When it comes to marketing automation, it can be difficult to know where to start. The thing about marketing and communication automation is that the possibilities are endless. You can use these automation platforms for external communication with potential leads, ongoing engagement with your existing clients, or even use it internally with your staff in order to keep processes streamlined.
Marketing automation is no longer just for lead nurturing campaigns and newsletters and is no longer limited to just email — although those are still very much valid. But, these platforms have the capacity to offer so much more to your organization, clients, and leads. So, if you're ready to get more out of your contact database and provide more to your contacts, it's important to identify what you hope to get out of using the platform. Having set goals will help focus your plan and help you hone in on what you can accomplish. That being said, there are a few campaigns that most, if not all, businesses and organizations can take advantage of to improve their overall marketing and communication strategies.
Welcome Campaigns
When a contact first signs up with you, whether it's for more information, a free trial, blog subscription, or whatever the case may be, it is important to have a personalized welcome message based on that topic. With marketing automation, you can essentially silo your welcome messages based on what you are welcoming the contact for.
For example, your blog welcome campaign may consist of a welcome email, another email a few days later with your top three most popular blogs, and then proceeds into your regular blog campaign where you send that week's blog posts. This would be totally separate from your other welcome campaigns.
New Customer Welcome Campaign
While on the topic of welcome campaigns, it is important to specifically note the all-essential new customer welcome campaign. While other welcome campaigns have their place in your marketing automation strategy, the place where the platform can really shine is its ability to offer new customers personalized information in order to really appeal to their interests, showing that your staff has taken the time to look into what the customer needs.
New Employee Welcome Campaign
Think of your employee onboarding process right now. How and when do new employees get their training materials? Are there some they should receive and review first? Believe it or not, marketing automation can aid in welcoming your new employees by automatically sending them the training materials they need in a timely manner and automatically checking in on them to make sure they don't need anything. If they do, your HR department is immediately notified automatically.
Engagement Campaigns
How many ways do you connect with your leads and customers right now? Are all of your messages consistent in timing, design, and tone? Marketing automation is the perfect avenue for streamlining these processes as you can set time delays, use the same template designs, and take the time to ensure the tone of your emails is consistent.
Engagement campaigns are very important when it comes to customer retention as they allow you to keep customers up to date with your company news, special offers, new tools coming down the pipeline, and any other information it is important for them to know.
Customer Engagement Campaign
It comes as no surprise that having a customer engagement campaign is beneficial to your organization. But, when it comes to engaging with active customers, you can provide them with campaigns to keep them informed of the points mentioned above, and you can also take this one step further with marketing automation.
If you're tracking customer success metrics, you are in an interesting position to trigger customer engagement campaigns based on how active and engaged your customer is. Do you have a client that uses your product or service well and is a promoter? You can trigger campaigns asking them to be part of a case study. Alternatively, if a customer isn't taking full advantage of your product/service, you can automatically send them messages to help them learn more and train them in the use of your offering.
Re-Engagement Campaign
So, we've discussed the options for active users/customers, but what about inactive users? Without a marketing automation campaign for this instance, a lot of inactive users just fall off, never to be heard of again.
Instead of losing these contacts, can you imagine the value-add to your company to be able to win them back and convert them into customers? With a re-engagement campaign, you can reach out to contacts who haven't engaged with you for a set period of time and try to win them back with an exclusive offer or promotion.
Internal Process Campaigns
Your staff is busy. And, when they're too busy, things get missed. Maybe a salesperson forgets to follow-up with a lead, or someone misses a shift. Unload some of the manual work and help your staff be more organized and efficient with marketing automation campaigns. That's the great thing about diverse marketing automation platforms; they allow for all sorts of communication automation, which may not be related to marketing at all.
Follow-up Notification Campaign
Although automation can help you provide immediate information to leads and clients pertaining to their interests with your organization, sometimes there is just no replacement for the human touch. Having reps follow up with contacts at certain points in the customer life cycle is still a very important aspect of business and should not be neglected.
In parts of your automation campaigns, you can pause the campaign, have a rep reach out personally, and then resume the automated portion of the campaign. These notifications ensure staff do not forget about follow-ups and allows you to include personal touches in your automated campaigns.
Shift Reminder Campaign
When you're working a 9-5 job, it's pretty hard to forget when your shift starts. But, for jobs that require different starting times each day, automatic shift reminders help ensure staff know exactly when their shifts are and helps curb people coming in late or missing shifts altogether. Automating this process means that managers don't need to call staff when they are running late and don't need to worry about anyone missing shifts.
Staff Happiness Campaign
Do you know right now how happy all of your staff are at work? Employee happiness is very important for retaining employees and ensuring that they don't pursue other positions because they are unhappy. Going around to every employee individually is a time-consuming task, and some employees may not feel comfortable answering questions one-on-one. An automated staff happiness campaign allows you to gather anonymous feedback and gives staff a place to voice concerns. Simply send around a survey that collects information from employees and provides all of the information to you in an easy-to-read report.
There are just a few of the many campaigns you can implement with the help of marketing automation. If you'd like to see how these campaigns can help your business, sign up for a 14-day free trial of SimplyCast 360.
