A successful demand generation strategy incorporates a multitude of components that work seamlessly towards generating a steady flow of qualified and attentive leads. And while marketers understand that marketing automation tools are essential to the success of an cross-channel campaign, only a small percentage of them have yet to integrate marketing automation techniques into their strategies.
Marketing automation empowers you to personalise the buyer's journey to the individual behavioural traits of your audience, instead of forcing each visitor to follow the same sales funnel regardless of their preferences. It enables you to create a dynamically engaging set of emails that would be overwhelming time consuming, yet are delivered seamlessly while being customised to their actions. Marketing automation can give life to your demand generation strategy by personalising and customising all of your marketing campaigns.
The absence of this marketing automation results in a boring, dull and standard email campaign that requires a lot of effort and time to execute. Without it, your content fails to gain the traction needed because the most important components of your demand generation strategy are left to their own devices- which unfortunately is not enough to compete with competitors who are using automation techniques.
Email Marketing: Effectively Personalise Your Email Campaign With Automation
Without marketing automation, each of your email audience members receive the exact same one-off campaigns and newsletters series-in the exact same order. The extent of your personalisation is limited to name and email fields. Even more, you have to monitor accumulated sales and website analytics in order to manually send follow up series when a customer takes a specific action.
That means that when a person signs up on your website for the first time, you have to manually create and send the welcoming email campaign. When a customer makes a purchase, you have to personally initiated the “thank you” email series in order to efficiently cultivate repeat clients.
Use Email Automation To Respond To Lifestyle and Action Triggers
When automating your email campaign, you have the ability to identify the actions that you want to trigger a particular email response. Using these lifestyle actions to trigger the delivery of related email sequences enables you to respond to their behaviours with the most appropriate and relevant messages that are triggered based on their behaviour. Your email campaign becomes flexible and mould-able in order to generate demand for your brand.
Without automation, your email marketing campaign lacks the personalisation ability to mould the delivery of content around the actions or engagement of each customer. When the posts are delivered, your customer may- or may not- be at that phase of the cycle. Whether premature or late, the posts are not being coordinated or synchronised with the pace that your audience is progressing through the buyer's journey.
When one of your social media followers is looking for follow up content on a particular topic, they have to search for it themselves if you are not using delivering those posts automatically. Automation allows you to identify the most connected and engaged users. Their activity will trigger follow up messages that extend the life of the conversation and elongates the momentum of their engagement.
For instance, the most obvious action triggers to designate would be when the user fills out a form, makes a purchase, clicks a link or watches a video. But you there are other points of engagement that marketing automation allows you to build an email campaign around.
When the user engages with your brand through a social media channel, automation allows you to use email newsletters to further encourage consistent engagement across multiple channels.
If a person has not taken any action for a while, you can use automation to re-cultivate the relationship. If they still fail to engage with you, automate their removal from your list. If a certain topic consistently generates a lot of traffic, build an email series to specifically engage with those who clicked a link, submitted a comment or lingered on your website after viewing a video or blog on that subject.
By leveraging social media activity to enhance the quality of your email encounters, not only will you strengthen the relationship your brand has with its' audience, but you will also increase the level of personalisation contained in your emails. Readers will not see your demand generation content as advertisements. Instead, they will perceive each message as genuine and valuable communication.
Use Automated Email Responses To Further Cultivate Your Leads
In addition to redirecting their email journey based on their particular activity and lifestyle habits. There are other triggers that can be used to personalise each customers' user experience. While these triggers do not influence the pace or direction of each person's journey, your acknowledgment of these events adds a sense of personality to the brand. Sending emails when these events take place shows that your brand is more than a profitable company looking to make a sale and makes a reaffirming emotional appeals to each customer individually.
Your email campaign can be programmed to initiate a one-off email response to certain events such as:
the lack of usage of a customer subscriptions,
their submission of product feedback on your social media page,
the announcement of a promotional discount on a product that a customer has previously purchased,
the upcoming expiration of their subscription,
their birthday coming up son, and
their membership anniversary.
These are just a few of the actions that you can designate as triggers.
Additionally, your response does not have to be an entire services, it could just be a voucher for a discount or an exclusive offer. It could be a video instead of text, or invitation to a webinar. You can also deliver a series of podcasts that empowers your customers leverage your services or products for their own benefit.
TRAC Marketing is a UK-based company that provides marketing automation consulting and solutions for small businesses. Speak to our marketing automation consultants today to learn more about putting marketing automation to work in your company.
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