6 Must-Know Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Drive Revenue
Marketing Automation can help organizations save time, boost productivity, prioritize, and drive revenue. Sounds great, right? As long as automation is used properly and strategically, it can truly transform a business. Keep reading for 6 must-know ways to use marketing automation to take the business to the next level.
Marketing automation systematizes and automates important and/or repetitive marketing and demand generation tasks for your business. While automation is by no means a replacement for team members, if used properly, it can help support the team by allowing them to set and forget tasks that keep day-to-day operations running smoothly.
Drive Better Business Outcomes with Marketing Automation
If you have automation software, these are 6 ways you can and should be using it!
1. Segment Your Contact List by Industry (And Use Smart Content!)
If you’re selling a service to multiple industries, chances are that prospects within each industry will respond to different messaging. The same goes for prospects at different stages of the funnel, prospects at different levels of engagement…the list goes on.
In that sense, segmentation is crucial. Marketing automation software can easily segment your database by everything from industry and job title to company size and engagement level. When your contacts are automatically segmented, you can create email campaigns, landing pages, and other content with tailored messaging that goes to the right audience at the right time, every time.
Once you segment your contacts, you can then use smart content to write one piece of content and change up certain areas of copy or images so that one segment sees specific messaging customized to them, while another segment sees a tweaked version that’s more relevant to them.
2. Keep Your Database Clean
Marketing efforts are only as good as their data. A cluttered database will skew metrics and make it difficult to achieve full campaign success. Contacts are constantly changing: people switch jobs, move locations, or delete their email addresses!
If, for example, an email marketing campaign goes to email addresses that are no longer valid, the emails will hard bounce. This negatively impacts deliverability, messes with reporting, and wastes time and energy!
By using a tool like InSycle, you can keep your database clean, updated, and organized automatically. You can deduplicate contacts, standardize how contacts look in your CRM, consolidate fields, delete bad data, and much more. InSycle will also integrate with many CRM, making automated database organization that much simpler.
3. Set up a Lead-Nurturing Workflow
It takes several touches to engage with a lead, and even more to convert them. But not every lead is ready to convert – in fact, most aren’t! Setting up automated workflows that nurture leads will keep leads interested with minimal effort.
These workflows should include touchpoints that cater to whatever stage the lead is at. If they’re at the top of the funnel (TOFU), a workflow that sends a series of educational blogs or videos works well. If prospects are in the consideration stage, at the middle of the funnel (MOFU), e-books, events, and content specific to your company do wonder.
Finally, if leads are in the decision-making stage at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), content offering free demos or pricing information can be greatly beneficial. You can create workflows for each stage, have contacts added when they meet certain criteria, and let automation do the rest.
4. Use Workflows to Create Marketing and Sales Alignment
Aligning marketing and sales is one of the best ways to get the entire team in sync, working towards the same goals, and converting leads into customers. Workflows can be a great way to foster that alignment and cohesion.
Some useful workflows to set enable a seamless handoff of leads from marketing sales. Lead scoring is a big factor here; by setting lead scores specific to your organization, you can set workflows that move a contact’s lead status or lifecycle stage when they reach a certain score. This means a contact can be automatically passed from marketing to sales the minute it’s a sales-qualified lead (SQL).
With that seamless handoff in place, sales can build on marketing’s foundation without delay. A sales-qualified lead doesn’t want to be ignored, and automated marketing and sales alignment workflows ensure that no leads fall through the cracks.
5. Turn Those Closed Lost Opportunities Around
A closed lost opportunity doesn’t have to mean you never engage with that prospect again. If a contact was once an opportunity, then they can become one again! Marketing automation can help turn those closed lost opportunities into closed-won opportunities without you having to keep manually reaching out.
Automated email nurturing is one great way to do this. This way, your organization remains at the forefront of a prospect’s mind. The email content should be written with the following in mind: these prospects already know a good amount about your company and product, so whatever they’re sent should reflect that.
Along with email nurturing, you can develop a strategic retargeting campaign that, for example, leads are entered in 3 months after a deal is marked as closed lost. A timeline like that gives leads some space, then reengages them with relevant content with the ultimate goal of closing the deal with them.
6. Implement Workflows to Create Time Stamps
Reporting and attribution are the bread and butter of marketers, but there’s nothing worse than unclear or inaccurate information. Implementing workflows that clarify various data points can help make reporting a breeze.
One example of this is to use workflows to create time stamps on important properties, so you have all the information you need to report accurately. This might be the date of a contact’s latest demo request or latest form submission.
With this information, you can engage with prospects accordingly and make sure no one is left unengaged for long.
A little bit of marketing automation can go a long way! By knowing this go-to automation and workflows, your marketing can work for you 24/7 and you can drive more conversions and more revenue. If you’re interested in a marketing agency that can implement all this and more and transform your business, check out ProperExpression.
