Marketing Automation Strategy: 5 Powerful Concepts (Updated)

Marketing is a crucial part of growing any business, but it can be extremely time-consuming. You’re trying to develop hundreds or thousands of leads and customers all at once, and you don’t have the resources to do that. But at the same time, blasting out generic content will lose you customers and leave your business stagnated.

A marketing automation strategy can help you balance between customization and efficiency. These tools will leave you free to focus on using the feedback from your campaigns to design more effective marketing efforts. Read on to learn how to develop a marketing automation strategy that will help you grow your business without lifting a finger.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is more or less what it says on the tin – a process that automates your marketing efforts. Things like social media and email marketing can be time-consuming and repetitive. Marketing automation can help you reach more customers while also devoting your time to more complex issues.

Marketing automation tools can help you select audiences, design content, and more. You can automate responses based on timing or customer actions. And it can optimize your marketing efforts so you can focus on the results that come back in and tweaking your campaigns to be more effective.

How It Works

The first step to using marketing automation is to collect customer information. The more information the computer has about your customers, the more it can do to optimize marketing efforts. Then the marketing automation system can create groups of customers and recommend content for that group.

Once the content is created and approved, marketing automation systems will do things like send out emails to the right people at the right time. It can reach out to customers who have left unpurchased goods in their shopping carts and send flash sale notifications. It can even send out personal messaging on social media platforms.

1. Use Dynamic Content

One of the best things you can do to ensure you have a successful marketing automation experience is to use dynamic content. You need smart content that can change to suit the past experiences or actions of your customers. This will help you to create an experience customized to your leads and customers at that specific moment in their lives.

Take a look at your customers’ past behaviors and interests to form a base for developing your content. This will help you create material that they want to engage with. And as you see the results coming in from your new marketing campaigns, tweak what you have to better suit what you’re hearing from your customers.

2. Set Up a Drip Campaign

One of the most effective ways to keep leads and customers engaged is to use something called a drip campaign. You may know this by the term flow chart. It’s an alternative to regular blast emails that gets a lot more engagement, and it works something like this.

Let’s say a customer visits your site homepage and clicks into the scented candle portion of your online store on Monday. On Tuesday, instead of sending them a blast email about bath bombs, your program sends them an email about a sale you’re having on scented candles. Your customer goes back to the candle section of your store, and this time, they put three candles in their shopping cart.

On Wednesday, you send that customer an email reminding them that they have candles in their shopping cart. It also offers them free shipping if they order in the next hour. Your customer clicks back in, and this time, they complete the purchase.

Each step of your campaign is more and more customized to draw that specific customer in and make the sale without you ever having to lift a finger.

3. Automate Real-Time Collaboration

The marketing world moves at the speed of light, and with the domination of electronic marketing, that’s no longer a figure of speech. So if your team isn’t also communicating at the speed of light, you’re going to get left behind. Team collaboration in real-time is key to a successful marketing team.

Each department in your business may have different data about the same customer. So set up a system to ensure that all that data gets automatically shared with any relevant parties in your company. This will help make sure your marketing automation program is getting all the information it needs.

4. Use List Segmentation

In addition to using drip campaigns, you should also use list segmentation to control who gets which marketing messages. You need to send out a variety of marketing emails and promotions to get enough coverage for every aspect of your business. But sending out a dozen emails or messages a day to the same people is a good way to get filters set up against you.

Instead, use your data about your customers to build segmented email lists. One group may get an email about a certain event, another may get a notification about a flash sale, and another might get an announcement of new merchandise. This makes sure everyone is getting the information they need and nothing more.

5. Create a Winning Marketing Automation Strategy

Having a strong marketing automation strategy can help you improve your marketing efforts easily. You can scale your marketing more easily and be confident that the marketing you are using is optimized for your customers. Make sure you’re keeping your information up to date and using dynamic content to get the best results.

If you’d like to get a generation marketing system that runs like a well-oiled machine, check out the rest of our site at Demand Machine. We can help you design, develop, and scale marketing solutions that drive revenue growth. Contact us today to start improving your marketing efforts the easy way.