Basic Modules
80% of marketing automation users notice an increase in the number of leads, and 77% of them also notice a rise in conversion numbers.
Automated emails have open rates higher on average by 70.5% and click-through rates by 152% than plain marketing messages.
74% of marketing automation users consider CRM systems to be beneficial to the company (17% – very beneficial, 57% – somewhat beneficial)
Basic modules – CRM
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a must. It is the place where you store all contact with additional information. It is also the heart of behavioral profiling which is crucial for ecommerce.
For ecommerce purposes, simple gender-based segmentation just doesn’t cut it. Each customer has different needs. If you want to address them you must discover them in the first place. The gathered information may facilitate further database segmentation, indirectly leading to more efficient campaigns and tailored communication.
Automatic segmentation can be based on:
- contact’s visit on a particular URL address and visit duration
- lead’s source (contact form, newsletter, salespeople actions)
- visit source (social media, organic, AdWords)
- phrases that lead to the website visit
Let’s say you have a dozen similar stores to choose from. You don’t have an emotional connection with any of them. Your attention span (according to research) is as low as 8 seconds – or even less. All you want to do is buy a hair product. Be honest – which store would you choose: one that shows a flashy ‘razzle-dazzle’ of goods or one that displays a special discount on hair products?
Behavioral profiling is a mechanism that stands behind displaying the right content to the right visitor at the best moment possible. Customers take shortcuts when they can – hence the importance of behavioral profiling.
Basic modules – Generate Leads
Visitors come and go. They skim through the catalog and close the tab. Since there are thousands of them, it would be a shame if you let the anonymous traffic just pass through your website without even attempting to convert them into leads. If you are meant to develop a business relation, it will happen eventually, but why should all the valuable behavioral data go to waste? On a website that can monitor user activity, information about anonymous visits is collected and stored for several hours and then removed. If the contact does not trigger the system to start monitoring them within three hours, the details from anonymous visits are lost. However, if you can convince them to perform such an action (fill in the form, subscribe to a newsletter) data will be assigned to the newly formed contact card, where your CRM will store all further behavioral and transactional information.
Converting anonymous visitors into contacts generates one more benefit: it allows you to leverage the full potential of your website traffic and, as a consequence, use the marketing budget to its fullest.
Let’s say your website traffic volume at the moment equals 1,000 unique visits and each visit costs you $3 USD. If the conversion rate of a given method equals 1% – it will generate ten contacts at $300 USD each. However, if the rate grows to 3%, then the database will grow by thirty new contacts for each $100 USD spent.
Basic modules – Email Marketing
Email Marketing is the cheapest and most convenient communication channel of them all. If done right, it is also one of the most efficient. Up to 95% of companies using marketing automation platforms benefit from email marketing. For an entrepreneur, building an email marketing strategy is mandatory. It’s a doorway to communication with the people who keep the business running – the customers.
People like to read emails that are personalized and open them far more often than the plain, bulk messages. If a plain email doesn’t cover your appetite, send a birthday email to show your customers that you value them and want to celebrate important events together. Another option is to use periodic emails to remind people of a special monthly sale or to tell them about the points they gathered from the loyalty program that they can use during their next shopping spree.
Building revenue
If done properly, the abandoned cart messages strongly engage potential customers. The average OR of these messages is 68% and the average CTR is 21%.
As many as 45% of the recipients open messages containing items that they were recently interested in. On average, 25% of people in this group click the links in the message.
Up to three-quarters of consumers (74%) get frustrated if the website content doesn’t correspond with their interests.
Building revenue – Website Recommendations
Website recommendation module is the one that allows for implementing frames that – in real-time – re-display user items they were interested in and similar ones too. Also, they recommend browsed items to those who revisit the website after a while.
Recommendation frames adjust automatically to every visitor’s interests, even if they remain anonymous.
It works so well because people tend to take shortcuts whenever they can. Simply clicking an offer is much easier than going through the entire catalog. Showing people the items they browsed during their last visit linked to relevant subpages is a great shortcut as it saves their time. Directly reminding people what they like is a great way to increase the number of transactions and improve customer engagement, and as a consequence, increase your online store’s income.
A young guy from Texas moves to California and goes to a big department store looking for a job. The manager says, “Do you have any sales experience?” The kid says, “Yeah, I was a salesman back home in Texas.” The boss liked the kid, so he gave him the job. “You start tomorrow. I’ll come down after we close and see how you did.”
His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down.
“How many sales did you make today?”
Kid says: “One.”
Boss says: “Just one? Our sales people average 20 or 30 sales a day. How much was the sale for?”
Kid says: “$201,237.64.”
Boss says: “201,237.64?? What the heck did you sell?”
Kid says, “First I sold him a small fish hook. Then I sold him a medium fish hook. Then I sold him a larger fish hook. Then I sold him a new fishing rod. Then I asked him where he was going fishing, and he said down at the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat; we went down to the boat department, and I sold him that twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn’t think his Mercedes would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him an Escalade.”
