Advances in marketing technology can help you focus your communication on what is most important to your customers. It is meant to present old communications in new ways across new media and new devices. With the power to adapt messages across channels, and to engage with every individual based on their preferences and behaviors, new technologies are beginning to fulfill the promise of truly personalized marketing.
So what are you missing if you aren’t using a marketing automation platform today? How do you know if you and your team are ready to move from email campaigns in a silo to omnichannel campaigns across devices? Here are four ways to determine if you are ready for marketing automation:
Are You Missing Out On New Subscribers?
An effective opt-in process helps to set an accurate and positive notion of what’s to come when someone visits your website. It is your opportunity to build trust and set expectations about your email marketing. Therefore a landing page or pop-up form where a subscriber enters their email address is your first chance to establish a relationship with potential leads.
Marketing automation software will offer either a single or double opt-in feature to allow visitors who complete a form on one of your landing pages to confirm that they want to receive communication from you. A new subscriber will enter their information and implicitly or explicitly opt-in to get more information about your service or product. An immediate auto-response email is triggered and sent which will thank and welcome the subscriber. This automated process will ensure that you capture new visitors and leads that are more qualified and likely to engage with your content, as they’ve confirmed that they are interested.
Are You Still Sending Manual Batch Campaigns?
One important function of marketing automation is simplifying routine organizational and marketing tasks. It effectively eliminates repetitive manual processes by automating manual marketing tasks. This, in turn, increases productivity as marketing department personnel are able to put increased focus on more important tasks.
Besides saving you time and resources, automating your email campaigns can help move prospects further down the funnel and generate more qualified leads. Leveraging triggered campaigns helps drive engagement by delivering messages at a time when consumers expect to be contacted. The greatest opportunities for triggered campaigns are from cross-selling and upselling, but also from asking consumers to share their satisfaction, provide feedback and ratings, or sign up for exclusive offers. Revenue shouldn’t be looked at as only immediate revenue – your strategy should include as many opportunities to increase customer lifetime value (CLV) as possible through ongoing engagement.
Are You Using Several Marketing Tools?
Traditional email marketing tools were designed for just one channel – email. It started as a single communications channel with no core connection to other marketing channels. Even today, companies that use standalone email service providers (ESPs) are stuck with a legacy approach. Enter marketing automation software. Marketing automation is channel-agnostic in the sense that it can be used to automate activities across various tools which includes email, SEO, CRM, and social media. Additionally, the software serves as a centralized hub for a variety of marketing activities, making your life a whole lot easier.
Distributing relevant and personalized content across all of your digital channels is of paramount importance. And if one of your goals is to increase revenue, then your marketing strategies must include broad customer engagement tactics, made possible with the proper marketing software. Having a tool that can execute on your multi-channel strategy and unify your products and teams will help tie together the customer relationship over time and across all marketing channels.
Do You Need to Improve Your Metrics?
In the United States, the average open rate of an email was 24.8% in 2017. If your emails are in the bottom of the open rate curve, this means less than 1 in 10 people are even reading your message. Even at the top of the curve, only 4 in 10 people ever open your message. Personalization is the key to better email engagement. Personalized messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. Personalized subject lines alone are 26% more likely to be opened. Marketing automation software allows you to leverage features such as dynamic content, snippets, and tokens to drive personalization and increase engagement.
Consumers are always on, always connected, and overwhelmed. If you want to connect with them, you will need to work harder to engage them. In order to be truly effective, your email marketing must become more relevant and more strategic. When implementing personalization, your email can significantly enhance metrics, increase revenue, maximize return on marketing investments, and increase the lifetime value of your customers.
Ready to Make the Leap?
If you answered “yes” to at least one of these questions, then it’s time to take the leap and adopt marketing automation software, or begin using the features in your existing tool. But how do you navigate through this new software? Marketing automation can help you streamline and be more effective with your marketing strategy but in some cases can become problematic. We can help you evaluate and optimize your software to fit your 2018 goals and help you save valuable time and money.