Marketing Automation Best Practices for Consumer Brands
In today’s world, marketing automation is essential to creating business efficiencies and relevant consumer experiences. As brands look to deliver personalized experiences to every customer, across every channel, such a task can be daunting from a time and money investment standpoint. However, according to Nucleus, 82% of marketers recognized a positive return on investment (ROI) and increased efficiency after adopting marketing automation.
Marketing automation allows brands to generate higher engagement and customer retention through real-time, one-to-one messages. These timely and relevant messages are deployed based on consumer actions or criteria along the customer journey, creating more value for consumers and builds upon their relationship with the brand. In order to experience the benefits of marketing automation, it is key to follow these best practices.
Understand Your Audience
Marketing automation opens the opportunity to communicate with consumers about their needs as they move through their journey with your brand. Your audience’s needs and expectations change throughout their journey, so your automated campaigns should reflect this evolution by providing consumers with the right content for the life cycle stage they are in. For example, new subscribers will need to build trust with your brand and benefit from receiving educational content rather than overly promotional messaging. Returning customers benefit from receiving content related to their latest purchase or to help them decide their next purchase, since they already have an established relationship with your brand.
Set Up Workflow Criteria & Scoring Models
Contact behavior and engagement is key to determining where customers are in the customer journey. Knowing and utilizing these behaviors removes the guesswork and will help you better target audiences with automated campaigns to effectively send relevant content. Create a plan for each workflow’s entry and exit criteria or usage of a scoring model, such as lead scoring. This will evaluate contacts to determine if they’re eligible to enter your automation or which path of your workflow to place them in, ultimately deciding if the content will resonate with the consumer to drive them to take the desired action. Within your workflow you can also assign points or criteria to contacts based on their actions, telling you which step in the customer journey will be most impactful for that individual. This could be moving contacts into a different automation campaign, handing over leads to the sales team for further nurturing, or passing data to another channel that will have higher engagement.
Utilize Personalization
Automation enables brands to create an experience and message relevant content informed by their consumers’ behavior and preferences. Behavioral and experimental insights can be used to engage customers at different points of the journey, utilizing data such as purchase history, digital engagement, demographic data, geographics and even in-store interactions. Leveraging data collected through various channels provides visibility into how to better address consumer needs and build segments and experiences for applying relevant personalization.
Create Multi-Channel Experiences
Through activating campaigns and messages in multiple channels, especially the preferred channel of individual consumers, brands create more touchpoints that strengthen their relationships and drive higher engagement and impact. It’s important to keep in mind the nature of your messages and consumer engagement within different channels, as certain channels may be more effective than others in delivering your content and driving consumer action. Each message should be curated specifically for each touchpoint and channel, organically moving the consumer along in their journey with the brand, often including increased personalization and relevance.
Implement Message Hierarchy
It’s extremely important for brands to understand the full consumer messaging journey. As contacts receive automated communications, they might also be receiving ad hoc promotional and other qualifying messages. Setting a message hierarchy helps brands from over-communicating and prioritize deploying the most relevant communications to drive forth the desired goal for each audience, whether it’s conversion, retention or win-back.
Test & Optimize Workflows
The key to automation is not having a “set and forget” mentality. Brands should create a plan based on business goals and engagement benchmarks. Then regularly review results to adjust their automated programs and improve strategy. This will result in continuously creating an improved experience for consumers as the industry and behaviors change, delivering timely and targeted information to increase conversion rates with consumers at every stage of the consumer journey.
Marketing automation develops relationships with consumers at every stage of the consumer journey, delivering timely and targeted information to retain customers and increase conversion rates. It gives you the opportunity to seamlessly tailor your content to individual consumers to address their specific needs, as well as deliver your messages through the most impactful channel. As brands plan automation workflows, it’s key to keep the targeted audience at the heart of all strategic decisions and look to create an experience informed by their behaviors and preferences. Delivering personalized real-time, one-to-one messages with audience engagement, delivery channel and full consumer journey in mind will ultimately lead to building stronger relationships with consumers and increased engagement.
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