How To Formulate A Top Marketing Automation Strategy? A 2023 Guide

February 21, 2023
by
Ammar Mazhar
How To Formulate A Top Marketing Automation Strategy? A 2023 Guide

Table of contents

Welcome to the world of marketing automation! In today's fast-paced digital age, businesses need to be able to quickly and efficiently engage with their customers to stay competitive. That's where marketing automation trends and strategies come in, providing a robust and streamlined approach to managing your marketing campaigns. 

By automating repetitive tasks such as email campaigns, social media postings, and lead scoring, you can save time and increase efficiency, allowing you to focus on more critical tasks, such as developing creative strategies to engage with your users. With the right marketing automation strategy in place and using the right marketing automation platforms, you can improve your ROI and increase revenue by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

But let's face it. We've all received those awkward automated emails that need to be corrected completely. Like when you get a birthday message from a company you last did business with in years ago. It can be a little cringy, but it's also a great reminder of how important it is to get your marketing automation strategy right! So, whether you're just starting or looking to revamp your current strategy, it's time to embrace the power of marketing automation and take your business to the next level.

What is a marketing automation strategy?

Marketing automation strategy is using marketing automation tools and software to streamline marketing efforts, create successful marketing automation strategies, and improve marketing processes. With the right marketing automation platform, you can generate leads, run ad campaigns, and create cohesive marketing strategies that resonate with potential customers at every stage of their customer journey. 

Using the right marketing automation tools, you can easily create personalized content that targets the right audience at the right time and increases customer engagement and brand loyalty. However, choosing the right marketing automation solution can be overwhelming, especially when many automation tools are available. To create a successful marketing automation strategy, you need to identify your business goals and determine which marketing strategies best meet those goals.

But don't worry, AppFlows is here to help! We understand that only some people are marketing automation experts, which is why we offer automation tools to help you develop a marketing automation strategy that works for your business. Remember! A successful marketing automation strategy is not just about automating your marketing campaigns but also about understanding your users' needs and creating personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with them. So, put your trust in the right marketing automation software and create effective marketing campaigns that will take your business to the next level!

What can marketing automation help you with?

Marketing automation can help businesses in a multitude of ways. It helps to reduce repetitive tasks and increase efficiency, and it empowers you to make informed decisions with the help of real-time data analysis. Here are some specific areas where marketing automation can help you: 

Infographic: What can marketing automation help you with?

1. Lead generation

At every point of the user journey, marketing automation solutions can assist you in attracting and capturing prospects. To find high-quality leads, it is necessary to generate tailored content that corresponds to the interests and preferences of your potential clients. This procedure can be automated, generating more leads and conversions while using less time and resources.

2. Nurturing leads

Following lead acquisition, marketing automation can assist in interacting with and guiding prospects through the sales process. You can nurture your leads until they are prepared to purchase by giving them the relevant information at the right time using personalized content and automated workflows.

3. Customer retention

After they've made a purchase, marketing automation can help you keep them interested and satisfied by continuing to send them relevant content. This helps keep customers loyal, lowers churn rates , and encourages repeat business through focused campaigns and timely information.

Many examples of companies have leveraged marketing automation to achieve great results. One such example is Airbnb. In 2015, Airbnb launched a comprehensive marketing automation strategy that helped the company double its bookings in just one year. The company used marketing automation tools to improve its email marketing campaigns, personalize its website content, and segment its audiences, resulting in increased engagement, loyalty, and revenue. 

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your marketing activities, consider using marketing automation as a method to do so.

How to develop a marketing automation strategy?

Picture this: you're a product marketer trying to keep up with your growing customer base, but your marketing efforts must catch up. You need help with social media, email marketing, and website updates. You're juggling so many tasks you feel like a circus performer. That's where marketing automation comes in. By automating repetitive tasks, you can focus on what really matters - growing your business. Now the question is; how to develop this automation strategy that can help grow your business by minimizing tasks that require micro management. 

