Like all marketers, we are looking for solutions to automate, optimize, and make things easier so that we can produce more content, achieve the highest ROI, and more.
On the other hand, nearly half of consumers say that brands could do a better job of engaging them. Customers now expect real engagement, a personalized experience. But creating personalized and engaging experiences for your audiences is a marketing aspect that most marketers find difficult, if not insurmountable. Probably because, to engage your audience, you really need to understand what they are doing and connect with them at the right moment. In a world surrounded by data, the hard part is not collecting data but using it and creating experiences across different channels.
1. Email marketing: nurture your audience with a personalized message
Email marketing capabilities within a marketing automation platform allow marketers to send simple emails as well as more complex sets of emails. For example, building email sequences that are automatically sent to customers based on predefined triggers such as behavior, demographics, or other criteria. Emails can be used for simple purposes such as:
- Sending a special offer or discount on their birthday,
- Sending a satisfaction survey following their purchase or after they have interacted with a team member (such as after a demo, for example),
- Sending a follow-up email after cart abandonment.
One of the advantages of marketing automation is helping marketers nurture prospects by delivering the right content to the right person in their buying journey to help move them to the next stage of conversion (whether that is a download or a sale). For example, nurturing can be used to deliver the right content to segmented customer groups – segmentation can be based on many parameters such as buyer persona, brand interaction history, city, etc. The only effort marketers need to make is setting up campaigns, sequences, and triggers… and of course the usual maintenance of the tool.
2. Mobile marketing: create a strong cross-channel experience
Your buyers go through several channels, so you need to be present on each of them (especially on mobile). Having a mobile presence can be simple, but make sure you provide the same level of experience across all your channels. With mobile marketing automation, marketers can:
- Create engagement with their customers via the mobile app thanks to push notifications, private messages, and chatbots;
- Deliver the right message at the right time by using the app’s geolocation to send commercial messages to nearby customers;
- Get mobile engagement statistics in the same platform as desktop, for example;
- Create a consistent brand experience, regardless of the type of device used by the audience.
Mobile marketing automation makes it possible to speak to each user as an individual by personalizing messages, a driver of engagement with your customers.
A conversation on desktop can be picked up on mobile, mobile engagement improves the personalization of your emails, etc…
3. Use social networks: track and boost engagement with a third-party channel
The best-performing social media marketing plans are aligned with all the other marketing campaigns in your strategy. Using marketing automation helps simplify your social media strategy by integrating it with your website, blog, mobile app, analytics, etc.
With social marketing automation, marketers can:
- Create posts that increase customer engagement, such as polls and contests based on their interests;
- Create personalized pages on social networks and track engagement;
- Add share buttons on all the pages of your site so that your audience can easily share this content with their friends.
Marketing automation platforms also allow you to collect data on the people engaged with your brand: other demographic and behavioral information such as, for example, what content has been downloaded, how many times content shared on social networks is clicked, and what content your followers appreciate the most.
All of these statistics are useful for improving your multichannel campaigns and sharing more content that will boost the engagement of your contacts.
4. Analytics and reports: measure your results and optimize your strategy
Building an audience engagement strategy is a first step. But if you do not measure your effectiveness, it is more of a hypothesis than a real strategy.
The actions put in place must be tested, measured, and proven effective before being fully included in your strategy. This is only possible if you track the right indicator, evaluate the effectiveness of different campaigns, and refine your strategy with the actions that have worked best.
By looking at what works and what does not, you can make decisions to increase customer engagement and focus on the channels, content, promotions, and messages that create the most engagement and therefore the best ROI.
5. Tracking your visitors’ IDs: personalize from the first stage of the buying journey
In an ideal world, every customer would be directly engaged from their very first visit on one channel or another, learning about the brand through different content throughout their buying journey, and would convert on the same day, in the same session.
But this is not an ideal world, and this is not how your audience behaves. However, customers and prospects may see a post on a friend’s social network, click on it, and start reading an article on your blog. A few months later, they view commercial pages on your site and case studies. It may take several months before your prospect is willing to give you an email address by subscribing to your newsletter or downloading a resource.
With your marketing automation platform’s visitor ID tracking feature, you can learn about your anonymous visitors even before they give you this information, allowing you to offer a more personalized experience.
The tracking ID allows marketers to have information such as city, company size, and industry, which makes anonymous visitors less anonymous than expected (even if you still do not have their name, email, and phone number).
This allows marketers to set up retargeting campaigns and thus know where leads are most engaged at the beginning of their buying journey. It also becomes possible to build a map of the buying journey, making it possible to better engage your future leads and anonymous visitors by delivering the right message, at the right time, thanks to the data collected.
These 5 features of your marketing automation platform help you take engagement to another level and position yourself better against your competitors.
