Marketing automation has seen rapid growth and adoption over the past few years. As companies look to improve efficiency and generate more sales opportunities, marketing automation platforms have become essential tools. With the right strategy and effective use of these platforms, businesses can drive greater productivity and return on investment from their marketing efforts.
This article outlines seven important tips for getting the most out of marketing automation in 2024.
1. Set Clear Goals and KPIs
Defining specific goals and key performance indicators is vital for measuring the success of any marketing automation strategy. Marketers should start by determining clear outcomes they want to drive through automation, whether it be generating more qualified leads, creating new sales opportunities, or directly boosting revenue growth. Tracking performance metrics like email open rates, website clickthrough rates from emails, landing page conversion rates, and cost per lead will indicate if ongoing campaigns are successfully hitting their targets.
With well-defined benchmarks and KPIs in place, marketing teams can closely monitor campaign performance daily, weekly, and monthly and optimize programs over time to maximize results.
2. Choose the Right Marketing Automation Platform
With the rapid maturity of the marketing automation market over the past decade, there are now many amazing marketing automation platforms available. When selecting the right platform, dig into key requirements, including ease of use for non-technical users, CRM and other critical system integrations, analytics dashboard capabilities, available templates, and workflows prebuilt for common tasks, platform costs, scalability needs, and more.
Getting buy-in and input from other groups like IT, Sales, and Customer Success will help align around the best choice. As needs grow over time, factoring flexibility for expansion will maximize your investment in a central marketing automation system.
3. Build Customer Journeys
Walking step-by-step through typical customer journeys from that initial point of contact through to the final sale can reveal critical stages where marketing automation can make an impact in converting leads. Identifying points in the journey with major drop-offs where prospects fail to progress provides opportunities to target those weak spots with tailored content and offers. By creating a detailed customer journey map that outlines the ideal path for guiding customers through your sales funnel, you can automatically trigger personalized actions that engage and nurture leads at every stage of their journey based on their behavior and activity.
Mapping the most common or highest potential customer journeys also promotes cross-team collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success around improving conversion funnel performance. Ongoing customer journey optimization paired with marketing automation enables you to continually refine the path to drive better results.
4. Personalize Content
Personalizing content to resonate with customers and prospects at an individual level performs better at engaging audiences, driving higher conversion rates compared to generic outreach. Best Marketing automation tools can segment contacts into groups or even down to individual levels based on attributes like demographics, interests, past interactions, and activity. This data fuels the ability to deliver highly customized messaging and relevant offers tailored to align closely with specific user needs or preferences.
Avoiding a one-size-fits-all content approach to speak directly to what matters most for each customer segment makes a dramatic difference in engagement and response/conversion outcomes. Automating personalized content across channels like email, on-site web messaging, mobile push notifications, and more creates a consistent customer experience that feels like it was manually crafted just for them. This level of dialed-in relevance pays dividends across all segments and verticals.
5. Prioritize Mobile Experience
With tablets and smartphones now accounting for over 55% of all web traffic globally, optimizing for mobile needs to be a central focus of any modern marketing automation strategy today. Ensuring that automated emails, landing pages, forms, CTAs, and other elements are completely mobile-friendly through responsive design and accelerated page load speeds should now be standard practice. Creating a seamless and consistent experience for audiences regardless of the mobile device they use for access drives better engagement and conversions across campaigns. This includes simplifying copy and messaging for quicker mobile consumption, confirming contact forms and key pages render and function correctly on iOS and Android screens, and leveraging Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) where beneficial. With Google now prioritizing sites with mobile-friendly criteria in rankings, the search visibility benefits alone make focus here a smart investment.
6. Leverage Account-Based Marketing
B2B companies that sell expensive products or services can benefit greatly from an account-based approach, which focuses marketing efforts on high-value target accounts. Exploring 7 fearless ABM strategies can help businesses refine their targeting and engagement, ensuring meaningful interactions with key decision-makers. By delivering relevant content, promotions, and ongoing interactions tailored to their needs, businesses can build relationships and brand awareness with key decision-makers. This approach also fosters customer retention and loyalty by continuing to provide personalized messaging after the initial sale.
7. Focus on Email Marketing
Despite the buzz surrounding social media, ads, and other digital channels, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to reach and engage customers due to its high open rates and conversion potential. Marketing automation eliminates the limitations of manual email marketing, enabling the creation of highly segmented and personalized lists, automated email campaigns throughout lead nurturing workflows, and triggered messages based on user actions or inactions.
In order to maximize list growth and conversions, it’s crucial to optimize email content, subject lines, send times, touchpoint frequency, and automation based on device usage and platform behaviors. With deliverability, security compliance, and spam avoidance now considered essential, marketing automation makes standing out in the inbox through relevance and value the next challenge. This starts with a deep understanding of your target audience.
Conclusion
Embracing the power of marketing automation is a crucial step for sales and marketing teams seeking to elevate their strategies and achieve exceptional results. Companies that actively implement these best practices will be well-positioned to maximize their marketing technology investment, outperform competitors, and gain a significant competitive edge in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
