Marketing Automation Strategy for Dummies

Marketers know automation is important and plan to spend more money on it very soon, but they don’t know how to create a strategy around it. Developing an automation strategy isn’t easy, but it is worthwhile. By asking yourself the right questions about who you want to reach and what you want to provide before, during, and after the decision-making process, you can get a strategy in place that will put those expensive automation platforms to work and start making a dent in your ROI.

Meanwhile, 58% of marketers polled said that they were having trouble finding success with marketing automation tools due to “lack of an effective strategy.” Forrester’s first marketing automation forecast predicts that spend on automation technology will grow from $11.4 billion USD to $25.1 billion USD by the year 2023, saying marketers are still “in the early innings” of adopting the practice:

Marketing automation really shines when it’s used to:

• Deliver messages to website visitors, leads, or customers at critical points before, during, or after the purchasing process.
• Provide crucial information to these same individuals.
• Automate check-ins, follow-ups, or reminders you might otherwise have to delegate to customer service or sales teams.

A survey by Liana Technologies showed that most marketing professionals recognize the top benefits of automation as exactly this: improving message targeting, making the experience better, and bringing in more qualified leads.

In short, marketing automation is best used as a way to deliver the right messages to the right people before, during, and after they’ve converted into a customer. And it’s this idea that you should keep in mind while deciding what to automate.

What’s most realistic to automate

There are some marketing tasks that absolutely make sense to automate. Most marketers start with simple pre-sales or post-sales emails. You’ve probably received hundreds of these — messages like “get 20% off by buying now,” “you left something in your cart,” or “review our service and share it with your friends.”

The logic on these emails can be created quickly. They can also be ridiculously successful with the right subject lines, offers, and timing. It’s no wonder they’re so popular. But you can also use email automation to add a lot more value to the overall experience your customers have with your product or service, not just to ask them for something. This may come by way of sending reminders, post-purchase education, or simple “happy birthday” messages.

Beyond email, you should think about automation for anything your business uses to interact with customers in a highly repeatable manner. For your business, that might be direct mail coupons sent after someone buys a specific product they’re likely to want again. Or maybe it’s an automated telephone call reminding them to vote for your candidate in an upcoming election. Maybe it’s more advanced scoring of leads, and passing that information to a member of the sales team so they can follow up. Basically, if it’s predictable and repeatable, marketing automation can handle it.

What requires a human touch

On the other hand, if it’s not predictable — like a human being — or repeatable — like interactions with human beings — don’t automate it. For example: if you manufacture cell phone accessories and use your Twitter account for customer service, an automated response to every mention of “thanks for your tweet, we’ll reply soon!” would work up until the moment someone claims their device caught fire.

When you’re creating your strategy, you should think about automating touch points with your customers that will, first and foremost, increase the value you provide as a business. Yes, automation should also save you time (and it will), but don’t automate something just because it’s time-consuming. That’s the fastest way to apologizing for a job well done:

Another consideration: with the added rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you can potentially get your business into hot water by sending unexpected — and let’s face it, unwanted — sales messages to visitors who have never contacted you or explicitly opted in to communication.

So be careful about scoring and contacting leads who haven’t ticked a “I’m interested in hearing from you” box. They may show promise, but citizens of the EU now have to give explicit consent to allow such communication.

Developing a cohesive strategy: think about opportunities before, during, and after conversion

A good way to make the development of a cohesive marketing automation strategy more approachable is to break it down into three groups:

• Automation sent to potential leads or customers pre-conversion to make them aware of your products or service, convince them to follow you, and eventually convert;
• Automation sent to leads and customers actively engaged in the decision-making process to convince them to finalize their conversion to a customer; and
• Automation sent post-conversion to check in on the experience, offer guidance, provide links to information, or encourage repeat purchases.

#1 Capturing the attention of potential leads or customers

Before a conversion takes place, automation can be used in a few ways to make potential leads or purchasers aware of who you are, what you’re offering, and why you’re better than the competition. Although automation may not seem as useful at this early stage compared to its place during the actual decision-making process (which is where abandoned cart emails, one common form, show up), there are still plenty of time-saving opportunities here to explore.

Early on in the decision-making process, potential customers want to learn more about you. Similarly, you want to know more about them… and probably want to find some ways to get their email address such as using an email address finder so you can take the conversation past your landing page or blog post. It’s important to offer potential leads to some highly desired content — e.g. a demo of their marketing software — in exchange for contact information. Visitors to their demo page can choose from three options, including a pre-recorded demo:

If the visitor chooses the “Online demo” option, they’re asked to fill out a form with their contact information first.

