Marketing Automation is about three things: people, processes, and bottlenecks. It’s a little bit abstract right now but stick with me and we’ll tackle how to optimize your marketing automation implementation!
While every business is different, marketing and sales funnels always share
3 common elements: people move through a process of discovery, evaluation, and purchase. The other common thing is that there will always be various bottlenecks in that process where leads drop out.
Marketing automation optimization requires focusing on the people that you’re engaging in your funnel, the processes you use to engage them, and the bottlenecks that happen in your funnel.
Using marketing automation technology to widen the choke points in your marketing and sales funnels will learn how to increase the percentage of prospects that take the actions you desire, increasing sales velocity and revenue growth.
1. Think of your people.
It’s no secret that your Customer Journey and Personas should be dictating a lot of your marketing efforts; everything from nurture email subject lines, landing page copy, and the assets you create should be
But using that theory and applying that to your marketing automation optimization and implementation is a key piece that some people miss.
What do your potential customers really want to see from you? How can you use the data available to you to better their experience? Can you provide them more useful content based on the behavior they’ve shown or previous content they’ve looked at?
Everything should start and end with your potential customers; the use of marketing automation absolutely makes your life better and easier, but it also allows them to have more individualized content delivered directly to the people who want to hear from you.
Using this thought process when thinking of marketing automation optimization means that you’ll be able to better think about how to make the technology really work for your audience instead of the other way around.
2. Automate manual processes.
An automated solution delivers ongoing results — because you’re taking the human error out of a process that was previously manual.
What does this look like? An automated nurture email campaign instead of a manual follow-up based on a download (we actually recommend both, but the second falls more into the sales category, so we’ll talk about that another time 😉). Or maybe a free trial activation causes Net-Results to schedule a certain task in your CRM, eliminating the human error of a salesperson!
I’m also a real big proponent of automated reporting. Net-Results makes reporting super fast and easy and there’s a reason for that — reporting means you can know what’s working and what isn’t at the click of a button… or the open of an email. We built Net-Results to be good at that because we’re well-aware of its importance in the lives of marketers. You gotta be able to know what works!
From those reports and trends come actionable insights that lead to better optimization of your marketing funnel and overall marketing automation implementation. Maybe you notice that a certain email subject line has a higher CTR or that 80% of your converted leads downloaded a certain asset or started from a certain UTM Source.
The options for automation are endless — use them to your best advantage by focusing on the processes that take the most time and have the most errors, and the reporting side of it. You can always schedule a no-pressure chat with our team of marketing automation experts if you have any questions about how marketing automation optimization can save your organization time and money!
3. Focus on bottlenecks.
Marketing automation can deliver incredible value when used to address the bottlenecks that cause leads to drop out of your marketing and sales funnels.
Simplicity is the point we’re really making. By breaking a multi-month sales process down to its individual steps, we were able to identify and isolate an ugly bottleneck.
We’ve seen companies get overwhelmed – unsure of where to begin with automation. Their mistake is to take on too much at once. Rather, we’d advise you to keep it simple:
- Define the steps in your process/funnel/customer journey.
- Decide which steps are currently causing you the most pain. Prioritize.
- Use automation (in combination with manual intervention based on common sense) to drive results in this one stage in your process.
- Return to step 2 and repeat… again and again!
Hope that was helpful! Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog below so you get notified about our latest free resources and digital marketing tips — directly to your inbox!
To your marketing automation success!
Sarah
Director of Marketing at Net-Results
