Being far better than average
Many of our clients are currently preoccupied with how to recoup their investment in online marketing, and how to manage and oversee the various disciplines. If they haven’t been very active in the online space until now, this represents a complete revolution for them. However, to succeed in these new market conditions, you’ll need to be better than just average. It won’t be enough to simply do the basics of PPC, SEO, Facebook and email marketing, as someone may have advised you. Everyone will be doing that. You’ll need to start working smartly with data and automate everything you can.
Whether you’re a B2C e-shop or a B2B company, now is the time to really get to grips with marketing automation. For an e-shop, this means focusing your efforts on building a database of email addresses, which you can then use to cleverly target both ad hoc campaigns and, crucially, automated ones. You’ll need several types of data for this:
- Personal data
- Transactional data
- Data on behaviour on your website
- Data on behaviour in sent emails
A high-quality database a smart system = a growing business
Using modern technologies, you can easily link this data together to create fully personalised emails that are sent at the right time to the right place. Standard, proven automated campaigns that work perfectly include:
- Collecting email addresses via pop-ups or Facebook, followed by a welcome campaign offering a discount on the first purchase for new customers
- Abandoned basket
- Birthday wishes
- Name day wishes
- Reactivation campaign to rescue an inactive database
- Remarketing based on website searches
- Cross-selling, up-selling
- Price tracker/product availability information
A multichannel approach is also commonly used for these campaigns. This involves integrating technologies with Facebook and automatically targeting campaigns at anyone who has taken a specific action. For example, those who haven’t opened your email. You can also target consumers who behave online in a similar way to your existing customers.
An investment that pays off handsomely
A well-executed campaign will pay for itself after just a few months of operation. It will help you build a completely new source of revenue that requires almost no further time or financial investment. That is why automated email marketing is sometimes referred to as a money-making machine. If you have an e-shop and are not using these campaigns, you are literally robbing yourself of money.
How to use automation in B2B?
With B2B companies, we often encounter the view that they can’t automate things much in this way, as they aren’t an e-shop after all. However, this is a misconception. There are plenty of clever solutions to be devised here too. By integrating an automation platform with a CRM, opportunities such as the following can arise:
- We monitor the online behaviour of our current customers and set a rule so that a sales representative receives a notification email if anyone in the database visits our website more than three times a week. Or if they visit a specific product page. This is a signal that they need something, and the sales representative should get in touch. Here, the sales representative calls exactly when the customer needs them. Imagine what a difference this makes compared to an inefficient call centre that rings up the entire database every six months to see if ‘anyone needs anything’.
- Similarly, a sales representative can see in their CRM which emails have been sent to a specific customer in the past and whether they simply opened them or clicked through. The sales representative can also track their historical web activity. If we integrate CRM and Google Analytics, we can even track which campaigns and channels contributed to acquiring this customer and optimise marketing spend. Not enough? How about if, thanks to the HotJar tool, your salespeople could also see the customer’s screen and mouse movements whilst visiting your website? Or if a salesperson receives a notification about an email that wasn’t sent due to a non-existent email address? Perhaps a change of email address hides a change of job, and with it a new business opportunity.
- Another excellent tool for salespeople is so-called lead scoring. This involves assigning a certain number of points to each customer activity and gradually ‘warming up the lead’ through automated communication. As soon as a lead exceeds a certain score (e.g. they’ve indicated their company is of a certain size, or downloaded a PDF), it is added as a new lead to the CRM. Previously, a salesperson would have wasted time on them; now, engaging with them pays off.
We understand automation and can help you set it up
Whether you’re a B2C e-shop or a B2B company, we can help you with marketing automation and put you miles ahead of your competitors. We have experience with many marketing automation and CRM tools; we aren’t limited to any specific technology. Get in touch and together we’ll find the best solution for you.