March 14, 2017

How to Use Marketing Automation for more than just Email

Reading time about 5 min
How to Use Marketing Automation for more than just email

Have you heard? Marketing automation is the next big thing.

If this is news to you, or you’re still wondering, “What is marketing automation?” don’t worry — you’re not alone. The technology behind marketing automation can be pretty complex. This has led to some serious confusion among marketers about what exactly marketing automation can do.

If you have heard someone talking about marketing automation, chances are they have told you about how it can make communication with prospective customers much easier. This refers to the sending automated emails triggered by certain behavior, or specifically timed email series, also known as drip campaigns.

Unfortunately, this is where most of the information stops.

While it’s true that sending automated emails is a big part of marketing automation, the software can be used to enhance your marketing efforts in other ways as well.

In this article, I will provide you with some new ways to use marketing automation beyond sending automated emails. I will also show you how you can implement them using marketing automation with Sendinblue.

Email automation is still important ! Check out our comprehensive guide to set up your automated messages and increase conversions.

Use Marketing Automation to Qualify Prospects with Lead Scoring

The whole point of a business is to provide value to a group of people that want whatever it is your business provides.

Keeping that in mind, it makes sense that you should focus your marketing efforts on the right people. You wouldn’t want to spend all of your time and money marketing a dog grooming service to cat owners, would you?

The challenge is that businesses get tons of leads, and online leads are often anonymous. This forces you to treat all leads the same, which is never a good idea in a world where personalization is king and pageviews are cheap.

That is why it’s important to qualify your leads, which means identifying the quality contacts who are closer to converting.

One way to qualify your leads is to use your marketing automation software to “score” them. Lead scoring allows you to assign points to each lead based on their behavior or certain characteristics. This point score helps you recognize how close they are to purchasing.

What is marketing automation - lead scoring

In order to do this, you need to have a deep understanding of your business’s purchase process:

  • What actions do people take before they make a purchase?
  • Are there certain indicators that signal a potential purchase?
  • How long does it take for a customer to complete go through the purchase process?

Once you can answer these questions, you can think about how these factors add up to a conversion. Then, you can determine how to assign points based on this process.

Sendinblue How-to
Check it out: Lead scoring in Sendinblue

Lead scoring is helpful for determining which leads require more attention from marketing and sales. Once you have a system in place, the score can be used to direct automated drip campaigns for nurturing, or targeted promotions designed to speed up the conversion process.

That leads us to our next marketing automation use case.

Use Marketing Automation to Better Segment your Contacts

As I mentioned earlier, personalization is the key to digital marketing success.

According to a study by the Radicati Group, business users receive over 120 emails on average every day. In order to stand out in overcrowded inboxes, you have to get personal.

No — I do not mean including their first name in the email salutation. Personalizing your emails means you are providing highly relevant content to your contacts. The only way to do this is to segment contacts into smaller groups with similar needs or characteristics.

This is where marketing automation comes into play.

With marketing automation, you can add contacts to lists if they match certain characteristics. These characteristics include:

  • Specific website activity: Adding a contact to a list once they visit a certain page can help you segment for specific promotions or tailor email content based on your contacts’ interests.
    Marketing Automation segmentation - pageview
  • Email engagement: If you know a contact was receptive to specific promotion emails, you can add them to a list for additional rewards to incentivize even more purchases.
    How to use marketing automation - email list
  • Lead score: If a contact reaches a certain score in your lead scoring system, you can add them to a qualified contacts list (as shown in the example above), or create several qualification tiers based on lead scores.
    Marketing automation segmentation - lead score

Once you get the hang of that, you can combine these to make more complex workflows. This allows you to be even more targeted with your segmenting.

Sendinblue How-to
Check it out: Creating a custom workflows in Sendinblue

Conclusion

Now you have a deeper understanding of how to use marketing automation for more than just sending automated emails.

We talked about the importance of identifying quality leads through lead scoring, as well as how you can create more dynamic email lists using automation workflows. Now it’s time for you to try these examples out with your own business!

Don’t have a free marketing automation account yet? Sign up today.

Happy Sending!

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