As marketers, we all understand that email marketing has a huge role to play in a marketing automation solution, however the features that come as part of a marketing automation solution go far beyond the creation, the sending and tracking of emails. Granted, features can vary between different providers, this is why in our latest blog article, we will provide you with 5 ways that your business can take marketing automation past email marketing.
1) Nurture marketing
If you didn’t already know, nurture marketing is often referred to as campaign automation and is the act of sending a whole host of personalised communications to either a contact or lead over a designated period time based on their engagements. On the whole, nurture campaigns largely consists of emails, however, can also include things like phone calls or any other channel that is used to make contact with a customer or prospect. Automated nurture programs work based on the actions that users make whilst at the nurture stage which gives that added personalisation. Through the use of a number of decision points created in a campaign automation, nurture marketing can enable you to reply to your leads and customers actions by sending messages that relate to those specific actions. This added personalisation can give people the impression that you are more than simply another person to contact.
2) Lead Scoring
This process involves giving leads a ranking based on how interested a prospect is in a business’s products/services, the chances of them making a purchase and at which point they will be at the point to make the transition from a prospect to a customer. Through the use of a leading scoring model, you can give prospects points based on specific actions. For example, someone that downloads a whitepaper from your website you could give 10 points for or if someone visits your campaign page you may decide to give them 30 points. The use of lead scoring can enable both sales and marketing to collaborate together on what factors will constitute a hot lead and can follow up where required.
3) Surveys
Despite the fact that surveys can be conducted in numerous ways, the most common form nowadays is usually online for businesses to gain practical feedback from their target audiences and better still, this is a feature that is included in most marketing automation solutions. Are you looking to find out what attendees thought about your latest training session or webinar? The use of surveys can give you those added insights in not only this situation but many different ones too. Better still, they can enable you to make more reliable and data driven decisions about how to exceed customer expectations with your marketing and gather valuable information about issues that are impacting on your captive audience.
4) Landing pages and forms
It is important to note that landing pages are webpages that are different from those on company websites and are designed with the sole purpose of generating additional leads for the business. This is where forms come in on these landing pages to enable you to gather lead data when someone completes a specific action like downloads a whitepaper, books a free consultation and so on. These two marketing automation features are so important as they enable you to focus on a single piece of content in order to collate valuable data from your leads. Furthermore, landing pages can provide a much slicker experience over a webpage by removing all things that could be distracting such as a navigation bar and provide just a single call to action which on the whole leads to an increase in conversions.
5) Subscription management
If you weren’t already aware of this, subscription management enables email subscribers to choose which emails they wish to receive and which ones they don’t. To put this into context in the form of an example, a contact or lead may wish to hear about the latest Microsoft products, however, might not be so keen to hear about company news. This way you put your subscribers in the power position by allowing them to choose to receive all of your emails or just a few that are of interest to them. Nowadays, customers want to decide on things and have personalised experiences which means that they would rather opt out of everything than receive emails about things they don’t want to hear about.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that likes the above features that come as part of a highly tailored marketing automation solution such as ClickDimensions and want to discuss your requirements further please contact us today.
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