As you come into the New Year, you might consider redistributing your marketing budget to increase ROI. Every single day, businesses of all sizes are waving goodbye to traditional outreach methods to be replaced by automation. If you don’t know what that means, maybe start here – otherwise, check out some marketing automation campaign examples.
You can build specific campaigns to develop a fully bespoke strategy that fits your organisation’s goals and objectives. Once you set these up, they’ll manage all engagement with new leads, existing customers and any other contacts that you wish. Forget those hours wasted at a desk managing customer relationships, let automation do all the grunt work.
And the capabilities of these tools are endless. Even for a novice user on a small budget, you can easily use automation for the following.
Marketing Automation Campaign Examples
Welcome Series
When a customer first engages with your content, they’ll usually be completing some initial research on your product. By offering high quality content, a unattained lead will usually be more than happy to exchange an email for content that is valuable to them.
This initiates a wow service that allows you to stand out from competitors who may only offer blogs or information that’s basically a sales pitch. Offer implicit, objective and beneficial material in a comprehensive guide or video series to grab real attention. Once you have that information, you can demonstrate authority and begin conversion efforts with a welcome series.
Automation will introduce them to your brand and service through personalised emails. All correspondence will be timed and respective to how contacts interact with your emails. Depending on how you structure everything, leads might be scheduling appointments or purchasing goods without ever speaking with a sales person.
Educating Leads
So your new leads didn’t buy directly from a welcome series – no problem! Automation can transition responsive contacts into an education series to increase familiarity and knowledge.
The more informed a customer, the more empowered they feel to make a good decision. If they’re weighing up various service providers and you’re the one to have been most valuable to them, you put yourself in a fantastic position to convert.
A blog series to add value to each email will assist these efforts significantly, but you can even achieve success with some cunningly written emails alone.
New Customer Integration
One of the main issues in retaining customers is indifference. You do well to close the sale, but then engagement often falls off a cliff. This is where the power of automation really kicks in.
Offer a welcome pack following the sale with unexpected perks and gifts following a purchase. Whether it’s discounts for future dealings, complimentary products or instructional content – this adds a serious wow service.
Even just by showing appreciation with a quick thank you and check in phone call shortly after, customers will feel truly valued.
NPS/Review
For online strategy, you should always be collecting NPS (net promotor score) and reviews. This will greatly assist in authority building and testimony is important to plaster over a website.
While still enjoying a post-sale wow service, automatically request NPS and gain reviews from positive scorers. Also contact and settle dispute with negative or neutral responses to eradicate any negative word-of-mouth attention.
This will improve overall customer relationships and supply important information for future efforts.
Referral
This is where you can begin to utilise currently untapped resources in a big way. Not all products have an on-going upsell or resale potential, so referrals are a great way to increase individual customer value.
Develop an incentivised referral scheme and encourage cold or old leads to connect you to new business. No matter what size customer base, you’d be surprised how much new opportunities can arrive once existing customers have motivation to push it your way.
Abandoned Cart
Definitely one that any eCommerce business is simply mad not to integrate. You can track all the metrics and analytics you want, but is there anything more frustrating than a customer bail on a full cart?
With automation, you can check in with all those feeling indifferent and dangle a carrot to close the deal. A small discount or even a little bit of persuasive language can go a long way in encouraging otherwise lost customers to buy your products.
And according to Retail TouchPoints, apparel retailer Boden achieved the following with this type of campaign:
- Reduced cart abandonment by 81%;
- More than doubled its percentage of revenue from triggered emails, from 13% to 30%;
- Identified 40% more visitors as well as their interests and shopping patterns.
The numbers don’t lie, these systems work.
Reminders for Repurchasing
Do your goods or services have an average life length or is there a gauge to know when customers need to replace anything? If so, reminders are a great way to secure reselling opportunities. Don’t let indifference push customers to another service provider.
Show you care with a simple check-in email after a few weeks or months. Remind them of their impending scarcity or need for your service. If you want to offer a discount, feel free to do so – but this is all about customer relationship management.
With automation you can maintain this familiarity with no day-to-day efforts.
Birthday Celebrations
Another strength in marketing automation campaigns is the ability to personalise every single engagement with each specific customer. Forget on-going generic email blasts, they’re a step away from spam in comparison. Automation manages dynamic and respective relationships with everyone, all while you focus on the important stuff.
One of our favourite examples of this is “Happy Birthday” campaigns. If within your registration you capture dates of birth, automation can send each customer well wishes on their big day. You can even offer a small discount as a gift to be used over the next 30 days.
This is a huge asset in delivering a wow service and can even trigger impulse buys. Customers will feel appreciated and value your brand moving into the future.
Nurturing Leads
One of the biggest pains of marketing, is the cost in securing a new customer. Both in time and money, you need to invest a massive amount to convert and close. This is particularly the case in those customers who aren’t ready to buy immediately. So what sounds like a better plan?
- Waste resources continuously checking-in and trying to persuade a contacts who may never buy. Delegating relationship management to salespeople rather than allowing them to focus their efforts elsewhere.
- Develop a nurture program through automation that manages all these efforts to contacts that are still yet to buy. And utilise all your resources in more important areas. Maintain familiarity and relationships all through personalised emails so when it comes a time for contacts to purchase, there’s only one option on their mind.
We’re not even oversimplifying, automation can completely manage all your nurture efforts. If contacts aren’t ready to buy right away, check in with them every couple of weeks by email with further educational material or news. When they’re finally ready to be converted, an automated system has them buttered up for your sales team to go in and close the deal.
Seasonal Sales
Many businesses enjoy hosting flash sales at various times of the year. It can sometimes be difficult though to inform all your customers in time to really increase sales and drive revenue from it.
You can structure automated campaigns to hit at specific times and maximise the coverage of your efforts. You can create scarcity by informing contacts of fleeting opportunities to save, or encourage impulse purchasing.
Many of us have seen success in recent years with Black Friday, and the brief nature of these opportunities can be a major factor behind their performance. If one was to mix an automated campaign to inform with scarcity with a short timeframe to save, there’s massive potential to significantly drive revenue.
Will Marketing Automation Help You in 2018?
No matter how big or small you are, automation is a tool you need to explore coming into the New Year. As these marketing automation campaign examples show, there’s endless amounts of opportunities to utilise it in your working week, cut your expenses and maximise ROI.
Forget your billboards and bus stops, marketing automation is the way of the future. If you’d like to find out how you can get started, make sure to get in touch with us today!
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