In recent years, the customer journey has taken a sharp turn — automation. Streamlined marketing efforts and personalized messages — placed at key stages of the customer journey — have become industry standard, and for good reason! In short, automation lets you optimize your marketing campaigns to fit your particular business needs without too much fuss (or money).

In fact, engaging your target audience has never been simpler!

Take a look at these five marketing automation tips laid out in front of you and find out how you too can provide your customers with a more satisfying customer experience. 

1. Organize Your Lead Management

Generating leads is one thing, following them up — a whole different ball game. Effectively contacting interested parties without being too pushy is an art-form in itself. Use automation as your lead management solution and target customers with the highest intent (people who filled your contact form or downloaded a demo). 

Keep track of their behavior. For instance, whether they are subscribed to your blog, signed up for your newsletters and webinars, whether are they engaging on social media, and so on.

Next, send notifications to customers who bought your goods with the exact details of their order, estimated time of delivery, and so on.

In short, you want to nurture your leads and guide them throughout the customer journey. Build your way up slowly with targeted messages and offers to convert prospective customers into loyal customers.

2. Improve Your Social Media Management

Use marketing automation to find and recruit brand advocates — these will be your loyal brand ambassadors and lieutenants. Usually, these are people who routinely share your content and comment on the same via social media, relevant forums, etc. Offer them a deal in the form of a referral program and encourage them to invite others to use your products and services. This will help you establish solid partnerships with your brand influencers, effectively increasing your marketing reach.

Also, don’t forget to use your little automated listening station to pick up negative comments about your brand as well and address these accordingly; there’s nothing worse than letting negative comments fester into something more sinister. 

Overall, listen to what people have to say about your brand — both positive and negative — and use this valuable insight to create targeted marketing campaigns. Marketing automation can assist you in gathering this data with ease and help you make data-driven decisions; meaning, there’s less room for human error.

3. Increase Visitor Engagement

In both the online and offline arenas, visitor engagement is still — king. 

For instance, in the online sphere, chatbots have been extremely popular as of late. So much so, that they are becoming more and more sophisticated by the day. They are an absolute godsend for small business owners as they can assist online customers every day of the year, 24/7 (robots don’t have holidays… yet). Usually, they are used as the site’s main receptionists — they greet visitors (even talk with them), ask for their contact info, and provide assistance by sending them to relevant pages or by passing them on to a human agent. 

Now, as the offline equivalent of these sophisticated chatbots we have the exceptional visitor management app that makes real-life visitor engagement both captivating and informative. This app will not only provide a nice boost to your company’s image — and your overall user experience — it will also collect leads and valuable data for your data-driven marketing campaigns. 

Receive notifications via SMS or email the moment your visitors arrive and surprise them with your fast response times.

4. Follow Up on Abandoned Carts

This one is huge — always do follow-ups on abandoned carts!

It’s surprising how many brands fail to utilize this tactic. Oftentimes customers just get intimidated by exorbitant shipping prices, or get distracted by funny cat videos on YouTube, and leave without finalizing their purchase.  

Implement marketing automation in such cases to remind shoppers that they are yet to make a purchase. Send automated emails with targeted promotional offers, limited-time discounts, and suggest related products or simply provide them with relevant information concerning shipping and the like. Once you hook ‘em, reel them in for another look!

Remember — customer retention is the name of the game. According to recent statistics, the probability of you selling a product to an existing customer is around 60–70%; whereas for a new customer, this is more in the range of 5–20%.

5. Gather Customer Feedback to Improve Your Game

As previously mentioned, collecting data is vital for improving your customer experience. Send an automated feedback request after each purchase and learn to embrace the criticism. Focus on figuring out all the key areas that could use some room for improvement. 

Apart from regular feedback loops, you can use automated surveys to ask users what they really think about your brand upon sign-up. This is not only a valuable source of information but also a neat tactic to get some customer engagement going. Sort the users by their answers to separate the useful leads from the less important ones and pass them on to your sales team. 

In addition, ask users who are about to quit your website — or have chosen to stop using your services altogether — for reasons behind their decision. Perhaps you can come to a mutual agreement that can benefit both parties.

At the end of the day, marketing automation is out there to make both your and your customer’s life — easier. Use it to create a more personalized customer experience for your users and watch as they reward you with their continued loyalty (and money).