Marketing Automation is an incredibly powerful way to manage modern marketing practices and engage with prospects and customers in a personalised manner.
Here are 10 epic things you can do with Marketing Automation. This isn’t an exhaustive list but will hopefully give you an idea of the great things you can achieve with it.
1. See how your visitors and prospects interact with your website and emails
With visitor and prospect tracking capabilities, you can monitor things like who’s visiting your website, where they came from, how long they’re spending on each page and what kind of content they’re viewing.
2. Nurture your leads with relevant content
Marketing automation platforms allow you to place your prospects that are not ready to buy into lead nurturing campaigns that send automated personalised emails. All links and calls-to-action in your emails are tracked, and your sales team can be notified as soon as a lead responds to your campaigns.
3. Score your leads to identify the best prospects for your business
Lead Scoring automatically assigns a score to leads based on their activity on your website and emails and who they are. You can increase or decrease lead scores based on defined behavioural and demographic parameters and perform a range of actions based on the scores. For instance, prospects that don’t pass a certain score threshold can be added into a lead nurturing campaign, and once these leads begin to respond to your nurturing efforts, and their scores increase, they can be automatically removed from the nurture campaign and assigned to sales reps for follow up.
4. Know if and when people download your marketing collateral
With a marketing automation platform, you can host your files and marketing collateral and track the downloads, allowing you to understand how your content is doing and see what resonates best with your prospects and customers.
5. Laser-focused segmentation
Need a list of people who have clicked your last 3 emails in the past 2 months? Or a list of leads who have viewed your pricing page multiple times? Online behaviours combined with other parameters produce laser-focused targeting and segmentation. These lists and segments update automatically based on the criteria specified and you can perform a whole range of marketing tasks, like sending an email, changing a field value, adding to a nurturing campaign, or changing a score.
6. Be alerted in real-time about prospects’ actions and behaviours
Marketing automation can send real-time alerts based on specific prospects’ actions, behaviours or demographic parameters defined by sales and marketing. For example, a pricing page visited X number of times by a lead can trigger an alert to the assigned sales person.
7. Gradually build a detailed profile of prospects and customers
Using a tool like progressive profiling allows you to shorten forms to just a few necessary fields. Once a lead has filled out one of your forms, they’ll be shown different fields on any additional forms they fill out, allowing you to build up a more complete profile over time.
8. Personalise website content for individual visitors
With marketing automation tools, you can display personalised content for each visitor to offer a unique, tailored experience. For example, you can dynamically show different text, images, calls-to-action buttons and offers based on a visitor’s location or buying stage.
9. Automatically assign leads to sales
Using workflows, you can automatically assign your leads to the appropriate salesperson based on criteria that you set, for example a lead’s location, product interest, or score.
10. Manage and clean up data
Marketing automation can automate part of your data management processes. For instance:
- Clean-up data: when data is not uniform (eg, USA, US, United States of America, United States), marketing automation platforms can clean up and normalise data. Common fields that can be automatically cleaned up include country, state, industry, annual revenue, lead source, job title.
- Blacklisting: if you want to exclude certain people from your communications, you can add them to a blacklist based on certain criteria . For example, excluding competitors based on email address domain or inferred data.
Marketing automation is a very powerful tool to deliver personalised customer experiences and manage marketing processes, from lead gen to segmentation, to nurturing, scoring and more .
What are your favourite marketing automation capabilities ? Are there any other things you’d add to this list?