Here are some tips you can adopt to develop a marketing automation strategy. 

1. Research your existing users

By researching your existing customer base, you can create targeted campaigns that resonate with them and boost sales. Here are some of the valuable insights you can gain from researching your existing user base:

Your top users, who bring in the most money, have the highest retention rates, or refer the most to you, can be found by examining your current user base. These customers can be the foundation for focused marketing campaigns that seek to upsell, cross-sell, or promote referrals. 

Understand you customers' behavior by tracking your customers' behavior, such as their browsing history, purchase history, and interactions with your website or social media. You can gain insights into their preferences and interests.

You can find opportunities to improve your customer journey by looking at how your consumers engage with your company. For instance, you may spot where customers lose interest along the customer journey and design tailored advertisements to pique their interest again. Also, by testing your campaigns with your existing user base, you can refine your strategy and improve your ROI. By analyzing the results of your campaigns, you can identify what works and what doesn't and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.

2. Define your ideal user personas

Defining your ideal user persona is essential in designing a successful marketing automation strategy. By creating a detailed and accurate picture of your target audience, you can create campaigns that resonate with them and ultimately drive more conversions. Market research and studying your target market can help you gain insights into their demographics, behaviors, and pain points. You can use online tools, surveys, or interviews to gather this information. 

Create a persona template that includes age, gender, occupation, income, interests, pain points, and goals. Use this template to create a detailed and accurate picture of your ideal user. Use data-driven insights to refine your persona over time. Track your campaigns, website analytics, and customer feedback to identify areas where you can improve your marketing automation strategy.

Overall, defining your ideal user persona is an ongoing process that requires regular updates and refinement

3. Set your marketing automation goals

Create a plan for achieving your marketing automation goals. This might include a content calendar, email campaigns, social media posts, and other marketing activities that align with your goals. Make sure that your plan is realistic and achievable. Start by defining your marketing automation goals. Be specific and measurable, and align them with your overall business objectives. For example, if your goal is to generate more leads, define what constitutes a lead and set a target number. 

Establish a baseline for your metrics. This will help you measure progress and determine whether your marketing automation efforts are having an impact. Use historical data to establish your baseline. Monitor your progress toward your marketing automation goals and adjust your plan as needed. Use your metrics to track progress, identify improvement areas, and adjust your marketing activities. 

Marketing automation goals are designed to help businesses achieve specific objectives that contribute to their overall success. These goals can vary depending on the business and its industry, but some common ones include lead generation, lead nurturing, customer engagement, and customer retention

4. Pick the right metrics to track

Identify the key stages of your customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase. This will help you identify the most important metrics at each stage, such as satisfaction scores.  Don't overwhelm yourself with too many metrics. Focus on the metrics most important to your goals, which will help you make data-driven decisions. You can always add more metrics later on as your marketing automation strategy evolves.

4.1. ROI

ROI provides a clear indication of whether the marketing automation strategy is actually generating revenue or not. It helps determine whether the strategy is worth the investment and whether changes need to be made to improve results. Also, ROI can help with budgeting decisions by providing insights into marketing automation strategies generating the most revenue. This helps ensure that budget is allocated towards the most effective strategies and that resources are used efficiently.

4.2. Average order value

AOV measures the average amount a customer spends during a single purchase or transaction. Some reasons why average order value is an important metric to measure includes providing insight into how much value a customer is bringing to the business. By increasing AOV, a business can generate more revenue from each user. By understanding AOV, a business can adjust pricing strategies to optimize revenue. For example, a company may adjust pricing to encourage users to spend more on each transaction.

4.3. Cost per acquisition

Understanding the CPA of a campaign can help businesses control costs and optimize their marketing budgets. If the CPA is too high, it may indicate that the campaign needs to generate more conversions or that the cost of the campaign needs to be reduced. CPA can assist organizations in better focusing their marketing initiatives. Businesses can determine the most cost-effective channels for producing conversions by examining the CPA for various channels.  

