Need to create marketing automation scenarios, but you don’t know where to start… or how to go about it? Do you need a guide to get started? You’ve come to the right place! I’m sharing some expert advice to help you create your marketing automation scenarios. Let’s assume you have marketing automation software.
Define the objectives of your marketing scenario
Choose the right triggers for your scenarios
Personalize and automate your messages
Analyze the performance of your scenarios
Adopt a marketing automation solution
Adapt to your personas
The first piece of advice is to adapt your marketing automation scenarios according to your targets, you know, your personas that you know by heart. ? To target them properly, you will need to ask yourself a few questions. What questions are they asking about your products or services? How can you reassure them and lead them to complete the purchase? You need to understand your target audience’s expectations and behavior. Once again, you need to ask yourself questions. What is the ideal timing to contact them? What are the triggers in their buying journey?
Understand your sales journey
The next step is to list all the stages of the purchase funnel for your products and services.
For example,
- downloading a marketing resource
- registering for an event
- completing a demo
- trial period for a service
For each of these stages, you need to break them down into sub-steps. For example, let’s take the example of downloading a marketing resource.
- Before getting to the download, your visitor had to enter their data in a form
- You bring your visitor into your database
- The resource is sent by email thanks to the data they entered
- Your visitor enters a nurturing campaign
- You decide that this lead is relevant, and it is sent directly to the Sales team for qualification.
As you’ve understood, you need to identify all the touchpoints with your visitors in order to launch actions. These will allow you to trigger your marketing scenario.
Define the objectives of your marketing scenario
Now that you have identified your personas and understand the buying journey of your customers and prospects, you will need to establish clear objectives.
Why? Because a well-designed scenario must have a goal. Whether it is converting prospects into customers, creating engagement, or building user loyalty. Defining these objectives from the outset helps drive your strategy and adapt your messages and channels according to the customer journey.
By defining your objectives, you can anticipate the indicators to track in order to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. For example, if the goal of your scenario is to convert 10% of the prospects who downloaded a resource. You can analyze several indicators: the number of downloads, the click-through rate on your emails, the open rate, the conversion rate, but also lead scoring to assess the quality of the generated prospects. This data allows you to analyze and adjust your marketing workflow for better results.
Segment your database
Divide and conquer? Personally, at Webmecanik, we prefer to segment in order to personalize better! ?
“50% of a campaign’s success comes from good segmentation and good targeting” Source: Marketo
Thanks to the information you already have about your contacts, you can create segments within your data. It is possible to create these segments based on different criteria: demographic, geographic, or behavioral. Behavioral data (interactions with your emails, purchase history, etc.) is available thanks to your marketing automation tool.
Of course, a contact can belong to different segments and more precise subgroups. Segmentation can evolve depending on the actions the contact takes. Some criteria are not fixed.
Your marketing automation software allows you to create several segments based on several criteria.
For example, Hanna does digital marketing for a business school. The school offers training programs in several languages and countries.
To target better, she creates a segment called “France English-speaking Finance Executive”. This segment also belongs to broader groups such as “Finance Executive”, “France Executive” and “English-speaking Executive”.
When a training course on e-business financing opens in Singapore, Hanna sends it to the “English-speaking Executive” segment but excludes executives in France. This allows more effective targeting.
Segmentation is based on 4 conditions:
- Exhaustive groups: every individual belongs to one of the defined groups
- Exclusive groups: each individual belongs to only one group
- Homogeneous groups: individuals belonging to the same group have similar profiles
- Differentiated groups: each group is as different as possible from the others
Set up scoring
To go further with segmentation, we advise you to adopt scoring in parallel.
This feature allows you to assign a value to prospects based on their engagement and conversion potential. Thanks to this, you identify the most qualified contacts. This score helps you adapt your communications according to how far the contact has progressed in their buying journey.
Here is an example of scoring based on segmentation:
- Marie downloads a brochure about a finance training program. She moves from the “Contact” group to the “Lead” group and gains +10 activity points.
- She opens an email (+5 activity points) and clicks on a link to the registration page (+5 engagement points).
- In the form, she indicates that she is an executive in a company, an important criterion. Her contact score gains +25 points.