The boss said, “A guy came in here to buy a fish hook, and you sold him a boat and truck?”
Kid says, “No, he came in here to buy a box of tampons for his wife, and I said, your weekend’s shot, you might as well go fishing.”
Building revenue – Dynamic Emails
The concept of dynamic emails is simple. The point is to follow customers’ needs and communicate with them at the exact moment when a properly formulated offer is the answer to that need. For example, if a person looks at a vinyl record with classical music, then I would most likely assume that she’s interested in such records, rather than, say, Kylie Minogue’s MP3s. An extra hint for me is that this person is researching vinyls right now, so I can safely assume, she needs it right now, not for example in six months. Therefore, the correct response would be to send that person an email containing an offer for the records she browsed, shortly after her visit during which no purchase was made.
This approach follows the basic principles of crafting marketing messages, i.e. delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Sending them positively affects the number of transactions. Use dynamic emails instead of spraying your audience with mass email. Out of 100,000 contacts, maybe 100 people would be interested in this offer. Wouldn’t it be better to send a message to each of those people with the article they saw recently, soon after their visit? Profit: sales increase, as customers return to your store and make a purchase there.
Building revenue – Recover Abandoned Carts
A common pattern in online shopping is that people sometimes add items to their shopping cart but never finish the transaction. This is not a rare phenomenon – nearly 70% of started transactions end up like this.
The good news is that up to 63% of carts can be recovered!
And one of the most important tools for this purpose is a dynamic email.
When the transaction is interrupted somehow, good practice is to send a message in which you refer to a recent visit of a particular contact in the store. The items in this message can be added dynamically straight from the shopping cart. The icing on the cake: add a little incentive, psychological or financial that will convince your almost-a-customer that they should complete the deal. And it’s not just about a discount – discounts can make customers addicted very easily, so they will later abandon their carts just to pay a little bit less than normal. Your secret weapons here are items that at some point aroused so much interest in a person that she thought of buying them.
It really works!
Such messages have 193% higher OR, 439% higher CTR, and 621% higher conversion than regular emails.
Extend communication
- Automate Social Media
71% of people who have had a good experience with a given brand via social media are most likely to recommend it to their friends.
Web Push notifications are a great example of permitted communication. The average CTR for this medium is 30%.
Extend communication – Automate Social Media
Connecting social media activities to a marketing automation platform opens up a whole bunch of new marketing opportunities. First, it allows you to queue up posts on the most popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter and measure their performance. Secondly, it engages information about contacts gathered in your database while you create so-called Custom Audiences – a group of recipients for which Facebook creates a database comparison (between its own database and the database of the company wanting to create the Custom Audience).
Effective Facebook campaigns are targeted at those groups in your area of interest that are most likely to engage. Precise targeting is the key to success here. You can create Facebook target groups based on individually monitored user behavior, such as: adding a tag to a contact, reaching a specific scoring by a contact or opting out from mailing.
Integration of the marketing automation platform with Facebook Ads is aimed at addressing the social media gap: while most of the marketers admit that they use Facebook for business purposes, only 45% think it works.
The whole process including the preparation of ads is created directly in the system, without the necessity of switching to the Facebook Ads panel. In the system, users will also find full analytics of activities via the social media channel.
Extend communication – Web Push Notifications
The web push is a simple, short notice, which enables communication with users who have visited your website and agreed to receive special notifications. Web pushes’ greatest advantage is that you don’t need a user’s email address to send her these notifications! Web push also works for anonymous contacts.
The contact does not have to be on your website, to receive such notification. The only requirement for this kind of notification to appear is that the users agree to get them via an agreement form. A contact doesn’t even need to have an active browser window or use it at the moment. The processes responsible for sending Web Push notifications remain active, even if the window is closed.It allows for both real-time communication and planning activities according to current events.
What does the web push implementation give you:
- a new way to communicate with contacts in your database
- communication with anonymous contacts (notifications do not need an email address to be sent)
- a new criterion for database segmentation
- improvement of sales performance by introducing personalized content for a specific product with redirection to an appropriate subpage
- the possibility of expanding the database by redirecting users to a landing page
- an additional tool for progressive profiling
- an easy way to highlight the offer
Example? Imagine that you deliver food. An hour before major sporting events, you can remind users that they must order food in advance, to eat delicious, hot snacks during the match. The possibilities are truly enormous. Your messages will be displayed to each user who will confirm their subscription while on the site, which in turn enables the messages to be shown by the browser. If someone declines you her permission – nothing is lost. The consent form can be displayed again after a time you can specify in advance.
Building relations
67% of marketers notice at least 10% more sales opportunities generated by lead nurturing and 15% of them mention an increase even up to 30%.
- Alerts For Your Sales Team
Enhancing collaboration between marketing and sales departments leads to a 17% increase in the use of lead intelligence in the sales process.
