8 Tips for Effective Marketing Automation (Part 2)

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Welcome back to the second half of our two-part article on how to effectively boost the results and the amount of fun you have when working with your marketing automation tools. Whether you’re managing social media or designing a whole new campaign, the way to make the best possible use of your thinking machines is to program them to do tasks you don’t enjoy. They will do them perfectly every time with no complaint. Last time we talked about starting slowly and working with data. Let’s pick things back up where we left off with organically gathering leads.

4) Continue Organically Gathering Leads

Another common marketing automation mistake is to start buying email lists of “leads” and feeding the data through the program to find more leads. This is not advisable. Instead, continue to gather leads as you always have, organically. While you can go with a little bit more of a shotgun approach with marketing automation because it can sort through more data than human team members, it works best when you give your automation software legitimate leads who have a reasonable likelihood of conversion. The automation will then analyze your lead collection and give you a smaller list of people who will be most responsive to a little outreach from marketing or sales.

5) Automate Where You’re Getting Overwhelmed

If you’re not sure what to automate at first, start with things that have been frustrating or tedious in the past. Lead qualification is the primary use of marketing automation but there are so many more. You can use it to determine individual buying preferences, large trends in your customer buying patterns like a preference for a particular color or style, and even integrate it with automated message sending to personalize your automated emails and social media posts based on what it thinks will be best received.

6) Think Long-Term Benefits

Marketing automation is not a small-scale tool. It was invented to handle the massive amounts of lead and customer data that a growing modern business needs to process in order to stay competitive. As you effectively automate more and more of the tedious parts of the marketing process, your targeting will get more precise and your marketing team will have more time to focus on things like quality campaigns and creating better connections to the now well-targeted customers.

7) Constantly Improve Your Automation

Never stop optimizing and improving your marketing automation configuration. Think of new tasks to give it and fine-tune the settings after each batch of results to continue to improve performance. Marketing automation tends to start slowly but soon your office will be wonderfully free of tedious analysis and response tasks. The more you work on your marketing automation system, the better automated your marketing will become.

8) Finish with the Personal Touch

Finally, no matter how effective your marketing automation gets, don’t forget that customers need personal interaction to feel truly taken care of. By combining the human connection of real sales and marketing professionals with the automated personalization of marketing automation, your customers will feel as if you personally know each and every one of them which will deepen your relationship with your customer community as a whole.

Marketing automation is something that is useful to everyone because it is essentially a multi-tool. You can use it to manage your social media accounts, shoot personalized emails derived from CRM analysis, and even assign it to collect or distribute interesting pictures on its own social media account.

Source: B2C