Okay so let’s take a very introductory look at marketing automation what it is, and how you can use it in your business. Although the term of marketing automation may be a bit confusing or different to you I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept so will begin by looking at what exactly marketing automation is and how you can apply to your business.
Starting with an IP address
When someone comes to your website they’re basically just an IP address there may be some geographical data or some other information attached to that IP address but really all they are is an anonymous visitor. Which you want to do is find some way of tracking that anonymous visitor and turn them into a potential need for your business. So with market information the whole idea is your tracking all of these anonymous visitors to your website keeping track of every page they visit how long there on that page for and what causes them to take further action.
Landing pages to collect more data
One of the ways the businesses do this is by creating landing pages with specific call to actions. These call actions may simply be something like filling out a form, or clicking a button to download something, or something else in which to encourage them anonymously to enter more information. And they’re going to enter this information in a form. So now what you have is an anonymously that fills in the form, this gives you more information about them typically those fields would be a name, email address, and maybe some other information about them. As a business you now have a lot more information about this individual now they’re no longer in anonymously you can now link all the pages they visited by their IP address to a specific name and email address. This is where information begins to come into play. Now that you hold an email address you can do a variety of tasks. You can look up their social networks based on their publicly available information, you can add them to specific lists, and you canbegin drip flow marketing email campaigns.
Beginning a drip flow campaign
So let’s talk next about drip flow email campaigns. The whole idea behind a drip flow email campaign is that you’re going to be sending targeted emails to specific lists automatically on predefined schedules. There’s two forms of campaigns, the first is a time-based campaign, and the second is a user-driven campaign. Obviously you can do a mix of the two campaign styles or hybrid campaign quite easily. What do these campaigns actually look like?
Example: Let’s say someone comes to your website they have browsed around a couple of different sections, and then they fill out a form on the landing page in order to receive a white paper about a specific product. Now you know first of all what pages they visited, the product of their interested in, and the resources they’ve downloaded. In your marketing automation tool you may set up a list for everyone who might fill out that form. Now what you can do is you can define specific campaigns to send those leads on that list. Targeted emails on a predefined schedule. You may send them an email directly after they download the asset, or you may choose to wait a week (or longer). Either way you can then set up a decision tree.
Create a Decision Tree
A decision tree means that if they opened the email your system is going to take a specific action, and if they don’t open the email you take a different action. That’s just one example! You can have decision trees based on links within emails, assets that they’ve downloaded, or a variety of other tasks that the user might perform. Perhaps if they don’t open the email you wait 30 days and then send them another email just as a gentle reminder. The whole idea of drip flow campaigns and decision trees is to nurture your leads along a specific path.
You nurture these leads along the path by assigning points to all of the activities they take. This means you can assign a point value if they visit a certain page, fill out a lead form, download a resource, or open an email. And these are just a few examples of ways in which you can assign points to your leads. The whole concept is designed to help create a value associated with each of your leads. So as your leads earn more points they become a more valuable lead. Eventually at a point total that you define that lead can be automatically moved into your CRM.
Establish critical integrations
This is where it gets exciting! Now when your sales team logs in to your CRM system they are greeted with a list of qualified leads that have been nurtured along the process for however long that process took and they are now ready to be contacted. What this process does is save tremendous amounts of time for your entire sales team. no longer are your sales team members stuck cold calling all sorts of potential leads that haven’t been fully qualified or maybe only slightly interested because maybe they only visit the site once and downloaded a single asset. instead they can spend their time calling those leads or contacting those leads who are qualified through the lead nurturing process that’s been done automatically by your marketing automation software.
Save Time
This is a pretty exciting process. When a business implements marketing automation into their workflow they eliminate the tedious time-consuming tasks which consume far too much of their sales team members time. So when we look at the idea of marketing automation we’re not talking about an impersonal relationship with your leads. What we’re talking about instead is redefining those personal touches in the communication that occurs and having them automatically triggered.
The contact is still personal but the timing has been automated.
And that my friends is marketing automation for beginners. Simple, effective, and incredibly powerful.