Automation is considered the next major evolution in marketing, but are you applying it in your business? And to what extent? For many companies today, marketing automation is still limited to email marketing campaigns and not much else. In reality, this field offers so many more possibilities that can boost productivity, generate additional profit, and improve the customer experience. If you want to get more out of automation, it’s best to take the time to set everything up properly first. Unfortunately, this is where many companies get stuck…
To get you started, here are 5 simple and practical strategies that will help your business get off to a strong start with marketing automation.
Step 1: Keep all data up to date in the CRM
The main reason many companies fail to implement high-level marketing automation is that they don’t really consider the roles of CRM, data acquisition, and data-driven insights to be part of automation. This is a problem because poor data quality—whether due to missing or inaccurate data—can significantly undermine your marketing efforts.
Marketing teams that fail to keep data up to date or have to work with data that contains significant inaccuracies cannot launch targeted marketing campaigns. Not only will customer relationships consequently be neglected, but the quality of the relationship will also be undermined by false sales promises based on incorrect information.
Therefore, use a CRM system that allows you to regularly check your entire contact database for errors or omissions. If you collect customer data from multiple sources, it is crucial that your CRM system offers built-in capabilities to verify cross-references.
If you want to make the most of all the marketing automation options available, you should invest in a powerful CRM system such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Delivering personalized content is a top priority for every marketer. A good CRM system is therefore the foundation of any effort to reach your target audience.
With Dynamics 365 Sales, you can also bring marketers and salespeople together in one place. Easily integrate email marketing tools such as Flexmail and Mailchimp with your CRM environment. Or integrate it right away ClickDimensions for advanced marketing automation.
Step 2: Map out the entire process
Once you’ve installed a CRM system, it’s time to see what you can do with all that data. By segmenting the information entered into your CRM, you can see how your current marketing campaigns are performing and improve them for better results. The most effective way to do this is by tracking a user’s entire journey, from inbound to sales and everything that happens afterward.
When you can map your customer’s journey through your CRM system, you’ll gain insight into the type of content that encourages interaction with your product or service, how much time a user spends on average before making a purchase, and how many meaningful interactions they have. With all this information, you can estimate the cost of onboarding, determine how to speed up that process, and figure out how to generate more high-impact communications.
Generating, qualifying, and scoring leads takes more time than you might think. Especially if your sales and marketing teams aren't using the same tools… With the built-in marketing automation tools from ClickDimensions In the Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system, everyone sets the right priorities.
Not only will this enable your sales department to attract more leads and generate more sales… Your marketers will also be able to engage potential and existing customers more effectively through targeted marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Set benchmarks
As you go through the marketing automation process, you’ll quickly realize that you can’t view this as an either/or scenario. Either you use an automated process… or you don’t. On the contrary, marketing automation is a multi-stage process, and you need to set benchmarks (reference points, criteria) to guide you through it. This way, you’ll know whether or not your marketing processes are automated.
What should you include in those benchmarks? Consider the quality of your list, your level of targeting, and the nature and level of communication you provide.
There’s a big difference between a generic email list that serves all customers and all needs, and an email list that allows customers to set their contact preferences. Sending generic emails is far from the same as a mobile-optimized video message or an email that integrates social media. Your automation benchmarks, therefore, reflect the level of detail you’ve achieved in managing your customer relationships.
Step 4: Automate with a Personal Touch
How do you turn marketing automation into a personalized process? We’re not talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) here, although it plays a major role—more than ever—in the marketing process. No, when we say you should also automate the “personality,” we mean that you should develop customer personas. These are templates tailored specifically to certain customer needs, demographics, and other key data.
Each persona belongs to a specific sales group. Simply put, you can’t talk to all your customers the same way, but you also can’t write hundreds of individual emails. These personas are a tool for communicating more efficiently.
With ClickDimensions Not only can you manage marketing campaigns, but you can also track your leads' online behavior, identify potential customers, and rank them based on their potential.
Using the insights you gain from email marketing, web intelligence, lead scoring, social media, web forms, surveys, landing pages, nurture marketing, subscription management, campaigns, and so much more… you can quickly identify who is interested in your products, gauge the level of that interest, and then take the appropriate action.
Step 5: Make it a priority for everyone
It is clear that marketing automation will boost your business results and improve the way you do business, yet implementing comprehensive automated marketing remains quite a challenge. The process involved in marketing automation is often seen as a barrier to growth and still strikes fear into the hearts of many companies.
But don’t let that stop you… By implementing marketing automation in your company, you’ll also optimize internal workflows, improve team management, and allow sales managers to focus more on productive activities rather than just complicated data handling. Marketing automation is for everyone.
It provides the perfect solution to today’s challenges, ranging from launching leads at the right time to breaking down data into meaningful benchmarks. By making the switch to CRM and data-driven marketing, many companies are securing their future.
If you follow these five criteria for marketing automation, you'll find that your marketing communications become much more effective. What's more, looking back, you'll have a hard time believing that you ever ran campaigns any other way!