After the form is completed and the demo begins, the visitor is sent the first email in a series of automated messages. You can send a piece of downloadable content in this first email… then following up with a message from a sales representative within five minutes.

The biggest win for a potential lead is the ability to view a demo on their on time, at their own pace, by choosing the online option. But for this company, they win by automating follow-ups to the demo. This way, it doesn’t matter when someone is learning about their service — they can stay in touch with them at any time, and immediately put messages in their inbox that keep the lead engaged and interested in finding out more from a sales rep.

Social media automation can be helpful some tools can help you flag groups of people talking about a specific subject related to your business — for example, a product that’s highly desired, or a service you offer that folks may not even know exists. Respond to social users seeking an item or service you provide could be an opportunity also for B2B. You can save time by crafting a message that encourages everyone talking about a relevant subject to take action. For example, you can collect the Twitter handles of everyone who tweeted about a specific feature being unavailable. Then, when the feature returned, they used automation to send a message about its availability to the users. In this case, the users likely had some level of awareness of service or the feature that was unavailable. But it would be very easy to monitor for users saying “I wish I had x” or “why can’t I find y” and automating responses directing them to what you offer. As a general note, it would probably be more desirable to send individual messages (one message per user) instead of batches (one message per multiple users) as shown here. That way your customers won’t feel like they’re on the receiving end of communication from a robot. For those instances where dozens or even hundreds of people are asking the same question about the same subject, you can respond quickly with the right tool and a carefully crafted message. But tread carefully, and when in doubt about looking like a human, ask an expert for advice.

#2 Turning captivation into a conversion

There is really no better audience than a captive one. Especially in this new era of GDPR. If you’ve already done the legwork to educate a visitor about your company, automation can now play a pivotal role in convincing them to convert. It’s at this stage that you’ll see common options like cart abandonment emails… but there are also a few new ideas you may want to explore. Use well-timed email automation to send enticing offers is a basic role in Marketing Automation. If someone opts in to your email list because they’re legitimately interested, these are the first people you should be sending automated campaigns to. If you’re not already sending messages to people who have explicitly said “I like you and what you do and I want to hear from you,” that is a gap you should be filing with automation.

If you have qualified leads, automation like this can help you close the sale. Discount or other increasingly better offers are hard to ignore, especially if a lead is already interested in making a purchase, which is why this campaign works so well. Bring shoppers with abandoned carts back to finish their purchase is another important role in Marketing Automation.  Shopping carts are abandoned for lots of reasons. Among the top reasons are unexpected shipping cost, or the shopper simply conducting research to find the best product for the best price. If you’re willing to do something to combat these causes of abandonment, like offering a coupon code, automation can help you reach these potential customers quickly, and potentially bring back a substantial amount of revenue you might have otherwise lost. The automation can include an email reminding the potential customer that they left something in their cart, and then sends messages offering a percentage off their purchase as an incentive to finish the transaction.

#3 Adding value — and encouraging repeat visits — post-conversion

There’s a lot to be said about automating messages after the sale. Post-purchase automation may not seem as worthwhile because, well, you already have their money. But automation can be incredibly useful here. Keep customers on track can reduce the strain on support. For example, sending automatic reminders to renew or update the software license. If you have a product or service that requires periodic updates this automation is very useful. Think about sending messages reminding folks when it’s time to make an appointment, buy new filters, replace parts, or extend a warranty. And if you offer any sort of timed reminders, giving the customer the power to delay or reschedule those reminders can keep them dedicated to you, no matter what their schedule currently looks like.

If you’re producing content for your site — documentation, guides, blog posts, videos, etc. — sending it to your customers after they convert can reduce stress while helping them make the most of their new purchase without any additional work needed on your part. One simple example of this comes from Google, and how they automate messaging after the purchase of a Google Home product. They send emails from “Your Google Assistant” or “Google Home Mini,” as if the product itself is literally following up with you. Each email contains some quick tips to help you get more use out of the item as you become more familiar with it:

These “pro tips” aren’t just entertaining — they’re actually useful. They can help customers avoid feeling like they wasted money on a product that is too complex for them, or (depending on the item in question) too limited. Any sort of product or service that requires education to use properly could benefit from automation like this. If you already have a lot of content prepared, make use of it!

