Start simple and refine the workflows gradually: Drawing up a long list of rules for workflows and customer segments means a lot of work at first. But especially at the beginning, marketers should keep their automation as simple as possible: only identify the most important phases and one or two personas. Then you can gradually tweak the settings and experiment with workflows. If you start straight away with a complicated mechanism, you may end up investing a lot of time in the wrong place. It is best for marketers to start with a specific part of the customer journey, such as registering for a webinar, and outline any questions that may arise on the way to registration. From there, the process can be transferred to other situations and scaled relatively easily.
Think beyond email: Email is often the focus of marketing automation, but customers also interact with companies through many other channels. This can be remedied by using software and a strategy that delivers relevant content across all channels: from email to blogs and social networks to conversations with sales.
Coordination with sales: One of the biggest mistakes in marketing automation is not coordinating with sales. As a result, potential customers are often approached by several teams at the same time and overwhelmed with many contact attempts and inconsistent messages. Marketing and sales should agree on who addresses which contact and when with which content.
Marketing automation along the customer cycle: to convert prospects into leads and leads into customers. Not every customer journey starts from scratch - existing customers are also leads for up-selling and cross-selling. With every workflow, marketers should consider what they want to achieve with it and how they can ensure further qualification. Segmentation is italy telegram data particularly important here because it determines whether contacts receive the right content at the right time.
Content is still king: With the right workflows and segments, you will soon have a steady flow of new prospects, leads and customers. The key to success is useful and high-quality content. This is because it ensures that leads stay on the ball, subscribe to the blog, enjoy newsletters and ultimately become interested in the products and services.
Equip the website with intelligence: Marketing automation is also about how companies interact with visitors to their website. The HubSpot study also shows that only one in four marketers knows how the potential customer moved around the website, and only one in five can track which products and services they have already purchased. However, if you know your website visitors, you can better tailor your offer to their individual interests and optimally support contacts along the customer cycle.
The prerequisites for automation are often still missing
The basis for automated workflows along the entire customer journey is the technical integration of all channels - from emails to social media to the website. The entire marketing strategy can only be orchestrated with a central platform. However, according to the HubSpot study, those responsible often still rely on a combination of different individual solutions for their work. On average, they use six to seven different applications for CRM, services, email, social media, content creation, blogging and search engine optimization. However, such a complex application landscape has a negative impact on efficiency: half of German marketers spend more than ten percent of their budget on maintaining and integrating various tools. But linking the various tools is essential to further increase efficiency. This is the only way to automate processes - and provide contacts with the right content on an individual basis.