Marketing automation: toward a winning strategy
Marketing automation is changing all the old methods of advertising and contacting prospects by relying on smart, reliable and efficient systems. Connected to a trusted CRM, marketing automation lets you track the behaviour of each visitor to your website and of each customer individually. This paves the way for classifying your clientele according to different criteria, always with the goal of building campaigns specially tailored to each group’s characteristics.
So-called “mass” marketing actions, such as radio, TV or newspaper ads, are aimed at all consumers without any specific distinction. Marketing automation, on the other hand, falls within relationship marketing, since it lets you target your audience according to specific characteristics. The campaigns it enables therefore vary and are specially tailored to each person’s behaviour and profile.
Combine a marketing automation system with your CRM and you’ll get crucial information to help you understand who you’re dealing with behind each click by a visitor or customer. You’ll then be able to identify their expectations and send them personalized content.
Marketing automation: using it effectively
Through marketing automation, you’ll develop better-targeted campaigns that will help you get a better return on investment. To get there, here are the steps to follow:
- Using the information collected through your CRM, you should segment your audience in order to create offers and promotions that target each category separately. To do this, segment your audience by region, preferences, level of engagement with your services, etc.;
- Converting your website visitors into leads is essential to the success of your marketing operations. Anonymous visitors are hard to target, but if you manage to get a visitor to leave their contact information, you can more easily convert them into a prospect by sending them personalized information;
- Once a visitor has been converted into a lead, you then need to do what’s called lead nurturing. This involves nurturing your new relationship by presenting the information about your business, products and services that you consider relevant to their profile. The goal is to stay in touch with this potential customer;
- Using lead scoring, you can sort leads according to their interest in your business and your offers. This should allow you to focus your efforts on the most interested ones and mobilize your sales team to get them to take action;
- Marketing automation lets you create sales pipelines in which to sort your prospects in real time. This will help you set sales stages, follow up, re-engage prospects and prepare your business’s financial forecasts;
In short, marketing automation lets you determine the right processes for converting your site’s visitors into actual customers and keeping them loyal. It lets you determine the best conversion channel to use based on the different profiles represented in the lead data you’ve collected.
Count on marketing automation to make your business’s online marketing pay off!
