Whether you’re graduating from an email service provider (ESP) or just looking to take a more holistic view of your customers, growth marketing automation is a powerful technology that drives brand evangelism and should be critical to your pile of martech.
For companies looking to scale responsibly, marketing automation offers tremendous growth potential, both by building the funnel and delivering the kind of brand experience you need to win.
Both businesses and consumers increased their digital engagement during the pandemic. According to Forrester, global marketing automation spend will reach $25 billion by 2023, and many professionals are considering using a marketing automation solution.
If you fit into the group of people seeking automation, you may stumble across a whole new platform and wonder how to start using your powers effectively. Read on for a guide to help you get the most out of automation technology and grow your business your way.
Perform a clean and content check for data hygiene
It’s tempting to start using the new marketing automation platform for the first time, but a few basics are essential before you get started.
As a modern marketer, you probably have a lot of data and content. Start indexing your contact lists to find the right target. Make sure the contacts you want to integrate into your new platform are selected to receive messages from you. This will lead to greater accuracy in engagement detection and deliverability.
Then organize your content library. E-books, webinars, blog posts, white papers, and product guides are great items to have on hand when starting a growing marketing automation strategy.
To deliver the right value to your customers, you need to think about where and when content is most appropriate across the entire customer lifecycle. It also makes your ascent into evangelism comfortable and natural. Use blog posts with built-in instructions and solid white papers for lasting encouragement.
Communicate with your sales team and start a test email campaign
Adding the complexity of marketing automation to your stack requires opening a communication channel with your sales force. While sales don’t have to understand the ins and outs of your new platform, it’s critical that you agree on the right time for sales to engage with your suggestions.
A solid marketing automation platform will help you build a methodology behind your approach to the customer experience through lead counting. Lead counting helps develop a mutually beneficial system that improves marketers’ ability to pass qualified leads to sales and allows sales to focus their time and effort on the most likely buyers.
By simply starting and leading with the mindset that every automated campaign you implement, from test to best, is a learning experience, you can assess each of the issues and find what works best for your organization as a whole.
Chew before swallowing to avoid biting off more than you can chew. This is an approach that will pay off later.
The automated SMS channel really took off during the pandemic as people explored new ways to connect with brands. Overall, 77% of consumers experienced new buying behavior in the last year, according to McKinsey’s latest consumer survey in the United States, primarily due to the need for value, convenience, and availability.
The keyword is value. As you evolve with your marketing automation platform, you will begin to understand that not all channels are created equal.
For long-term communication, such as sharing a white paper to improve the customer experience, email is still a great channel. But for urgent communications like hotel logins or payment reminders, SMS can instantly provide your customers with information that improves their work and everyday life.
It’s important to note that, unlike emails, SMS is very personal and should only be used to enhance the purchase or customer experience. When entering this new frontier of engagement, do so lightly and with the mindset that texting is not a means of “lots and lots of explosions.”
Remember this is automatic growth in marketing, not autopilot
If you first notice the automatic growth of marketing, you might feel like a kid in a candy store. The ability to automate serious and tedious tasks can be addictive.
However, a common misconception is that you can operate on autopilot with automation. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The less time you spend manually focusing on goals and creating campaigns that make mistakes, the more time you can spend getting to know your customers. That means you’ve increased your bandwidth to work one-on-one with customers and evangelists, review your feedback to see where you can improve your offerings and communications, and try out new and emerging channels.
Automation is your Batman Robin. This makes the stage more effective for you in your messages, not more robotic. By getting your platform up and running, you have more time to be creative and run more effective campaigns.