1. Use dynamic content to engage your customers
To get the best result out of any automated marketing tool, you must have dynamic content. Dynamic content is what drives your interaction with leads. Having no content or sending the wrong content to your lead could result in a loss of a potential customer.
What is dynamic content?
Here’s how HubSpot defined it:
“Also referred to as "dynamic" or "adaptive" content, smart content is a term for the aspects of a website, ad, or email body that change based on the interests or past behavior of the viewer. It creates an experience that's customized specifically for the visitor or reader at that moment.”
And one way to understand user’s and customer’s past behavior and interests is to embrace content marketing fully and start building trust with your customers.
According to DemandGen Report, 47% of buyers viewed and engaged with 3-5 pieces of content before interacting with a sales agent. This is why you should not only create content but great and credible content. No wonder 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders.
To give your automated marketing efforts the best chance of success, you must have the right content that aligns with customer’s past behaviors and satisfies their interest.
If you gather enough data about your leads, it’s a lot easier to convince and engage them with your content.
For example, by collecting and analyzing data from their marketing automation software, Cincom, an enterprise software solutions company implemented a behavior-based content campaign. This led to an increased click-to-open rate of 1,941%. The company also generated an average of 18 new sales leads every week.
Not all content types are created equal. Blog posts and articles, for examples, are good at the top of the funnel, but when customers are considering buying your product, you need visual content (e.g., videos, slide presentations, product demo).
In some cases, let's say you're an e-commerce business selling a product, visual content like pictures of the product and videos of other customers using it could go a long way in convincing your potential customers.
2. Set up a Drip Campaign
Having a Drip campaign for your automated marketing efforts is marketing at its finest. Why? Because it is all about your customers. Here’s an example of a 3-stage drip campaign from Yesware:
A drip campaign is an automation that takes action based on the customer’s online behavior.
For instance, when a lead signs up for your emails, a welcome message is sent to them. What if they visit your product’s sales page? You send more content about the product along with promotional offers.
Instead of blasting a single message to all your email subscribers, for example, which is really ineffective, you should tailor your content to each lead based on their behaviors. Because Drip campaigns are all about what the customers want, it’s a win-win for your company and the customer in question.
Messages sent through Drip campaigns have about 80% higher open rates and 3X click-through rates than a message that’s blasted to everyone at the same time. 79% of marketing qualified leads never convert because they aren't nurtured using drips. Furthermore, companies that are great at drip campaigns generate 80% more sales at 33% lower cost.
A Drip campaign is so effective because you can nurture relationships with your leads without direct human involvement. You can also build credibility and trust over time with such leads.
KANA Software increased their average CTR by 3X, compared to their normal blasted emails. Submission rate on their CPC landing pages also increased from 2.63% to 34.19%. Their website visitors from drip campaigns spent an average of 3:02 minutes compared to 1:56 minutes — the average time spent by visitors from non-dripped emails.
3. Automate team collaborations in real-time
One of the biggest problems that can occur in a workplace is a communication gap. Even before you gain customers, many departments are unable to get information across to other departments without hitches. This problem could even be more pronounced when you have customers.
In a Salesforce survey of more than 1400 corporate executives, employees, and educators, 86% of the participants believed that lack of collaboration was responsible for workplace failures.
Different departments have different data about a particular customer. Sometimes the data available to the accounting department could be important to the marketing department. This communication gap reduces the quality of communication of each department with customers or leads.
Today, with the use of automated marketing software, you can make all the information about a customer available to every department. This makes it easier for every department and teams to interact with the customer.
This makes information about every progress made on a lead available to all departments. Because any update about a lead is available, through the marketing automation software, to all the departments in the company.
4. Setup nurture campaigns in your funnel
Not every visitor to your website is ready to buy your product. At least, not just yet. But most of them are potential buyers. Whatever strategy you implement will determine whether the lead will become wasted or a regular paying customer.
For leads who are not yet ready to buy your products, you have to nurture them. How do you nurture them? Through dynamic content that is tailored to the specific needs of each lead. Forrester research shows that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at 33% lower cost.
When a lead subscribes to your email, you send them a welcoming email. From this stage, however, most of your leads take different paths depending on their online behaviors. Whatever path they take, you can use your content to nurture them until they make a purchase.
A new lead is usually at the awareness stage. Through nurture campaigns, you move your leads from the awareness to the consideration and to the decision stage. You turn them from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL).
For instance, if a lead visits your winter cloth section on your e-commerce website, this is a clue to send them content related to winter clothing. What are the negative effects of excessive cold? Why should you buy adequate clothes for winter? And so on.
All of these can be achieved easily because your marketing automation software provides all the data that you need. With tools like Salesforce, Infusionsoft or AgileCRM, you can segment each lead automatically and nurture them accordingly. Through nurturing, Marketo had a 30% improvement in quality leads.
5. Use email sequence to follow up prospects who fill out a lead form
For a potential customer (i.e., a lead) who has filled your form, what is your plan to follow up such a lead? With an automated marketing tool, you can prepare a list of ‘welcoming’ emails you can schedule and send to them.
You can prepare more than a sequence which will be applied to different leads through a change in their behavior.
This email sequence is the series of emails that are sent to leads to convert them into paying customers. Did you know that for every $1 spent on email, you can generate up to $38 in ROI?
This is why it is important to prepare an email sequence that will turn your leads into paying customers.
6. Leverage marketing automation in list segmentation
There is a lot of information you can obtain from your leads. When you’re armed with this information, you can group your leads into different segments. Making a list segmentation can be done manually but this takes a lot more time and can be prone to human errors.
With marketing automation, though, you can segment your list from your settings. Customers or leads can be segmented based on different criteria like their demographic information, geographical information, past buying behavior, engagement level, etc. You can get as creative as possible with segmentation depending on the metrics that are important to you.
With email marketing tools like AgileCRM or Active Campaign, you can achieve list segmentation easily and determine the content to send to each list.
By developing an effective email marketing automation, QIS Packaging, a company that sells paper bags and packaging increased its ROI by 830% and sales conversion rate grew by 13%.
List segmentation also helped PaperStyle.com, a stationery specialist company, to increase email open rate by 244% and a 330% increase in revenue per mailing and here’s an example of a drip campaign.
7. Study and hack Top Performers in your market
In every industry, there are top performers and leaders. And there are many reasons why they are leaders: They are able to exploit new technologies effectively. There are high performers in online marketing — and they probably use marketing automation.
For you to implement the most robust marketing automation strategies, you have to study the high performers.
How do they approach marketing automation? How often do they send emails to their leads? How do they structure their content? What type of content do they send to their prospects?
Another option could be to pay these performers to teach you how to exploit the best of marketing automation as you may be unable to get some important information by studying them alone.
Conclusion
Marketing automation has endless possibilities. The truth is that some companies will get more out of it than others.
The number of potential benefits you can reap from marketing automation will depend on how robust your marketing automation strategies are.
As you embrace and implement these 7 strategies, you’ll be able to multiply your conversion rate with marketing automation.
