Understand Marketing Automation – tips for beginners | Blog SALESmanago – Customer Engagement Platform for impact-hungry eCommerce marketing teams

Once we begin to work with Marketing Automation, we face the myriad of brand new marketing and sales market openings. Marketing Automation offers much more than what was possible in marketing until recently. That’s why, at an early stage of work with the system, it’s essential to understand a few fundamentals, which will make your further work smooth and engaging. Let’s start with some basics and in next articles we’ll cover in-depth study of marketing and sales automation processes.

Starting work with Marketing Automation, it’s wise to forget old habits, even for a while, and open yourself for brand new integrated attitude, focusing on individual recipient and his needs. Below we list four tips explaining foundations of processes.

1. All marketing activities can be tied in consistent process

The technology allows to consolidate practically all marketing channels and accomplished activities in one systematic process. Marketing Automation system is the one that connects them, helps to pursue the processes and allows to see the influence of each of them on particular client. Everything we do on-line can easily be related by URL link. E-mail marketing, Social Media, online adds, adwords , blog, WWW page and any other spot the link may be placed in, can be related. Thanks to this fact, we observe those activities in one hub and we can measure their influence on leads. Whether it’s a click in an email message, liking something on WWW page, clicking the advert or downloading e-book, each reaction is monitored by Marketing Automation SALESmanago and recorded on the charter of particular contact. Marketing Automation allows for monitoring of all marketing activities and linking them with exact persons.

2. Conversion – main objective of our activities

Conversion is one of those elements Marketing Automation won’t work without. At this stage conversion means anonymous person sign-up and its identification. The first thought is a newsletter sign-up form. However, there are plenty of possibilities to acquire contacts in other areas and in different way than a contact form. We list some examples below:

• forms enabling files download
• registration forms for events
• pop-up forms, sidebars and classic forms with static content
• forms displayed only in specific URL address
• forms only for anonymous visitors
• dynamic forms
• competition apps on Facebook
• chats on WWW pages
• online survey and research

In each of those scopes, before a client receives access to required content, he is asked to provide his email address. It simply is a classic barter: interesting content in exchange for contact details. Consumers understand this, as it’s natural for them. That’s why, once there’s something for them in it, they are ready for a trade.

When creating a form, we need to remember 3 basic rules:

1. The form should be as short as possible – each space over three lowers conversion by 10%
2. Always offer appropriate value – as mentioned the barter above, what we offer in exchange for filling in a form needs to be proportionally valuable for a consumer
3. Take advantage of progressive profiling – in the first form consumer should provide most important data only. Thanks to Marketing Automation, we’ll automatically identify him once he appears in other form, which will request other data we don’t yet posses. We can follow this pattern in each consecutive interaction.

3. Client education increase sales

One of Marketing Automation fundamentals is shifting client education effort from sales to marketing department. This is what Lead Nurturing programs are for, as the automatically provide essential information required by client in particular moment, in order to direct him closer to purchase. Once an educated client gets to sales department, the sales process is faster and statistically has higher value. The other crucial thing connected with Lead Nurturing is that a single program is not sufficient. We ultimately need to build a few processes tailored to various client segments and their needs. Should we wish out educational messages become successful they need to:

• look tailored for receiver
• provide valuable and helpful information
• include easy to notice call-to-action, linked to materials developing message content

4. Marketing must cooperate with sales department

Marketing automation allows to link the moment of contact acquisition, marketing activities and sales effect in the coherent entirety. Therefore, it’s clear it merges sales and marketing activities. To successfully educate potential client and take him down the sales funnel, marketing needs knowledge salespersons have. First of all, they know what clients ask for in the initial contact, which is the knowledge marketing process falls short of. They also know what behavior and client features lead to conclusion that the purchase will take place. The entire knowledge we may gain from sales department will help in actions below:

• Lead qualification – analyzing sales processes proceedings we’ll find common features of contacts, which made prompt purchase, made purchase after considerable time and education or the sales failed. It will help to recognize contact identified by Marketing Automation and direct immediately those ready for purchase to sales department and educate remaining ones in Lead Nurturing processes.
• Client scoring – salespersons may prompt what behavior made client make purchase and what acquisition sources brought highest quality contacts. Once we learn this, we are able to fruitfully determine scoring rules, giving more points to sales important behavior and features. Thus, scoring will begin to indicate leads with highest sales potential.
• Lead Nurturing – if we want to educate client we must know the information he needs in every level of the purchase process. His online behavior will provides us with part of information, while the further info should come from salespersons, who know what client is interested in simply by talking to them.

These are the basics. In next article, we’ll look into the world of Marketing Automation. We’ll develop issues mention above and enrich them with best practices in contact base segmentation and creation of simple automations.