Automation is no longer a technology available exclusively to large corporations. Small businesses now have access to automation across business processes. Automation allows you to do more without having to allocate more resources. Automating mundane and repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails and keeping up with customer support requests also help your business operate at a higher pace.
There are more business processes that can be automated these days. Automation tools are also becoming more capable, especially with machine learning and artificial intelligence supporting complex workflows. One of the things that can be highly automated is your digital marketing efforts, and we are going to discuss the best tips and tricks to get you started in this article.
Build Audience Lists
The key foundation for automating most of your digital marketing activities is a set of audience lists. You want to know your audience well, but it is virtually impossible to do it in a granular way, at least not if you want to reach thousands of potential customers at the same time.
Audience lists allow you to keep track of your audience without the usual complexity. When a group of potential customers comes in contact with your blog post, for instance, you can flag that group as being already familiar with your brand or your content.
You can then treat different audience lists differently. Those who already have multiple interactions with your brand can be targeted with promotional offers, while others who are earlier in the funnel can receive tailored content marketing or different sets of ads.
It is easy to see how having clear and accurate audience lists is the key to automating the rest of your digital marketing efforts. It is never too early to start. Tools like HubSpot are designed to simplify the process and can be the foundation for your digital marketing automation.
Integrate Multiple Tools
HubSpot, Active Campaign and various other marketing automation tools are only some of the tools you can use to simplify digital marketing. They are designed to do a lot of things, but they seldom offer specific features related to specific digital marketing instruments.
When you want to be more personalized when sending marketing emails, for instance, you need email marketing tools like Mailchimp for their extra features. When you need to schedule social media posts in chains, specialized tools like Sprout Social are usually better.
Using multiple tools allows you to benefit from the best features they offer in specific areas. However, managing multiple tools that are designed to do specific things can be challenging, especially when some of the features overlap.
Integration is the solution here. Rather than using different digital marketing apps and tools separately, you can use them in tandem. This can be done here through PieSync which synchronizes contacts between platforms like Mailchimp and even iCloud for integrated digital marketing. It’s a great tool for making your cloud apps work together seamlessly.
Start with Simpler Tasks
Automation can be very complex very quickly, but that doesn’t mean you have to start by automating complex tasks. The simplest digital marketing tasks and activities are usually the most fun to automate. Following up on dropped carts and retargeting are good examples.
When you are automating the sending of a follow-up email in the event of a dropped cart, you have a very simple problem to fix. You already know the user, and the items that they add to the shopping cart, which means automating the delivery of a personalized email is not difficult.
You can take this a step further by automating promotional offer creation, which means every user that drops a cart will receive a unique discount code that is only usable when that user decides to complete the purchase.
Automation lets you engage users in a more personalized way, but without forcing you to do the tasks manually. On top of that, you can also be more effective with your marketing budget when you are able to automate the parameters of promotional offers.
Add Personal Touches
Always go the extra mile when adding personal touches to automated actions. The last thing you want is for the users to know that they are getting an automated response or seeing an automated post on social media. You still have to add personal touches to the content.
When sending emails, for instance, always use strings and tap into users’ preferences to customize the content. Sending the same email to all users is no longer the tactic to use. Instead, you want the emails to be tailored to users’ interests, past actions, and other parameters.
Another way to add personal touches is by giving your brand a face. People don’t really connect with the brand, but they will appreciate speaking to the people behind your business. If you see senders like “Sally from Amazon” in automated and support emails, this is the reason.
The last set of personal touches you want to add is personalized visuals. Forget about using stock images or vector templates. These are small details that will only make your brand appear cold and less approachable, especially when combined with automated engagement.
Think Conversion
Just because you are automating different parts of your digital marketing activities, it doesn’t mean you can stop optimizing the campaign. You still need to tweak the digital marketing activities that you automate in order to achieve higher engagement and better conversion.
Tweaking the landing page when you see a huge drop in conversion is a start. When you start using automation, directing traffic to landing pages at scale is no longer the issue. You can shift focus towards optimizing the landing pages to gain more customers.
The same is true with optimizing content. Once automation handles the delivery of content to the right audience lists, you need to start focusing on refining the content for those lists for maximum engagement. The resources you free up with automation can be redirected this way.
After all, that’s the real benefit of automation in digital marketing. Instead of spending a lot of time on repetitive tasks, you can automate them and redirect resources towards taking the digital marketing campaign to a whole new level.