Automating a large chunk of marketing operations is slowly becoming a necessity for businesses, nowadays. This is primarily due to a demanding attitude that today’s customers have developed owing to the excessive availability of products and content available to them. Such an attitude greatly compels online businesses to engage their consumers in a perennial manner.
Even though marketing automation has solved this issue for businesses to quite an extent there are a few undiscovered areas where it holds a lot of potentials.
Let’s look at 3 such marketing areas where implementing automation can turn out to be a boon for a firm’s engagement rates:
Customer Onboarding
Every consumer/potential consumer of a business needs to be specially treated these days, and not just as another revenue-generating source. The best way a firm can carry out this process is by sending the consumer a welcome e-mail or push notification. This can either be when he purchases a product or signs up for a newsletter.
Marketing Automation would come in the handiest in this case, as it can help you to create and send mass e-mails based on different actions completed by the customer. Your welcome message can also be quite useful when it comes to knowing more about a customer’s preferences, for example, by attaching a small questionnaire at the end. In this way, you can categorize your new customers in various e-mail databases and target them accordingly in the future.
Customer Win-Back Programs
An abandoned cart is something that every online website faces extensively. You can have the most perfectly laid out and navigable online storefront possible, but you will still end up with a ton of customers who will leave your site with items remaining in their cart. Such customers are not completely disinterested in purchasing the products remaining in their cart. Instead, they don’t experience a strong urgency at the moment to make the purchase.
The best option available to marketers in this scenario is to leverage marketing automation and frame a strong follow-up strategy. The follow-up strategy can include sending e-mails/push notifications to customers at regular time periods and remind them of the products that are remaining in their cart.
Other than informing the customers about the products, you can also provide engagement in the following manner.
- Informing them of the limited stocks that you have regarding the current product.
- Providing exclusive discounts for them.
- Offering free shipping/delivery charges.
Multi-Channel Marketing
It’s a no brainier that the consumer of today buys products and consumes content from a wide variety of online channels. A business just can’t target a single platform nowadays, and hope to get maximum revenue out of it.
However, on the other hand, every individual channel requires a separate digital marketing approach, especially when it comes to content creation. So where can automation help in easing up the overall marketing burden of a business?
Marketing automation can significantly contribute to enhancing the brand recall factor for a firm through every channel that they are targeting. Good content followed by a strong multi-channel automation strategy would ensure that you get the maximum engagement throughout every channel.
Here are a few ways in which you can carry out your multi-channel automation strategy:
SMS
They can be easily called a hidden gem in the field of digital marketing. Where e-mails manage to have an open rate of 10-15%, SMS has an open rate of 99%. The best approach to leveraging SMS is to use it for repetitive exposure or reminder.
This can include providing SMS to your existing customers or subscribers that majorly include:
- Reminders about products that they have extensively browsed, but not purchased finally.
- A highly personalized SMS that provides a link to the checkout page of products previously browsed by the customer etc.
E-mails:
Unlike SMSs, your e-mails should be focused on engaging the customer in a comprehensive manner. However, entirely text-based e-mails have become highly futile nowadays, and you need to include videos and images to garner the required engagement. E-mail marketing if done right can be quite beneficial for your business as stats suggest that 60% of e-mail recipients tend to visit the promoted page.
Here are a few successful e-mail ideas:
- Inciting first-time buyers to make second time purchases by offering special discounts to them.
- Sending a personalized thank you postcard after a lead attends a product demo.
- Encouraging first purchases by giving $50 dollars off with a promo code.
On-site messaging:
On-site messaging is unrivaled when it comes to creating real-time engagement. This is a relatively new and emerging form of lead generation strategy that many businesses are adopting nowadays. The process starts by asking a visitor the reason for his visit to the website. As per the visitor’s response, the website gains insight as to what the visitor is most interested in. Once the visitor signs up to your website you can place him in a certain category and target him with personalized e-mails through your e-mail marketing software.
Here are a few on-site messaging tactics that you can try:
- Inviting visitors who land on a particular product page of yours, to a webinar.
- Offering special discounts to pricing page visitors who agree to sign up for the free trial
- Provide information about your upcoming features/products that haven’t been revealed on your website yet.
Wrapping Up…
Marketing automation is still in its embryonic stage and would play a highly significant role when it comes to engaging customers in a consistent manner. What marketers need to do is to determine those applications or elements in their organization where marketing automation would bring the best results and vice versa.
