Crafting a successful marketing automation strategy

What defines a successful marketing automation strategy?

Marketing automation is best used to cultivate your leads for improved conversion rates and long-term customer retention. While some brands resort to buying their contact lists as an attempt to jumpstart their strategy, the healthiest way to create a strong marketing strategy is going to come from putting in the hard work and building from the ground up.

Typically, successful strategies will focus on increasing:

Qualified leads—76% of CMOs reported to Gleanster that they increased higher quality leads with implementation of marketing automation. Groove Digital Marketing reported buyer persona driven content improved companies’ SALs (sales accepted leads) volume by 45%.

Conversion rates—Arberdeen reported that companies using marketing automation reported seeing 53% higher conversion rates for their MQL (marketing qualified leads) than those who weren’t implementing marketing automation strategies.

Revenue—According to Gartner, companies that automate their lead nurturing have been able to measure a noticeable 10+% increase in their revenues within just 6-9 months. Groove Digital Marketing found that nearly half of all companies (44%) using marketing automation software experience ROI within 6 months and three out of four companies will report reaching ROI after one year.

Defining your strategy

In order to build a strategy that is successful, you have to define your direction clearly. You will want to form buyer personas so that your company has a clear snapshot of who your best customers and most qualified leads are. Then, you will want to establish lead stages so that you have a segmented contact list and you can address them according to their own positions in your inbound marketing funnel (or other noteworthy differences).

In order for your marketing automation strategy to work well, you need to know who you are addressing, what they care about, and then personalized your strategies to fit their wants and needs.

Conversions—Establish goals that will increase your email contact lists, boost your sales numbers or get users to sign up for your bulk texting.

Pinpointed Messages—Segment your contact lists based on demographics, location, business pain, job title, point in the buyer’s journey and more to address your contacts in a personalized way.

Scheduled Content—Plan ahead to avoid mundane content or rushed pieces that don’t appeal to your target audience. Your content calendar can help you see how multi-channel marketing strategies can be timed to work with special events, seasons and content topics to best fit your audience needs.

This means you could be sending SMS marketing campaign messages to your current customers to offer technical support or give them a follow-up deal. For B2B companies, it is a good idea to send out automated cart reminders for those leads that haven’t quite reached conversion Your automated marketing goals should be working hand-in-hand with your company goals and personal interests of your target audience in order to create a strategy that works.

Guest writer Sophorn Chhay is a Marketing Specialist at Trumpia

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