The marketing automation (MA) software industry is worth a mammoth $6.1 billion, and more than 480,000 websites are using this technology to generate leads. Around 51% of businesses across the globe use MA to automate daily repetitive tasks like:
- Welcome emails when an existing customer or prospect (lead) signs up for your newsletter
- Thank you emails when a lead has made a purchase or given feedback
- Follow up emails and SMS after a lead shows interest in your product or service
However, for MA to be successful, it needs to be personalised to avoid your communication feeling random, irrelevant and distanced. To achieve this, follow these three tips:
Marketing automation with a personal touch
A huge part of personalisation is achieved by understanding where your leads are on their customer journey and nurturing them until they convert. For better clarity, let’s break this up into steps:
Step 1: Track your customer journey
This is also known as the sales pipeline, and it involves tracking your leads’ every action until they make the final purchase or sign up for services. The goal is to move them along to the final stage by following up through automated messages dependent on where they are in the sales pipeline. The more information you have about each lead, the easier it is to nurture since your messaging will become more personalised to their demographics, website behaviour and other actions online.
Step 2: Communicate through segmented lists
Once you have a detailed understanding of your leads, it’s time for the actual communication to begin. To ensure your marketing automation is personalised, you need to segment your leads into smaller groups that share similarities. They may share similar demands, complaints or needs. Once they are segmented into lists, it makes it easy to send targetted and relevant emails and other forms of communication to each of these separate groups.
Step 3: Trigger campaigns for hyper-personalisation
Event-trigger marketing, also known as trigger marketing, takes your personalisation into hyperdrive using automation tools to generate and send out marketing messages based on events within the customer life-cycle.For example, an ‘event’ takes place when a lead fills in an enquiry form on your website that requires them to choose a product or service they want to know more about from a list of multiple options. Based on their selection, marketing automation will enable you to immediately send a pre-written follow-up email that’s personalised based on the selection on the form. Recent stats show that triggered emails have a 70.5% higher open rate and 152% higher click-through rate than generic email newsletters.
Through trigger-based marketing, you can send automated messages (emails, push notifications and text messages) when a lead takes specific action or goes from one stage to another in the sales pipeline
Your marketing automation becomes personalised by implementing these steps as your leads are delivered messages that show you’re listening to their unique needs and wants.
There’s no place for unwanted contact or spammy communication. It’s all about using precise targetting to nurture them by providing information and answers they’re looking for and eventually convert them into loyal customers.
The human element
AI technology is taking marketing automation into the future with intelligent chatbots, dynamic email responses and voice automation technology. It’s convenient and generates immediate responses – but there is an obvious downside – it lacks authentic contact with a human being. To overcome this, it’s essential that your communication gives your leads the option to talk with a real person for any urgent matter. This humanises communication in a world where impersonal, machine-based responses are taking over. It shows your leads you’re happy to hear from them and don’t mind taking the time to respond to their queries.
The basics still matter
Marketing automation makes personalisation highly targetted and effective. But don’t forget the basics while you’re setting up these processes. Automated messages with empty merge fields make even the most relevant messages feel impersonal and out of touch. To avoid this, make sure you’re using custom fields in your email, SMS and push notification templates. These allow you to add the names of your customers or prospects and other personal details such as order numbers, loyalty statuses and local store locations when you’re sending automated messages . Including these details in your communication ensures your leads know you’re dedicated to a long-term relationship with them.
How we helped our client achieve over £82k in revenue through automation
Our client, Cardiff Cosmetic Clinic, needed our help promoting their new service offerings – premium radio-frequency aesthetic treatments. The clinic needed to find the right clients for these latest treatments, so they turned to ONCREE for help.
We immediately got the ball rolling by first setting up a booking platform, enquiry touch points and a lead nurturing system based on in-depth customer research and purchase data. We then got busy building full Facebook Ad campaigns and sales pipelines to help us identify where each customer was in their journey. We then set up email and SMS sequences personalised to each stage. This enabled us to respond to specific customer concerns rather than sending generic emails that had no relevance. Since lead nurturing is an ongoing process, we continued to manage this by creating a series of habit and interest-based audiences to cultivate cold traffic, nurture warm audiences and effectively re-target existing customers with the right message.
After implementing our plan of action, we achieved phenomenal results for Cardiff Cosmetic Clinic, which included:
- Generating £82k in revenue with a 8.6x return from an ad spend of just £9.5k
- Attracting 405 high-value leads at the low cost of £23 per lead
- Implementing a new built-in CRM system that effectively nurtures leads
Check out our in-depth article to find out more about marketing automation.
At ONCRÉE, we know how to manage marketing automation platforms to grow your leads and convert them into customers. We can set up sales pipelines, create personalised messages and target these to relevant audiences to ensure your automated tasks and campaigns are successful.
ONCRÉE is a Creative and Media Agency that blends creativity, data and strategy to help your business meet goals, drive results and ultimately grow to exciting heights! If you want to own your space and stamp of authority on social media, search engines, email, and any other platforms your audience uses, we have the expertise to make it happen. Contact us today to find out more.
