Leveraging Marketing Automation to Enhance Customer Experience
Marketing automation has been a trending buzzword in the business world for the last few years as organizations look to leverage the power of a centralized customer repository for enhanced experiences.
Modern users spend their days exploring different websites and applications. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their digital activities. Purchases, account creations, subscriptions, conversations, ad clicks, email opens, etc., are just a few examples of data businesses are now collecting and storing to generate valuable insights for future marketing campaigns.
This approach has become mandatory in this digital age as marketers have to use a multi-channel strategy to target their desired audiences. From email marketing to retargeting, lead magnets, landing pages, social media posts, live chats, and on-site promotions, there’s a lot to do and do well.
However, it’s easy to see how doing so many things simultaneously can become a problem. This is where marketing automation comes in to simplify the process and help businesses optimize their sales funnel and journeys to enhance customer experience.
In this post, we’ll dive deeper into the growing concept and share how to leverage marketing automation.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of leveraging digital technologies and software to streamline, automate, and measure repetitive marketing tasks and workflows. It also helps companies identify their ideal target audience and automates the process of nurturing leads to sales-readiness.
Simply put, it automates key actions that bring potential customers to the point where sales teams can approach them directly and influence their purchase decisions. This improves operational efficiency at different sales funnel levels and can turn visitors into happy customers faster than traditional methods.
If you’re confused or on the fence, let’s clarify the concept with an example. You’re probably aware that education and awareness are essential lead-nurturing processes. Marketing automation supplies the content used to develop interest and trust faster and more consistently.
This improves the decision-making process for consumers. For sales teams, it provides a more qualified lead for conversion.
How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Enhance Customer Experience
There’s more to automation than an all-or-nothing proposition. On the surface, it suggests putting your marketing campaigns on auto-pilot. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Instead, the main purpose of automation is to enable teams to figure out which functions can be automated and hone in on the most repetitive, time-consuming, or error-prone tasks.
Fortunately, you can automate several marketing functions, from your content curation to social media, email and SMS marketing, and lead nurturing. However, you need to understand that the idea is to supplement or enhance human interaction, not replace it.
Here are four ways to leverage marketing automation to enhance customer experience:
1. Loyalty Programs to Enhance Engagement with Existing Customers
Every savvy marketer understands it’s much cheaper and easier to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So, if you’re looking to build and maintain long-term relationships with your buyers, you need to provide the benefits to gain their loyalty.
Modern consumers consider loyalty programs and reward points a great part of their overall shopping experiences. Using MarTech tools, such as Google Analytics, Eloqua, ContentPepper, Empower, etc., you can identify high-purchase customers and send targeted offers, gifts, and discounts.
2. Automated Social Media Posts
If you have customers in different locations and time zones, you need to ensure 24/7 availability to ensure you remain relevant. Using social media marketing tools like Sprinklr or Kontentino, you can target customers anywhere by scheduling posts. This way, you can increase the number of people seeing your posts in other locations and boost engagement on different channels.
You can ensure your customers don't forget you by posting more consistently on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. You don’t have to promote your products in every post necessarily. You can offer solutions, talk about different topics, or even generate feedback about your services.
3. Omnichannel Marketing
For nearly a decade, omnichannel marketing has become the go-to strategy for businesses looking to provide their customers with a seamless digital experience. However, one of the biggest problems marketers have faced is finding the best combination of channels to maximize resource efficiency. MarkTech tools, such as Google Analytics, can help you identify the best channels to use for your specific audience.
For instance, if email marketing is your most profitable channel, you can use tools such as MailChimp, GetResponse, Keap, Omnisend, and Wishpond to automate email campaigns. For example, you can create drip campaigns to slowly guide visitors to become your customers, from the welcome email to the first offer and followups.
You can also remind customers regarding items in their carts using email automation and send them shipping confirmation emails and other transactional information related to their accounts or activities.
4. Content Analysis Using CMS
The best way to enhance customer engagement is to find what works for your customers. Getting this information will take a bit of trial and error on your part. Along the way, you’ll find what you’re doing wrong and change it. This is where a content management system comes in to help you identify which content type performed well and which didn’t.
Many tools also provide negative reviews and bad comments on social media, using which you can continuously change your tactics and improve your engagement. The most popular options in the market today include WordPress, Magento, Weebly, HubSpot, Squarespace, and Magnolia.
Bottom Line
To sum up, marketing automation empowers marketers to spend less time thinking about how to build and deliver marketing campaigns. Thus, they can spend more time optimizing each promotion and campaign to maximize results and offer a better customer experience. By paying attention to the details, you too can create campaigns that will help foster trust and improve existing/new relationships.
