Ch. 3: How to use marketing automation tools
Automate your email.
Automated email is a core component of marketing automation platforms, and with great reason. Automating your email is much more than scheduling messages to send when nobody’s at the computer. With email marketing automation, you can trigger workflows based on specific user actions ranging from signing up for your newsletter to abandoning an online shopping cart after putting items in it. Depending on the trigger action — and the user’s profile — anything from a simple email send to an adaptive content campaign can be set into motion.
As customers move through their buying journeys, your automated email tools move with them. Newly segmented mailing lists can be auto-generated based on new user data. The content and timing of email campaigns can be changed when users change their preferences, and as they pass through the marketing funnel.
Set a drip marketing automation program.
Integrate marketing automation with CRM.
Marketing automation platforms are awesome on their own. But integrating your automation with a CRM system takes everything to a new level.
A few of the many great reasons to connect your marketing automation and CRM tools together:
- Give your sales team the best leads. Marketing automation systems gather all kinds of data on prospects, and use that data to score and grade leads. Connect the system to CRM, and automatically pass the best-scoring leads on to your sales teams.
- Tailor your messaging. Speaking of data, flowing information from automated marketing to CRM lets you arm your sales teams with detailed behavioural profiles on prospects. Now they can tailor pitches and build the kind of individual relationships that win deals.
- Nurture leads throughout the journey. When marketing and sales work together, leads who aren’t yet ready to buy don’t slip through the cracks — they’re nurtured until they’re ready to make deals.
- Customise messages to grab their attention. That behavioural data we already talked about? It keeps coming in handy. Leverage what you learn about prospects to send targeted messages, personalised to what they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle.
- Highlight campaigns that move the needle. When you tie a marketing automation system to CRM, you can map closed deals back to the campaigns that created them. From there it’s a breeze to pinpoint the marketing campaigns that impact revenue, and plan future strategies and spends accordingly.
