Automation is the unsung hero of marketing strategies. It helps increase leads, conversions, and ultimately revenue, is proven to boost sales and productivity, as well as streamlining marketing professionals’ day-to-day workloads.
For these reasons and many others, marketing automation is now imperative for any successful marketing strategy. Marketers need to take into account, however, how their customers are engaging with, and responding to, automated campaigns.
Here is a list of 8 more B2C marketing automation examples at work.
1. Continuously ‘Remind’ Consumers About Your Brand
Did a customer leave something in their cart without purchasing? Did someone not click on a certain email? Is there a common second purchase that a customer should be aware of? Marketing automation can continuously send reminder emails to keep your brand at the top of a customer’s mind, and inbox. These types of campaigns can include newsletter sign ups, customer feedback emails, and offer emails.
2. Automate Campaigns Across Multiple Channels
Multi-channel programs are paramount in the age of social media. Customers are everywhere, and your brand needs to be omnipresent. Marketing automation can help reach these consumers on different platforms, at the right time, without spamming them. Automated emails are just the tip of the iceberg; social interactions and text messages can now all be automated, and are useful for interacting with hard-to-engage customers.
3. Send Shipping and Transactional Emails in Real Time
This is probably the most common example of marketing automation for B2C marketers. Buyers now expect a confirmation email after an online purchase, as well as updates throughout the entire fulfillment and shipping process. With B2C marketing automation solutions, these updates can be triggered in real time for immediate notifications.
4. Nurture Customers Throughout the Entire Buying Cycle
As customers move through the consumer lifecycle, from education, to purchase, to upsell, marketers must constantly be engaging them with new content. Marketing automation enables marketers to build complex journeys that leverage all available consumer data. Knowing the best send times for certain groups, the ideal subject line for a specific audience, or the optimal incentive for a single buyer, can help hone in and optimize these relationships.
5. Create Turnkey Campaigns for Continued Success
For most marketers, a campaign’s success is a sign to put it on repeat. Automation tools make it easy to replicate successful campaigns, while pausing those that may need a few tweaks. The best campaigns can be repeated as many times as necessary to continually reap the benefits. Creating turnkey processes is one huge benefit, not only of marketing automation solutions, but advanced marketing technologies in general.
6. Rely on Web-Based Triggers for Maximum Action
When consumers interact or engage with a website, these ‘triggers’ can then automatically set off content-specific campaigns. Depending on what a certain person engages with on a site, a marketing automation solution can tailor messaging specific to them. This is the easiest and most efficient way to personalize the customer journey almost immediately. Web-based triggers can also help marketing teams learn more about the ideal consumer and where they should focus.
7. Test, Test, Test for Continuous Optimization
As with any new strategy, marketing automation works best when it is continually tested and optimized. Marketers should use A/B testing to experiment with new messages, brand changes, and other ideas. Marketing automation is a good way to test the quality of certain messages because you can send different content to different groups for maximum optimization.
8. Know When You’re Succeeding and When You Need to Make Some Changes
The only way to know if a campaign is succeeding is to measure and analyze the data. Marketers must look at all open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to evaluate success or failure. When starting a new automated campaign, teams must make sure the goals are aligned to predetermined benchmarks to ensure success out of the gate.
Final Thoughts
Marketing automation solutions aren’t going anywhere, this technology is here to stay. What other marketing automation best practices did we not mention? Let us know by commenting below!
To learn more about how marketing automation works for B2C marketers, download our whitepaper.
Related Articles: