5 Recipes to Adopt Marketing Automation

Online marketing makes your campaign deliverability more obvious and timely. Every online marketing message cannot be manually sent by direct marketers who are targeting millions of business prospects. This requires marketing automation software that sends campaigns in real-time to a huge email marketing list of email subscribers. Gleanster reported that in 2016, 77% of the top-performing companies’ CMOs have used marketing automation to get more revenue. But there are 5 pre-requisites for adopting marketing automation. If you take care of them, the marketing automation will increase your sales leads and conversion rates.

Let us go through them here on:

Systematically Segment Lists

List segmentation needs list cleansing and management. To make marketing automation successful, it is important that you build a huge contacts list, with responsive contact information. A cold email list can miss-guide your campaigns and yield no results. To get positive results from a sales cycle, you need to run A/B testing on your previous emails and check the email activities and metrics like CTRs and identify which email addresses are more responsive, list such email Ids separately. You can also refer to the email addresses gathered from Newsletters in b2b email marketing strategy and social media page subscriptions.

The other way is to keep your database clean and remove non-responsive email addresses that have opted-out or have requested for ‘do-not-email’. You need to verify all the email addresses in your final database, cleanse, filter, and segment as per customer demographics like age, gender, location, industry, SIC Code, buying interests, etc. According to a study by MailChimp, list segmentation can result in a 15% more open rate and 59% better click rate.  See that your different lists do not consist of the same email addresses, as that would mean that many of your automated emails will be sent to the same email subscriber.

Use the Apt Content

Most marketing content can be purchased or can be personalized by you. In any case, the content you use to send campaigns should be able to engage your target business prospects. So, every marketing content should, by default, have a powerful call-to-action like Join Free Today, Get Started, Request Quotes, at the right place to trigger the right response. Not all well-written marketing messages can stir the interest of the recipient. Your content should be able to convert the reader into a buyer. Understand the needs of your audiences and personalize your content accordingly. The different marketing messages should be automated for a different leads lists. The sales cycle will also decide what kind of marketing content will appropriate at a particular time. The series of a sales funnel should comprise:

  1. welcome emails
  2. sales emails
  3. follow-up messages
  4. thank-you emails
  5. Special offers, contest emails, and so on.

With all the ready content you can use the marketing automation to send your campaigns to your niche business prospects. Marketing automation can then help in all the reporting what your content strategy has resulted in. A content strategist can use the marketing automation software to integrate the web content writing strategies with the software.

When in Need of Leads

For a particular list that does not include leads, then you need to drive campaigns with the email addresses from such lists through automation. You have to drive organic traffic through CTA buttons on your landing page that leads to a form page which will make them submit their email address if they want to download either a whitepaper, e-book or a brochure. Then you can send automated emails and responders to the opted-in mail addresses of your leads. Drive automated campaigns to bring along your leads from the beginning of a sales cycle to the end. For this, you need to send personalized event invites, webinars, and trade shows. These ways are great to generate leads through marketing automation.

Set Goals that require Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is not necessary for all marketing programs. But if your marketing goals involve marketing automation, then know that your marketing strategies should use marketing automation in a way that it reaps the required deliverables. Convert more leads to customers with the best b2b email marketing strategies that can be integrated with the marketing automation software tools. A recent market study showed that within a year, 32 % of companies reap higher revenue with the use of marketing automation.

Purchase that serves the purpose

There are many marketing automation software available in the market like MailChimp, AWeber, GoResponse, Campaign Monitor, Active Campaign, Wigzo, etc. Sort your email lists according to your marketing strategies, if required, with email addresses facilitated by email appending processes. Know what content you want to put up, and then go for a marketing automation tool that seems to fit your budget and meets all your requirements. The changes you bring to your marketing program will bring the difference in the result any marketing automation will yield.

For example, MailChimp charges $10 per month for any growing business in the beginning, which increases as per your marketing needs. So, pay for what you want to get.

Marketing automation can increase your email campaigns efficiency, improve sales, marketing results and bring positive impact on your sales cycle. Know more how marketing automation can accelerate your sales pipeline. Get a free quote today!

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Amy John is a marketing executive with over 12 years of experience in the execution of marketing and lead generation strategies.