Marketing Automation

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Integrating automation tools

In order to streamline certain tasks which can be effectively conducted by machines, saving both time and money, we can implement a series of automation tasks across our inbound marketing efforts. When applied correctly, marketing automation tools can do great things, like dynamically serve or modify web page content and personalize it to certain segments of your website visitors to get the best response, and send emails out to customer segments and leads based on criteria which is set.

If this, then that

For example, customers can be taken on different journeys depending on how they interact with your email content. A series of automation rules and journeys is called a workflow. Now, setting up a workflow is a list of what's called "if this, then that" settings, and it's a system that allows us to automate based on logic.

"If this, then that" is a way of using logic and options to decide what happens next after someone takes an action. For example, if someone clicks on email link one, then send email two. Or if someone does not click on email link one, send email number three. So, this allows us to anticipate what might happen. And it's anticipating and knowing what users might do with your content that allows you to kind of display different things on your website, create different scenarios, send different emails, and automate a different transactional workflow to engage with that consumer.

Of course, a further enhancement of automation is that many marketing automation tools can be integrated with your CRM, allowing you to personalize content on your website to individual users within that database or send them highly specific emails to their needs.

Rules and workflows

Rules and workflows can be settled based on CRM segments relating to things like customer criteria. For example, how much did they spend in the last 30 days? This is a great way of figuring out what are the type of workflows you want to send for this particular person. We can also look at whether they're a top-tier client, we can look at their purchase history, we can look at length of time as a customer, and their location.

When deciding on your automation workflows, choose high-impact criteria as a way of segmenting customers and aim to deliver them the most relevant content for their needs and their stage of the customer journey because it's all about them.

Now, streamlining the automation processes can really increase the effectiveness of your digital channels by allowing the machines to automate and optimize the processes faster, more accurately, and at times when humans simply can't influence the channel mix. And in that regard, that is how marketing automation can enhance your overall channel strategy.