In today’s world it is the customer who holds the reins – demanding, not expecting, personalisation. In contrast, business entities encounter significant difficulty when attempting to provide such targeted and personalised services to their many clients.
The solution lies mostly in understanding individual customer interest and intent, engaging him/her and inviting them to follow a path of discovery that is relevant to what they are specifically looking for.
Marketing automation can help significantly with this process and can be used to acquire, convert, grow, retain or reactivate potential leads and customers. The process should ideally start through the collection and collation of information about customer behaviours across diverse sales channels, such as the web, email and social media, to create a unique, personalised experience across the various touch-points.
When attempting to invigorate marketing efforts, and consequently increase revenue, business organisations should:
1. ‘Know Your Customer’
It’s important that the organisation enriches each and every customer and contact detail regularly, updating all systems with the latest information regarding customer preferences, demographics and behaviours. Marketing automation can help to attain this by facilitating the ‘Know Your Customer’ process.
As an example, one could set up a basic email campaign to encourage and incentivise current and potential customers to update their records, leading to a pre-populated web form, enabling them to provide additional preference and demographic detail. It is also important to ensure that all forms customers fill in throughout their interactions with the organisation are integrated with the central database, so that one can rest assured that the information that is held about customers is always the latest.
2. Putting your prospects on auto-pilot through Nurture Programs
Nurture programs are an excellent channel through which to keep a message in front of prospects without committing valuable sales resources. Marketers can easily build nurture programs and sales people can easily nurture prospects who are not yet ‘sales ready’. A relevant stream of personalised and relevant messages will be sent and a variety of automated actions can be triggered as the prospects begin to respond.
For example, one could easily set up something similar to the nurture program below whereby a prospect is first sent an introductory email (Nurture Template). The system will wait for two days and then check whether the prospect has clicked any links on the email. If this has been done, the prospect will be assigned to an account manager and the owner of the account is notified. If the prospect has not clicked on any links in the introductory email, a different process is followed.
3. Welcome Programs
Nurture programs can also be tweaked to act as personalised and automated welcome programs; an excellent way to educate new customers about the organisation’s offering/s and to guide them during the first few weeks or months about the best way of making the most out of these products or services.
4. Obtaining customer feedback through surveys and questionnaires
Asking for regular reviews about products or services can provide an organisation with valuable feedback that can then be used to nurture prospects and encourage them to take the desired course of action. When a respondent completes a survey all the data the visitor submits this is linked to their main record, so you can ensure that you have a 360 degree view of a particular prospect or group of prospects.
The organisation also able to automate processes based on certain responses. For example, if a respondents is asked to rate a service on a scale of one to ten, an automated internal notification of any ratings below a certain threshold can be sent out to the account manager or any other interested party.
Conclusion
Marketing automation can significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing efforts. For more tips on marketing automation and how this can be implemented, please do get in touch – we’ll be more than happy to help!