Finally, don’t forget about requests for feedback. They’re easy to automate, they get much needed social proof on your site, and they can also remind customers to contact you about a nagging issue they might have. One practical example: after a user has been signed up for a specific period of time, send them an NPS survey. If they give you a high score (an 8 or above), you can then automate another email asking for a review, because you know they’re most likely to give you positive social proof. However, you may want to treat lightly with automated requests for feedback or reviews. If a customer returns something or has a complaint, you need to have a system in place to take them off a “how did we do?” automation. Don’t be tone-deaf. Asking reviews from folks who gave you 8 or more for NPS is a good way to do that.

Obviously, a large part of creating your strategy is going to involve deciding who you want to reach, when to send your messages, and how. But the remaining parts, which are just as important as deciding what to automate in the first place, involve tracking your results and performing A/B tests. Tracking your results and testing for improvement is essential.

Long-term, you should be keeping an eye on how your automations are performing and actively planning ways to potentially improve them. Let’s first review what you should be doing as far as tracking and analytics are concerned. The automation platform(s) you use will obviously have some analytics or performance tracking built in, but don’t just look at your reports and get mislead by positive numbers. When you review the performance of your automations, ask yourself these questions about each one:

• Are leads or customers engaging with your messages? What’s being opened? What’s being acted on? Are the calls to action actually being acted on?
• Are messages being delivered at the right time? If you’re sending reminders, are they being delivered in enough time to be acted on? Is your post-purchase education arriving early enough to prevent messages to customer service?
• What’s working well? Is directing users to your content increasing sales or decreasing your refund rate? Use successful automation as a model for future tests and campaigns.
• What’s not working? Has anyone complained about a message’s timing? Are unsubscribe rates on the rise? Is your support team now doing more work instead of less? Dig in deep and look for opportunities to improve.

Again, these are questions you should ask yourself about every automation you start running. Don’t be misguided by a flood of new clicks or revenue that wasn’t there before — there are always opportunities to improve. Once you’ve identified a potential opportunity — a lackluster response rate, an issue for your support team — the best approach you can take is A/B testing a new version against the original.

As you would with any other A/B test, for each automation, you should be asking yourself:

• Will this test be measurable? You should be testing changes that result in hard data (CTR, sales, response etc).
• Will this test include big enough changes? Changing a single sentence in the middle of your email copy wouldn’t likely be significant. Changing the timing of a text message or a subject line, however, would potentially have a big impact on the results.
• Do you have a specific goal? Perhaps the worst thing you can do is start an A/B test intending to see “better results.” What should be better? Pick something specific and optimize around it — for example, if you want a higher open rate, focus on testing the subject line, timing, or segmentation.
• How long will you wait to review and act on the results? You don’t want to act too quickly, but you also don’t want to let the test drag out for weeks — especially if there’s any risk of the test reducing clicks or conversions. Plan on at least an initial review, and ideally schedule some follow-ups prior to the time or point (like number of sends/opens) at which you’ll call it good.
• Who’s going to be in charge of implementing the changes, if any need to be made? Don’t make the mistake of running tons of tests without planning for implementation. If you identify a huge opportunity but your developer has a month’s backlog in front of them, that’s an issue. Loop everyone in beforehand and consider scheduling implementation in advance if you’re really busy.

You will probably never finish optimising your automations, and that’s okay. The goal isn’t to create campaigns that are “successful enough” or “save a little time.” Accept the fact that even automated messaging takes hard work and multiple iterations, and you’ll start to see every weak text message campaign or low-results email as an opportunity.

There are four key questions you can ask yourself right now to decide what and how much to automate. They are:

• How could I better supplement my sales funnel? Are you collecting emails from your blog but not doing anything with them? Having customers opt-in for texts but not following up? These are the opportunities you need to jump on — and automate.
• How could I be supporting my customers and team? This might be by directing customers to educational material after they’ve made a purchase or checking in with them after they’ve had a product for a little while. This might also involve sending reminders to patients or follow-ups to leads so your support team or sales reps aren’t overwhelmed.
• What don’t I want to automate? Any channels where you may communicate directly with customers should be handled with care. Tread lightly with those Twitter auto-DMs and Facebook chatbots, folks.
• How am I going to track all this? Part of this will involve the platform(s) you’ve chosen for automation, but you also need to evaluate the results yourself. Decide what you want to look at (specific pages, products, leads…) and what constitutes success.