- Respond to Behavior
Messages sent to a contact after they search for relevant information on the website had ORs higher by 200% and CTRs 50% higher than regular messages.
Building relations – Educate Customers
According to Consumer Reports National Research Center (a report concerned with the food industry), almost 80% of participants said they’d found an especially wide range of choices in the previous month, and 36% of those said they were overwhelmed by the information they had to process to make a buying decision. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of products in the average supermarket swelled from an average of 8,948 to almost 47,000, according to Food Marketing. Analogous processes have taken place in all industries.
This plague of plenty makes every Average Joe really confused in front of the product shelf, even the virtual one. Every purchase becomes an elaborate, complicated logistic process that requires a wide research. And it doesn’t matter whether it concerns buying a car or a bottle of ketchup.
Customers need some help with that confusing abundance. They need reasons: “Why should I choose that particular product?” That’s what Lead Nurturing does, by describing the market, showing possible uses and providing data so customers don’t have to search for this information on their own. Simply put, you do the research for them.
In addition to educating new contacts, Lead Nurturing can also be used in campaigns to engage existing customers or increase their loyalty. It can be disguised as a series of trivia messages, inspirations on how to use the purchased product or information on how to maintain it.
Nurtured clients spend up to 47% more than non-nurtured ones.
Contemporary consumers go through 90% of their Buyer’s Journey on their own before reaching out to a salesperson. They research before they buy. That makes delivering the key information such a crucial part of the consumer-brand relation building process.
Companies that implement Lead Nurturing generate 50% more leads ready for purchase while spending 33% less than others.
Building relations – Alerts For Your Sales Team
An alert is a message sent automatically to the salesperson (or another member of staff) to focus their attention on a lead whose relationship with the brand is about to evolve.
Alerts might be triggered by:
- reaching pre-defined scoring
- visiting a given website (like price list)
- lack of activity
- clicking an email
- registering for the free trial or ‘freemium’
The pick of events that trigger alerts depends on the specifics of your business and audience. It’s necessary to analyze customer behavior leading to the purchase in order to identify at which sales level the purchase was made.
Finding those hallmarks leads to preparing the alerts that support the sales process and helping to build better, stronger relations with customers.
Examples of use
A lead stops visiting the website and does not respond to messages: An instant reaction can help save the relationship. A phone call to the customer made at the right time can do wonders. The most important information will be why it happened. Even if the lead has bought a competitor’s solution, it is important feedback that should be registered.
A lead browses professional or high-end products, but does not decide to buy: With more expensive, exclusive or specialist products in the catalog, you must know that potential customers are not always ready to buy them at first. Lead nurturing is the strategy to shorten their purchase journey. Alerts that remind salespeople to contact the hot leads and personally answer their questions before such a significant purchase can support this strategy perfectly.
Building relations – Respond to Behavior
Autoresponder works like this:
When the user does X, send message Y.
How Autoresponder Works – A Customer’s Point of View:
- A company reacts to my interests.
- I watch a clip about an item – I receive an offer on that item via email.
- I’m interested in an event – I receive an event reminder.
- I click a link in an email – the next message contains personalized content.
- If I’m NOT interested in something, I’m not spammed with information on that brand.
By including autoresponders into your arsenal, you increase the effectiveness of your messages. They become better fitted to what interests a particular person, and what makes the overall communication more personalized. Moreover, you avoid spamming with the offers that don’t interest your customers.
The most popular autoresponders
In Marketing Sherpa’s research, marketers described what kind of automatic emails they send. Top 5 results:
- Welcome messages: 50% of respondents
- Thank you messages: 48% of respondents
- Transactional messages: 40% of respondents
- Activating messages (how to use the product or service): 26% of respondents
- Post purchase messages (product review, customer survey): 25% of respondents
Something more…Personalized Banners and A/B/X Tests
Personalized banners display content tailored to a user’s interests and engagement level. Personalized banners are perfect for:
- user gratification – you can show discounts to the most engaged customers, freebies for people who do large or expensive purchases, and so on
- win back campaign – with the proper set of automation rules and a fairly accurate tag system, personalized banners can be used to display special offers and discounts to people who have not shopped for a long time to re-encourage them to take a look at the offer and eventually make a purchase
- target group profiling – banners are excellent material for A/B/X testing; they allow for capturing behavioral trends and preferences among site visitors, making it easier to create a Buyer Persona
Tests and experiments are the lifeblood of good marketing. For example, no one can predict how the next 100,000 visitors will behave: will they click the banner, which creation will they like best, which CTA button is visible and encouraging enough to trigger the proper reaction. There’s no point in waiting to gain this insight and burn out the potential of this traffic.
Running an A/B/X test allows you to check the reactions of a representative group, such as 1,000 visitors, and then follow the probability calculation rules to implement a creation that will best increase engagement and sales.
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