08 Aug Marketing Automation
When prospects interact with your business at various times, whether they are signing up to an email list, downloading a white paper or sending an inquiry about a product, that interaction is an indication of where they are in their relationship with you as well as an indication of where they are in terms of their own business. While it may seem impersonal and mechanical, marketing automation is a great way to connect with your prospects and deliver content catered to their exact needs at that moment.
The reason marketing automation brings prospects to you is because your team has done several things to ensure that it happens. The first thing that your team needs to do is design a roadmap for your prospects. If your team already has specific goals and a strategy for your prospects, great. Revisit them. Make sure that you can align your marketing automation strategy with your goals. If you don’t know exactly what you want your prospects to do next and how to prompt them to do that, turning them into clients is going to be very difficult and marketing automation probably isn’t going to work for you.
Once you have your roadmap designed, the next thing your team will do is create content specifically for each stop along the roadmap. This is important because anything less than specific, well-crafted content relevant to the needs of your prospect will come off as insincere and you risk losing your prospect permanently or otherwise making it more difficult to convert in the future. The last thing you want is to send communication that becomes marked as spam or becomes nothing more than clutter in your prospects inbox. Your marketing automation tool will reveal what your prospect is interested in at the precise moment they are interested in it. This provides the ideal opportunity to build upon that interest and provide an email that is related to the topic they are interested in and lead them further down the road.
It’s also important to remember that you may need to make changes along the way and this is a part of the journey. If your tactics are not converting prospects the way your sales team needs or expects, then something needs to be tweaked. Maybe your emails aren’t going out at the right time, perhaps they’re too soon or too late, too few or too many. Maybe the content isn’t specific enough. Also, make sure that your clients are only getting one email per campaign. Duplicate emails are another sign of insincerity. While mistakes will happen, your prospects want to be treated as individuals.
There is a difference between marketing emails sent via a blast and personalized messages sent periodically or at specific times. One method turns prospects away and the other turns prospects into clients. The larger the reach of your marketing efforts the more necessary marketing automation becomes. This doesn’t have to mean cookie-cutter emails. In fact, with marketing automation, it provides the opportunity for just the opposite and that’s what brings your prospects to you.
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