CPA is a crucial measure for determining the success of a marketing automation campaign because it aids in cost control, marketing effort optimization, and campaign ROI assessment for firms.

4.4. Trial to paid user conversions

While creating a marketing automation strategy for converting maximum trial users to paid versions, identify the different touchpoints a customer goes through when upgrading from a trial to a paid version. Knowing the customer journey will help you create targeted messages that resonate with the customer at each stage. Much like the other metrics while studying trial to paid conversions, keep track of all the analytics gathered after implementing the strategy and make sure to use them effectively while devisign it the next time for better results. 

4.5. Conversion rate across acquisition channels

Conversion rate across acquisition channels is a crucial metric to consider when developing a marketing automation strategy since it enables you to determine which channels are most effective at generating conversions and how effective each channel is at bringing in new clients. Your marketing automation approach can be improved with the use of this information, allowing you to concentrate on the channels that are producing the best results.

5. Put your strategy into action

All your marketing efforts depend upon one thing, What your strategy is and how you are implementing that strategy. Create your lead nurturing campaigns, activities, and triggers for your marketing automation workflows. Ensure your workflows are built to increase conversions and move leads through the sales process. 

Choose a marketing automation platform that works with your current technological stack and satisfies your needs. Ensure that your marketing automation solutions capture the data needed to track your KPIs. While automation can save time and improve efficiency, it's important to strike a balance between automation and personalization. Collecting data is only the first step. Make sure you use your data to drive insights and inform your marketing strategy. 

6. Choose the right automation campaigns

Being able to choose the right automation campaigns for your business is critical. Below are a few types that you can choose from for your business.

6.1. Kick-off relationship with your users

When choosing the right marketing automation campaign to start a relationship with a user, consider what will resonate with the user and create a positive first impression. Give new users a personalized welcome email that expresses gratitude for choosing your brand and provides information about your goods or services. Consider designing a campaign to educate new users and give them helpful information. They could learn more about your sector or products through webinars, whitepapers, or other tools. 

6.2. Onboard new users

Onboarding new users is the most challenging and important part of building a strong relationship with them and setting them up for success with your product or service. Use video content to provide a more engaging and dynamic onboarding experience. Video tutorials and demos can be a great way to show new clients how to use your product or service. Make it easy for new users to get in touch with you if they have any questions or issues. Provide multiple support channels, such as email, chat or phone, and be responsive to their needs. 

6.3. Nurture new users

Now, throughout each stage, the process goes similar. As discussed, the key is always to provide customers with information to solve their problems. Stand in the client's shoes to understand what obstacles they can face throughout the customer lifecycle or what impact the product can help solve their problem. People usually interact more with others when they feel the other person has the solution to their problem. This will help nurture new users and ultimately close more sales. 

6.4. Upsell your existing customers

Upselling is one way you can boost your sales. It is usually the most undiscovered area throughout the customer lifecycle in most of the cases, but upselling is easier than we think. Imagine a person who has already buyed something from your company and has an overall experience with the product versus someone new to your product. The one already using your product will likely have a greater chance of trusting it if they are satisfied. Conclusively, upselling has the potential to lift your sales game! 

6.5. Re-engage your inactive users

There is a chunk in your directory that you consider as junk! Those customers who have already purchased your product and once were active users, and are now forgotten, can be reached back and can give you more sales. The only lack both sides are facing is communication. By approaching your inactive customers, you can offer them amazing discounts and offers to redeem them. Once they are back on board, you can show them relevant content that solves their problems and can convert them into active customers. 

7. Improve your strategy through A/B testing

A/B testing can be used to test different subject lines for your emails. Experiment with various formats, lengths, and styles to see which ones perform best in open and click-through rates. The key is establishing clear goals and measurements for each test and having a large enough sample size to obtain significant results. You can improve your marketing automation approach and produce greater outcomes for your organization by regularly testing and improving your campaigns. 

