I am sure that everyone reading this at some stage in their life has played ‘pin the tail on the donkey’. What a ridiculous game, that normally results in the poor old donkey having a tail appended to every part of their body other than the correct place.
If you want to pin a tail on a donkey, you need to take off the blindfold. If you want to be a smart marketer, you also need to take the blindfold off.
Marketing Blind
Digital marketing is more important now than at any time before, however, ramping up a ‘hit and hope’ approach will not generate the results that you desperately need. You need to be smart. You need to understand and target different audiences, you need to analyse how they engage with you and you have to focus on taking people on journeys.
In theory, most marketers see the benefits that Marketing Automation can offer, yet either feel they are not ready yet for this sophistication or cannot justify the cost. Why would you not be ready to take the blindfold off, and how can you not justify something that will make you exponentially more effective?
Let me walk you through just three of the reasons why you need to relook at Marketing Automation.
1. Transform eMarketing
According to Campaign Monitor, the Industry Average open rates for emails in the technology sector is 17.6% and click to open ratios are 14.3%. A lot of marketers only dream of achieving these rates as they constantly face diminishing returns from eMarketing. Unless you can get smarter and achieve or exceed benchmark averages, there is no point is simply ramping up activity.
Segment & Personalise – using marketing automation to leverage the wealth of CRM data to segment audiences and then personalise copy blocks in your email will significantly increase engagement.
A|B Testing – testing different subject lines, copy blocks and call to actions will enable you to get smarter and continually improve results.
Predictive Send – when you send an email can significantly impact results, apparently Tuesday is the best day for opens and Friday is the best day for clicks. Why guess when a Marketing Automation platform can send each email at the time it knows is best for that person to engage with it?
2. Engage Customers
Whereas you are likely to know how many customers came to your event, attended your webinar or opened your newsletter, can you measure the level of engagement of each customer or identify those customers that are not engaging across any activity? To reduce customer churn and maximise customer revenue streams, you need customer marketing to be effective and you need to connect the dots.
Marketing Automation enables you to measure engagement across all channels and then to drill down on this to understand exactly what is going on in your customer base and how you can get closer.
3. Turning Interest into Intent
It is easy to get focused on the top of the funnel and declaring victory in the number of new leads being generated. However, your success will ultimately be measured on how many of these initial glimpses of interest you can turn into real intent to buy. Marketing Automation can help you get smart in this area:
Lead Scoring – enabling every point of engagement to be tracked and scored so that you can monitor the progression of leads through the marketing funnel.
Automated Programmes – allowing you to focus on initial engagement points and automatically follow-up and take the person on a journey to quickly progress them through the funnel.
Measure Effectiveness – not only seeing what activity generates interest, but which activity and programmes are effective at progressing leads through the funnel and into opportunities.
These are just three ways that Marketing Automation can significantly improve the effectiveness of your marketing activity; there are many more. Being restricted by budget or by time are not reasons to ignore Marketing Automation but are drivers to consider it. Marketing Automation can help you remove the blindfold, to make exponential improvements and to get the time back to do the right things, in the right way, to get the right results.
If you are interested in learning more about Marketing Automation from practitioners that use these tools every day of the week, we would love to speak to you. Simply reach out to us by email info@cremarc.com or call us on 01932 856158 and we will connect you with one of our team to share their experience.
