place to recognise your qualified leads? Segment, analyze and trigger automations based on the period of time people have or haven’t interacted with your emails or website.

How will you define ‘ready to buy’ contacts or organisations based on a mix of demographic, firmographic & behavioral data? Track the product pages on your website your contact is most interested in so that you can send him targeted offers afterwards. Have you identified & target leads for nurturing engagement through conversion.

Define who is engaged on your website, your products or services? Who reacts on your emails? Their progression of person in their buying journey? Do you know how to track and prioritise those further in the purchasing process?

Have you identified your fans, promoters and advocates. Track what they are doing? Do you know who are the referrals, who do social media sharing? Do you know who are the people who purchased and come back for more? Your repeat customers?

Event Followup

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Are you organising live webinar events? Working with webinar solutions such as Zoom, Demio, YouTube Live Events, Goto Meeting, CrowdCast, ... ? Why not automate and build a webinar event marketing registry system for nurturing prospects who attend, reminding registrants before the event and providing follow up messages based on if the contacts attended or not.

Have you an event communication calendar in order to organise your event marketing. How will you organise event marketing and keep track of registrants, attendees, … and organise follow up and post-event feedback on a webinar event. Through post-follow up messages automatically to your contacts who attended or not.
 

Deals / CRM / pipeline automation

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Automate lead distribution to a salesperson for contacts who are in your sweet spot. Auto create deal records and engage with these contacts by sending an email to see if they have time for a phone call. So, that deals are created automatically. Deals are your chances, opportunities, ... with a given person or an organisation you want to track. Never miss out on a proper follow-up of your open deals.

Open deal with a contact ? Track communication in your local email and automate task creation to improve follow-up of your open deal. Activities such as Meetings, calls, lunches, emails …move your deals toward closing.

It's all about showing up at the right time by the right person. So why not automating the creation of deal records once your contact's score reaches a threshold you define. Auto create deal records and distribute 'qualified' lead to a salesperson so that he can reach out to him and see if they have time for a phone call.

It is sales who does do the selling and drag and drop deals to the right stage in the process, drag as lost or win.

Campaigning

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Campaigning is about creating and sending email. Do you create an online newsletter? Do you send newsletters with dynamic triggered content?  Do you test different subject lines & email content to see what business vision gives you the most opens, clicks, and highest ROI.

How about sending special coupons to your 2 year anniversary loyal customers. Send anniversary cards with coupons through birthday emails to loyal customers. Launch automated series of emails around dates. In function of annual renewal dates, expiry dates, event dates they signed up for. 

Organise sales campaigns by sending emails on a product launch, course, webinar or sale. Campaigns that convert  sales like crazy.

Courses show what kind of content you are capable of and if your email course is branded to what you are selling (as it should be!) it can help convey the value of your larger offer. Do you want to prime your audience so they want to buy from you? You could check market interest by asking permission, through an email campaign, to inform them on the topic. Checking first if there is a market. After consent, sales campaigns could be initiated that drive highly optimized, time-limited offers for each individual prospect who consented. Automating this all stands for a highly optimized evergreen sales experience. 

Contact satisfaction

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Do you ask customers for a testimonial when selling a product, course or when doing giveaways? Testimonials are another great way of satisfying by offering your readers 'social proof' about your product or services. With a testimonial capture form you can pose pertinent questions that make it a pleasure for them to respond and give you a ready repository of relevant testimonials that you can use when you need to.

Give your customers the feeling that even after their purchase you still do care and remember. By checking and making sure if everything went according to plan and customers' expectations. If negative make sure support people reach out. Kind of 'Contact Satisfaction Survey' or a 'Customer Service Follow Up' automation that can be integrated with your Help Desk App.

Do you have a system in place that notifies your support people…. when contacts indicate that issues are not resolved. Help your contacts with “how can I help you?” emails after contact visits and complaints. 

Are you out of automation ideas? Don't re-build what is already available. Consult my toolbox of automation recipes during a discovery coaching session. I have a large portfolio of ready to custom tailor automation that can help you reduce your time to market.