You can test different offers or incentives to see which ones drive more engagement and conversions. Different landing page designs or content  can be tested to see which ones drive more conversions. Your send times matter a lot. Check out on your send times and try sending emails at different times while testing. This will let you know what time is best for each user specifically. 

7 Best practices to follow when building your marketing automation strategy

Now that we have covered how to build a marketing automation strategy, it's time for you to know how to optimize it. Here are a few best practices that can help.

Infographic: 7 Best practices to follow when building your marketing automation strategy

1. Take advantage of multi-channel automation

Multi-channel automation is an increase to marketing automation that allows you to reach out to your audience over numerous channels, including email, social media, SMS, and more. Collect data from all your marketing channels, and use it to build a 360-degree view of your audience. This can help you understand their behavior, preferences, and interests, and use this information to personalize your messaging and content. 

Instead of siloed campaigns targeting just one channel, create campaigns collaborating across several channels. You could utilize social media ads to generate website traffic and follow up with tailored messaging and content via email.

2. Put tracking in place

Track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions using tools like Google Analytics. This can assist you in better understanding how your audience interacts with your website and other digital assets, allowing you to optimize your campaigns for better outcomes. Set up conversion tracking to track when customers take specific actions, such as filling out a form or making a purchase.

3. Leverage the use of lead scoring

The technique of providing a numerical value to each lead based on their activity, engagement, and demographics is known as lead scoring. You can rank leads based on their potential to convert using lead scoring and use this information to personalize your messaging and content. Using lead scoring, you can optimize conversion rates by focusing on the most likely convert leads. This can help you increase your conversion rates and maximize the ROI of your marketing automation campaigns.

4. Clean your email lists

A clean email list contains only genuine and engaged subscribers. Deleting unengaged or invalid subscribers can help you improve email deliverability, increase engagement rates, and prevent being flagged as spam. By cleaning your email list, you can ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date.

5. Follow data privacy regulations

A system of laws and regulations that control how companies gather utilize, keep, and distribute personal data is known as data privacy regulations. These standards must be followed while developing a marketing automation strategy to ensure that firms handle personal data lawfully and ethically and preserve individuals' privacy rights. Some of these regulations include: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and others. 

Companies must be aware of applicable legislation, get explicit consent for data collection, verify the accuracy and security of personal data, and implement necessary measures. Noncompliance with these standards can result in serious legal and financial consequences and reputational harm.

6. Utilize customer feedback to improve

User feedback is the most important thing after all the efforts that you made throughout to gain the customer. Your customer feedback is what new users see first when interacting with your brand. People rely on the information and buy your product if the current customers' feedback is positive. In contrast, in the vice versa case, people tend not to engage in a transaction with a company with negative feedback. 

7. Focus on the quality of your relationship with the users

When it comes to developing good relationships, consistency is essential. Be certain that your communication is consistent across all channels and that you convey the appropriate message in the proper time. Listening to user input can help you better understand their wants and preferences, enhancing your product or service. Any strong connection is built on trust. To develop trust with your consumers, be upfront about your data collection and usage practices, ensure the security of user data, and give outstanding customer assistance.

Conclusion

Consequently, a well-planned and executed marketing automation approach may be a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes. Keep in mind that marketing automation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Every company has its objectives and obstacles, and a successful marketing automation approach necessitates careful planning, testing, and constant optimization.

Businesses should focus on establishing their goals, target audience, and the channels and strategies that are most effective for reaching and connecting with their customers when developing a marketing automation strategy. Companies should also pay particular attention to data privacy standards and guarantee that customer data is collected and used responsibly and transparently.

Author Bio

Ammar Mazhar

Ammar Mazhar

Content writer by day and a book nerd by night, Ammar Mazhar has been writing for 3 years for B2B and B2C businesses. As a wordsmith, Ammar knows how to write SEO-optimized content that your users will find insightful, igniting results for your business.

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