This marketing automation guest post on Savvy-Writer is provided by Radhika Mohan Singh Roy, Marketing Manager, at EngageBay.
Automation has helped marketing advance in leaps and bounds, optimizing how we strategize and approach our customers. At every point in the process, automation makes its effects distinct.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is software that helps automate monotonous, mechanical tasks, leaving you free to devote time to engage in more creative and critical thinking processes.
Image courtesy EngageBay
It spans across social media, email communication, and making purchase decisions, thus bridging the gap between marketing and sales teams. These processes make it easier to grow an online business while maintaining reliability and efficiency. The longer you use marketing automation, the stronger its effects become.
Several providers now offer automation software along with their marketing and CRM tools in a package, making integration smooth and affordable. However, not all of us know how to use them best.
Read on to see how many different areas marketing automation can help you and improve your user experience.
Recommend Products and Content
Enterprises like Amazon and Netflix are popular because their user experience is highly personalized. You must have noticed this if you browse through their products and services and are recommended things that you may enjoy.
They use Recommendation Engines (REs) to do this. REs combine data to deliver personalized content to users. About 70% of users return to your store if you can show you know them well.
Image courtesy of Medium
Using marketing automation to achieve this improves customer experience, which leads to better CTR, higher conversion rates and revenues. REs can also recommend similar content to users, which urges them to browse the site longer and make purchases.
Send Personalized Emails
Email marketing is tricky because recipients judge the quality of emails based on their subject line and sender only. Using marketing automation, you can segment your customer base to make your content more relevant and exciting.
Doing this is not instantaneous. Instead, it comes from breaking through psychological barriers and being able to connect on a personal level. Automation helps deliver this content without making it feel robotic.
Image courtesy Sana Commerce
Some easy ways to personalize emails is by addressing recipients by their name in the subject or opening line. Then, subtle details like their subscription dates, locations and weather, ethnic identity, age and gender can be integrated into the body text to make them feel valued.
Send Triggered Emails
Beyond personalization, customers respond well to emails based on their journey through your website. These are gentle reminders of what a user has been doing on your website. In addition to making them feel valued, this helps them feel secure through regular updates on account changes.
Image courtesy EmailMonks
Triggered emails can also be reminders of inactivity on your website, or act as conversation enders after customer service calls. These elevate user experience and increase engagement.
Some commonly triggered emails are:
Personal Reminders
These are customized based on user data. For example, delays or early-service notifications on their purchases, birthdays and anniversary wishes and personalized discounts on special occasions can mean a lot to customers.
Abandoned Cart Reminders
Often, customers add things to their cart and forget about them altogether. Sending them follow-up emails about these items encourages them to complete the purchase. You can also set this up to remind them of discount deadlines, low stock alerts or alternative product recommendations.
Image courtesy MailBakery
Transactional Emails
Although physical stores are fast being out competed by those online, people like the user experience there. When you make purchases at a store, you are given a receipt to take back. While you cannot possibly post receipts to all your customers, you can send them instant emails about their purchases.
Image courtesy Mailjet
These receipts act as proof of purchase, but you can customize them to go beyond that and offer discounts, memberships and reminders based on your customer profile.
Milestone Emails
If you have customers who have been loyal to your brand, show them your appreciation! They are more likely to keep purchasing from you if you display how much you value them.
Image courtesy Vero
These milestone emails celebrate their relationship with you, through special events, discounts or memberships. Strengthening your customer relationship makes it likelier for them to stay loyal.
Make The Most Of Problems
Problems are product gaps that cause new customers to be attracted by your business. Customers are seeking to fix these by making purchases through your website, giving you insight into what they are looking for and tailoring your recommendations and services accordingly.
New customers who stumble upon your website and stay long are already interested in you. Convert them to sales by pitching them problem discovery or early-stage funnel content.
Further, you can email them product information through website activity tracking. Marketing automation does this through lead nurturing, which delivers relevant and adequate content to your customer base.
Solve Complaints Through Chatbots And Live Chat Sessions
Many customers who come to your website have the same initial queries. Employing a sales representative to deal with them personally is wasteful. Marketing automation toolkits contain chatbots, which are powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Image courtesy Chatbots Magazine
They learn about customers and respond based on rules you have set for them. Chatbots welcome customers to your website and help them through their journey. All you must do is set them up and pre-feed them responses.
Chatbots are particularly helpful in the early stages and during after-office hours when live chat sales personnel are unavailable.
However, the best strategy is to use a combination of a chatbot that can answer basic queries and a sales rep who can answer more complicated questions. This makes the user experience much more human.
Marketing Automation Summary
Marketing automation is a tool that can help transform your business and improve the user experience dramatically. All through the marketing funnel, marketing automation sifts clean leads, nurtures customer relationships and coaxes customers into making purchases.
Through personalized recommendations, triggered emails and chatbot functionality, your online business needs marketing automation to prosper fast. If you haven’t already implemented it, why not start now? Sign up for a free account at EngageBay and take their software for a test drive to boost sales today!
Author Bio:
Radhika Mohan Singh Roy is the Marketing Manager at EngageBay. He has earlier been a senior marketer with Agile CRM, the manager for communities & social media at Simplilearn. He has previously also worked with Google, Apple Computers and Bank of America. He is a Masters’ degree holder in English and a certified Six Sigma Green Belt.
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