5 Examples of Great Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a software solution which allows you to create highly personalised content that helps nurture leads and generate sales for the long term.

With marketing automation you can automate repetitive marketing tasks and processes so you can focus on growing your business.

Why You Can’t Ignore Marketing Automation for Growing Your Business.

According to a benchmark study by eMarketer, B2C marketers who use any form of marketing automation have seen conversion rates as high as 50%. This includes everything from sales emails to educational autoresponders and cart abandonment programs.

Marketing automation doesn’t just improve your sales pipeline. It also boosts employee productivity.

Latest data from Nuclear Research has shown that staff productivity increases between 1.5-7% when using marketing automation and 95% of companies have reported some benefit from marketing automation.

Marketo have also demonstrated huge advantages for marketing automation users, compared to that of non-users.

They’ve found that companies who use marketing automation, spend more of their sales time selling rather than prospecting, and are far more likely to reach their yearly revenue goals (84%).

So, now you know the benefits of marketing automation and the impact it can have on your business.

But how can you implement it to fit in your organisation without breaking what you’ve already spent time and money to build?

Simple Marketing Automation Examples

Here are 2 simple marketing automation examples you can implement today, without having to invest thousands of pounds on new software and training.

1. Lead-Nurturing Auto-responder

The lead-nurturing auto-responder is a series of on-boarding emails used to educate your leads about your business, products or services, and how you can help solve their problems.

When a visitor signs up to your website or service, it’s because she/he likes something about your business or what you’re offering.

Whether you’re giving away a free report, a 30-minute consultation, a course or a free-trial to use your product; they found it enticing enough to share their email address with you so you can communicate further with them.

After all, the goal of your give-away and auto-responder series is to help familiarise your leads with your business in a way that makes them trust you. A lead is more likely to buy from someone they know, like and trust as opposed to a complete stranger.

For example, at Grow we offer marketing consultancy to small-medium sized businesses looking to increase their revenue and profits. In order to capture the right prospects, we offer a free eBook that highlights the biggest marketing mistakes they’re making in their business and how to fix them.

Our offer, the eBook, is used to entice website visitors. Whilst the on-boarding emails are used to build trust with your prospects, so they’re more likely to buy from you.

Using the same example, your lead-nurturing auto-responder may consist of 10 obstacles which prevent their business from growing to the next level.

Each email is designed to tackle one obstacle and is sent out using email marketing automation software or CRM like MailChimp as illustrated below.

Day 1: Welcome Email + Download

Day 2: Marketing Obstacle #1: How To Overcome Redundancy by Company Downsizing

Day 3: Marketing Obstacle #2: You’ve Been Demoted

Day 4: Marketing Obstacle #3: How to use digital marketing to grow your business [Workshop]

You can tailor how often these emails are sent out, and get even more creative by sending emails based on events.

For example, imagine you asked your prospects what their biggest marketing obstacle is in your welcome email.

You gave them a survey with a list of the biggest marketing obstacles and waited a couple weeks to get your results.

You could use marketing automation to send specific emails to the following:

Using marketing automation in this way allows you to segment your database and find out the real pressure points which prevent your prospects from sleeping at night.

Be sure not to spam your leads with continuous marketing/educational messages every day, unless you specified so upon sign up.

This will only frustrate prospective customers leaving you with a list of apathetic people who will be frantically searching for that unsubscribe link so you can stop bothering them.

The success of this strategy isn’t just determined by what you say in your emails, but also how you deliver your emails.

We’ve combined these 13 tips to ensure your email marketing automation efforts are not falling on deaf ears due to novice mistakes.

2. Behaviour-Driven Automation

Groove is a customer service help-desk company. They nurture their leads by sending a series of customer on-boarding emails teaching their trial users how to get the most out of their product.

As an SaaS (software-as-a-service) company, they are aware that the more competent their users are at using their product, the more paid subscriptions they’re going to convert once the trial period finishes.

They sent behaviour-driven emails to users who were struggling to complete specific tasks. If a user took too long to complete a task, an automated email would be sent asking them if they needed any extra assistance.

Image Source: http://groovehq.com

This resulted in a 10% response rate, with 30% of those users still remaining customers after the initial 30-day period.

Figuring out which areas of your product or service keeps your customers at bay is a sure-fire way to identify bottlenecks in your business and increase your revenue.

Look closely at your analytics and pay attention to the metrics which look unfamiliar. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, a simple email like the one above could help your users get over this hurdle whilst promoting a positive user experience.

The key to success with marketing automation is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

This is why we stress the importance of building buyer personas for your business.

You must understand who your customers are, what their problems are and why you’re the best solution out there for them.

Until you know that, using marketing automation is like driving a Ferrari Enzo in a 30mph speed limit zone. It will only hold you and your business back if you have no idea how to use it.

Marketing Automation and Adaptive Content: The Ultimate Tag-Team Champion

Marketing automation is about delivering a message to users based on who they are – location and behaviour.

Adaptive content is about delivering unique content to users based on what they are – free users, paid users, first-time website visitors.

Combining marketing automation with adaptive content will leave your competitors in the dust as you are creating a unique web experience to those who fit your segment.

Here are 2 real-life examples of how marketing automation and adaptive content come together to nurture leads and generate long term sales.

1. Buffer’s Method for Testing New Features

Social media sharing and scheduling app Buffer use marketing automation and adaptive content to beta-test new features of their Pablo app.

A) They identify their most recently active Pablo users and send an email asking if they would be interested in talking about their experience with the app and which problems they’ve encountered whilst using the tool.

B) During the chat, they enable new, yet-to-be-released features exclusively on the users’ account and ask them to check them out and provide feedback.

e.g.  Pablo’s new image search functionality was first given to select Pablo users before releasing it to the public.

By providing live solutions to long-term problems and rewarding their most prized customers for their time, they can easily reduce churn rates whilst increasing customer satisfaction.

2. Unique Blog Call-to-Actions

Another strategy you can use to gain huge wins is to tailor your website’s copy and key call-to-actions based on which type of user is visiting your website.

The Balanced Life Academy does an excellent job of this by showing different calls-to-actions to first-time visitors, free-registered users and paid users.

 A) First-Time Visitors

Once you’ve read one of their articles, you will be presented with the standard benefits driven sign-up box, encouraging you to register.

This is one of the most common lead generation elements most websites use today.

Image Source: http://balancedlifeacademy.com

Upon registration you would use lead nurturing marketing automation to build a relationship and nurture your leads.

In each email, they direct their leads back to their website so they can learn more about the company and how they can help them solve their problems.

B) Free-Registered Users

Here’s where things get fancy.

When free users (logged in members) click-through to their website to consume more content, they are presented with a new call-to-action box that is displayed exclusively to them.

This is a clever way to up-sell your paid products and membership programmes to your free users without even having to use a sales email.

You can take this even further by surrounding your paid content around your free content.

According to some studies, your prospect needs to be exposed to your product, ad or service about 5-7 times before they’re willing to commit.

However, take the above statistic with a pinch of salt.

By repeatedly showing your customers what they’ll get without doing so explicitly, they will already have enough knowledge about your product or service to make an informed, educated decision when you do send them your sales email.

Conclusion

The key takeaway here is to create a unique web experience for your users so that they’re more likely to convert.

The most important lesson you must remember is to never make assumptions. You are not your customer.

When in doubt, test.

When you are certain, test again.

You will thank yourself for it.

Many businesses are gunned down by their competitors simply because they make assumptions about their customers, their product and their website.

Use the marketing automation strategies above to level the playing field and start generating leads and sales for the long term.

Which marketing automation strategies have you found work wonders in your business?

Let us know in the comments below.