If you are planning your marketing for 2020, you are likely considering all your segments and campaigns to surprise and delight your current and potential customers.
Want to make sure you are not behind the times? Ask yourself this:
Are you also providing a customized experience for your customers no matter what channels they are engaging you on? For instance, does your data track your customer interactions with your organization on email, website, social media, events, etc. as the same user?
If you are personalizing your customer experience across marketing channels, I promise you, you are not engaging at a level that people expect and are now used to receiving. At worst, you are seen as tone deaf or “spammy” and at best you are seen as cold and uninterested in engaging with your customers (“that organization is talking at me not to me”).
There is no excuse for marketing to not be customized to the interests of your customers with the availability of marketing automation tools available on the market. The price points for these systems have come way down and the playing field has been leveled for functionality to a few minor assets that one has over others. Integrating your engagement across platforms has never been easier and more cost-effective.
Even if you have a marketing automation system, you may not be using the full power of its functionality. In this article we focus on segmentation, but we will have other articles soon on lead scoring and proving the return on investment (ROI) of the marketing departments efforts. Let’s talk about how you can intelligently use your system to get your customers to segment themselves.
Most of us start by mapping out our customer journey with knowledge from the marketing and sales teams. We capture the pathway(s) from start to finish and develop materials, tools and incentives to move your customers through their journey, and your sales funnel. With a marketing automation system, you set up algorithms that are triggered by the action of your customer at a pace that they determine through their action/non-action. Those actions trigger more options that are relevant and meaningful to the customer based on their previous action. This is the part that most organizations do well within their Marketing Automation systems. (If you want a fast, free demo of this, email me at sarah@stirlingmarketing.ca)
But here is where the value of your automation system really comes into play: The system will initially be set up to bring your audience through the sales cycle. But you adjust, tweak and invest in ways that your customers decide with their engagement, what your TRUE sales cycle is. In this way, you can use the data to start to see how customers differ in their interests and needs and you can start to invest quickly in filling gaps and divesting from areas that are not being used. You can superpower this up by strategically planning out your lead scoring system and triggers (stay tuned for a future article).
You might be saying “We have done this for years”. We see where the traffic is high and low and make decisions based on that.” But what organizations with marketing automation systems understand is exactly what mix of channels results in sales and resales.
Examples always help: In one organization, they realized that a landing page, an email offer and a handful of articles were responsible for 83.5% of customers that went on to buy. In fact, that landing page was not very appreciated at all up to that point and was slated to be deleted during a future website overhaul. One article was hard to find from their home page, buried deep in the site. Further digging into the multi-channel data-sets revealed that one action by a sales rep and one offer were responsible for 75% of re-sales within 30 days!
If you have a marketing automation system but you fear you are not using it to its full potential, give us a call for a free consultation and we can share ideas and strategies.
If you are unsure about how to get started with a marketing automation system, book a free call with us and we can give you a quick run-down of the available options and benefits. We don’t sell these systems, so can you get our honest opinion. You can also email me directly at sarah@stirlingmarketing.ca.
We want your customers to have the most positive, personalized experience possible and the investments you make into marketing and sales have the most impact for the least amount of budget.
For more marketing tips and tricks, visit www.stirlingmarketing.ca and sign up at the bottom of the page for free emails that we send out about 10 times a year (you can unsubscribe at any time with one click).