- She then visits 3 pages on the site (program, testimonials, and pricing), gaining +5 points per page, i.e. +15 activity points.
- Thanks to these interactions, Marie becomes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), and the sales team can get in touch with her to finalize her registration. ?
Let’s imagine that in your system, a “Lead” must reach at least 25 points in contact, 30 in activity, and 10 in engagement. Marie exceeds these thresholds, which can trigger actions such as a sales call to move her forward in her journey.
? Our advice: don’t do the lead stage scoring exercise alone! Surround yourself with a few colleagues from sales and marketing to identify the lead stages to track, the data to collect at each stage, the contact’s activities, and the minimum score to reach at each stage.
Choose the right triggers for your scenarios
Triggers make it possible to activate marketing automation workflows. You therefore have every interest in defining them beforehand so that your strategy is effective. For example, signing up for a newsletter, visiting a product page, or adding an item to the cart can be triggers. Each of these actions must initiate a process such as sending an email, adding to a segment, or triggering a campaign. These are only examples. ?
Triggering actions is cool, doing it at the right time is better. ⏰ Sending a message too early or too late can make it irrelevant or even useless. ? You need to find the ideal moment for each trigger so that your message arrives when the prospect is most responsive.
Personalize and automate your messages/strong>
For your scenarios to be relevant, your messages must be personalized. The effectiveness of your campaigns relies entirely on good personalization. Use the data you already have. Such as name, purchase history, to send messages tailored to contacts.
Do not hesitate to run AB tests in order to compare different versions of a communication (email, sms, etc.); thanks to these tests, you will be able to identify what works best in order to potentially reuse it for your future communications.
Timing is also essential, you need to analyze their time habits (email opening, browsing habits). You will, for example, send a welcome email to your new contacts within 24 hours. Sending a welcome email 2 weeks after registration is of little relevance…
The 4 mistakes to avoid:
- Spamming is the mistake not to make! Avoid sending too many communications to your contacts. Just because you can send in bulk thanks to automation does not mean you should abuse it. Your contact may quickly get tired of it.
- Relying on only one channel! Instead, opt for a multi-touch strategy; this allows you to reach your target through different channels.
- Creating scenarios that are too complex. And yes, just because your marketing automation software offers many features does not mean you have to use them all. Start little by little, create a simple scenario, test it, and improve it over time.
- Hiding automation is not necessarily useful, and your contacts will realize it at some point. ? Embrace transparency. At 1min30, they add humor and humanity to their automated content, while informing their contacts that a person is always available if needed.
Analyze the performance of your scenarios
Tracking the performance of your scenarios is important to measure their effectiveness. As explained a little earlier, you can create AB Tests to analyze which element works best.
You need to analyze the KPIs related to your marketing automation scenarios. Here are a few examples of indicators:
- Lead: number of leads, number of MQLs, number of SQLs
- Email: open rate, reactivity rate, unsubscribe rate
- Financial: conversion rate, change in revenue, average basket (amount and product quantity)
- Loyalty: repeat purchase rate, churn rate
- Resource: number of downloads
- Social networks: number of shares, reactions, followers, impressions
If a scenario is not working, identify the friction point and correct it. You can modify the message, the frequency, or the channel used. These changes allow you to optimize your results.
Adopt a marketing automation solution
Final piece of advice! Before creating marketing automation scenarios, you need to choose the software that suits your needs, if you do not already have one. ? Identify the features you need to set up your workflows. Adopt GDPR-compliant software for the security of your data. And yes, a transparent approach strengthens the trust of your prospects and customers. Many companies expose their data to legal risks without realizing it by using non-European servers, software, or extensions.
Choose software that can synchronize with your CRM. The connection between these two tools allows you to centralize all customer data by combining demographic (CRM) and behavioral (marketing automation) information.
I hope this expert advice will help you create your marketing workflows. Marketing automation allows you to give your conversions a boost… provided you apply this advice properly. ?
By implementing these strategies, you structure your scenarios around your personas, your sales journey, and your objectives. Optimization involves data segmentation, scoring, and the use of the right triggers. Don’t forget that it is by personalizing your content, automating your actions, and analyzing your performance that you ensure the impact of your marketing workflows. All of it with the right marketing automation solution. Your move! ?
