Marketing Automation strategies for your campaigns.

When Marketing Automation kicks in, the results quickly start to show. Engagement increases, as does the conversion rate and opening rates of your emails and newsletters. To take full advantage of this tool you need to implement an effective strategy. In this article you will find 5 ready to use.

Marketing Automation: definition

What is Marketing Automation? The definition of Marketing Automation could be as follows:

An approach to Marketing that allows you to complete repetitive and mechanical activities by activating automatic flows called workflows .

Marketing Automation can be implemented on different channels to optimize workflows and facilitate a company's relationship with users and customers. For example, we can find Marketing Automation solutions for Email Marketing, E-commerce, SMS Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Analytics, etc.

The advantage of using a Marketing Automation platform lies in the possibility of automating various marketing activities and controlling them from a single dashboard , which stores all user data and the results of individual actions.

How does marketing automation work?

In Digital Marketing there are many activities that are carried out manually but which, due to their mechanical nature, could be carried out automatically without losing effectiveness, on the contrary, improving the sales process.

The goal of Marketing Automation is to provide a personalized experience for site visitors and customers and save marketers time on repetitive tasks.

To automate marketing activities, you need a tool that activates an automatic flow or a strategic action whenever a particular condition occurs. This condition, called a workflow trigger , can be, for example, a user who signs up for the newsletter or a customer who abandons a product in their cart.

If the Marketing Automation tool manages these processes, the result is a considerable saving of time for the marketer, who can devote himself to more strategic activities, and ensure greater precision and effectiveness of the marketing strategies implemented.

What can you automate with Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation has endless possibilities: it can be applied to marketing activities, as well as those of the sales department or customer service. In fact, it is possible to create a specific workflow for:

• lead generation, using customized landing pages,
• lead scoring to divide contacts ready to convert from those who are not yet,
• lead nurturing,
• online support,
• sending emails and notifications with the latest offers,
• the management of social networks,
• sending personalized content to customers to build loyalty,
• and so on.

In general, we can say that all these possibilities fall within a broader scope of inbound marketing, an approach for which Marketing Automation is undoubtedly a fundamental ally.

5 marketing automation strategies

Using a Marketing Automation tool is not enough to obtain significant results. What really makes the difference is an upstream strategy in which automatic flows are part of a mechanism for providing personalized content to users, nurturing and engaging leads, optimizing marketing activity times and tracking results.

So let's see 5 excellent Marketing Automation strategies that can be useful to implement, both for large companies and startups.

1. Leverage Marketing Automation to segment your contact databases

The leads you collect provide you with a lot of information: use them to create audiences to send customized campaigns to. Manual segmentation is time consuming and often not entirely accurate. Marketing Automation software integrated with your CRM, on the other hand, can quickly achieve exact and reliable segmentation.

Choose strategic segmentation criteria for what you sell and for your market: you can use demographic information, geographic information, engagement, buying behavior of your site visitors, etc.

2. Automate the chat on your website

Answering questions from potential customers increases the chances of moving them forward along the buyer's journey. The ideal would be to offer 24/7 support, but doing it manually would require a dedicated resource and a considerable budget.

You can solve the problem by implementing a chatbot on your site that automatically answers users' most frequently asked questions instantly.

In addition to increasing your chances of landing new qualified leads, you'll gain key insights from conversations with site visitors that will help you create new content and improve your services.

3. Set up Drip campaigns based on specific triggers

The Drip campaign is an automatism that allows you to create an automatic flow of emails based on user behavior.

For example, when a lead signs up for your mailing list, your system sends them a welcome message. Instead, when a potential customer visits a product page on your site, send them content about that product along with an offer or discount. The Drip campaign therefore allows you to adapt your content to each lead based on their behavior.

Messages sent via Drip campaigns have approximately 80% higher open rates than generic campaigns and triple click rates.

4. Introduce automated nurturing campaigns into your funnel

Not all of your website visitors are ready to buy what you sell. Most of them are potential buyers who need time and more information to convert.

What you need is a nurturing campaign that brings your leads to maturity (from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, up to conversion) automatically.

A Marketing Automation strategy allows you to send your leads personalized dynamic content, which responds to each one's specific needs. By automating this activity, you make the content you send to your contacts much more effective and facilitate the transition to the next levels of the funnel.

According to a 2021 statistic, using Marketing Automation to nurture leads leads to a 451% increase in qualified leads.

5. Set up an Email Marketing Automation strategy

You can apply Marketing Automation to Email Marketing to more effectively manage the sending of personalized email campaigns through the use of automatisms.

Email Marketing Automation allows you to exploit all the information you have on contacts in your database (demographic, geographical and behavioral) to improve the customer experience and reach each user with a personalized and relevant proposal, because it is based on his interests and recent actions.