1. Create Fully Automated Welcome Programs

A time-tested way to improve the efficient execution of your email marketing strategy is to set up fully automated workflows.

Are you aiming to kick off your loyalty-based rewards program? Set up autoresponder welcome emails that are triggered as soon as a customer signs up to become a member.

Welcome autoresponder emails serve as a vehicle for new customers to get to know your brand. You can introduce them to your brand values, the team behind it and offer a discount on their next purchase to encourage them to choose your brand again.

Automated email flows also allow you to track the customer journey across different product categories in your eCommerce store. On-site actions like browsing products listed in the emails, clicking on offers trigger data collection, which further trigger customized web content and product recommendations–helping drive purchases across the board.

2. Boost Your Customer Retention

Have you ever come across an Instagram Shop ad for an item you were looking for for a very long time, but it’s also 2:00 a.m., and you’re in no mood to get out of bed to grab your credit card?

As an eCommerce business, how do you get this type of customer to the decision stage? Abandoned cart and win-back emails are effective tactics to bring back this type of customer on a purchase journey.

When a brand has a seamless feedback loop in their online customer flows (meaning they’re removing as many barriers-to-purchase as possible), it helps retain customers better in the long run.

It doesn’t have to be emails. Ad delivery platforms have figured out targeting people with ads who “forgot” something on your website right where they are–on social media platforms–reminding them to pick up where they left off. Once a customer leaves your website, they are not totally lost. Retargeting ads help re-engage visitors who’ve previously visited your website in the hopes of converting them.

3. Automate Omni-Channel Campaigns

Modern digital marketing has spectacularly crushed old-school marketing principles in the past decade. Remember “rule of 7”? A prospect needs to see your message at least seven times before they convert.

Today, you’ll need to inundate people seven times every day so your brand can stand out in cluttered social media feeds. Even within social media feeds, prospects are split between Stories, Reels, IGTV, posts, etc., necessitating marketers to find a time-efficient way to reach them on all formats.

Automating omnichannel or multi-channel campaigns can help you speed up your sales-conversion funnel while requiring lower oversight than traditional marketing methods. You can target customers with hyper-personalized product recommendations in a matter of a few minutes of them interacting with your eCommerce site through emails, location-based push notifications, retargeted ads, and native content.

4. Improve Your Customer Personalization

Customers have highly unique and specific needs now, making it difficult to segment them into traditional target market buckets. Marketing automation tools can pick up on markers like frequency and seasonality of on-site interactions, a combination of products viewed, add-to-carts, and serve personalized messages accordingly.

Shutterfly, for example, shows products personalized with photos picked out from your personal album to drive purchases in that category. If you download the app and give it access (permissible) to your phone album, it picks up photos with faces and shows you products with those photos on them–like mugs and cushions. It’s an impressive alloy of content marketing and customer experience principles.

You’re more likely to buy a product like that if you can already see how it would look once you do. It also removes barriers like clicking on a product, uploading a photo, and then checking out how a customized mug would look like.

5. The Ability for Continuous Improvement

A great upside to marketing automation tools is that it provides infinite opportunities to test and learn as quickly and as precisely as possible.

With marketing automation, you can target paid ads specifically to an audience with those niche markers so you can understand quickly whether your messages resonate with this group or not. It saves you time and effort while lending scalability to your marketing campaigns.

You can continuously run A/B test campaigns to optimize email messages, subject lines, creative elements, calls-to-action, copy, and audience segments.

Does your team have six different ideas for what the creative for your next holiday campaign should look like? With automation tools, you can test and learn creatives at scale.

6. Reduce Costs in the Long Run

When you can automate mundane tasks like adjusting bids, loading creatives, switching targeting, it saves you cost in the long run. You don’t need to hire a full-time campaign coordinator to manage those tasks anymore and instead can focus team resources on devising strategies and creating ideas.

It also means you don’t need subscriptions to five different platforms and can instead have a one-stop-shop for needs such as dynamic creative creation, audience testing, and budget optimization, etc.

7. Enhance Your Lead Nurturing

You know what saves time? Not having your sales prospecting team personally reach out to leads to qualify them. You can automate prospecting based on markers like the time between interactions, subscription options checked out, or pages browsed.

Swift response can yield a higher sales prospect conversion rate because you’re not allowing room for other competitors to swoop into a prospect’s consideration set. Many times customer needs are so urgent, response time is the only differentiating factor. Support automation is the way to go for those looking to shorten their response time.

8. Make Your Teams More Efficient

When your team is not tied up with monotonous tasks, they can judiciously utilize their time to focus on long-term strategic planning in service of your annual goals.

Teams need to be challenged creatively so they can grow and accomplish new milestones–both professional and personal. Marketing automation tools are sophisticated enough to take over many tactical tasks and operational elements of your team, such as lead assignments and follow-ups.

Moreover, in most organizations, marketing and sales teams use different tools while working towards their respective goals, exacerbating tensions. Lining up both teams on one automation tool can foster greater collaboration and bridge communication gaps. If sales and marketing are each working with different tools, they will be looking and analyzing vast outcomes of the same business-building strategies.

Utilizing a marketing automation tool allows your teams to focus on high-level elements of your marketing strategy, boosting overall team productivity, the volume of sales, and business revenue.

For more information and assistance on all things marketing automation visit our services page to see how we can help. Alternatively, you can book in for a Free 30 Minute Discovery Call today!