Marketing automation is now a crucial part of digital marketing. The shift to digital operations, affordability, and effectiveness make it a popular choice. Automated campaigns achieve various goals efficiently.
- They’re easier to edit and iterate upon;
- They scale well to large audience sizes;
- And they’re personalized to the end user.
In short, automation makes marketing campaigns more efficient and more effective. Now let’s look into tips and suggestions for creating a useful and efficient automated marketing campaign for your (or somebody else’s, if that’s your niche) business. But first, let us discuss what is meant under marketing automation.
What exactly is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to carry out repetitive marketing tasks, such as email marketing. Instead of individually writing emails, automation tools can personalize content based on the recipient’s information.
Email marketing automation for programmatic advertising goes beyond just first name and location. It utilizes user data to personalize content based on various factors relevant to your business and individual customer relationships.
Mobile marketing offers unique opportunities and challenges for automation. It is more flexible and powerful than other digital marketing forms, allowing brands to connect with customers wherever they are. However, campaigns must be designed properly to leverage mobile app advantages.
To help you get started, we’ve compiled these eight tips for automated marketing campaigns. Try one out today, and A/B test the results to see if these tips move you closer to your performance goals.
#1: Curate Your Audience Segments
The easiest way to create an automated marketing campaign is to write an email or push notification, and then blast it out to your entire audience at a scheduled time. However, the easiest way isn’t always the best way.
Market segmentation is essential for effective targeting. Factors like location, timing, and customer identity (age, gender, religion, ethnicity) play a role. Data on social, political, economic, and education groups can be used to segment your market based on business needs and niche.
Segmentation is key for effective messaging. Tailor messages to different segments like gender in a clothing store. Make promotions relevant to recipients to avoid being ignored.
#2: Invest in Quality Content
Marketing automation can save time for business owners, but customers should not feel like they are interacting with AI. To create personalized interactions, focus on quality automated message templates.
Ultimately, the message is what makes or breaks an automated marketing campaign. If the content itself is poorly formatted, ambiguously phrased, or otherwise broken in some way, then it doesn’t really matter if the overall campaign is stellar. The campaign will still fall flat if the message doesn’t resonate with users.
The solution?
This is why we advocate A/B testing for every aspect of your app — not just the core app content, but also your marketing content. Test different subject lines, copy, and images against each other to see which combination drives the most engagement.
We’ve analyzed push notification trends and discovered 120 power words that increase engagement. Check out the report to improve message opens with effective word choice. It’s about your approach, not just automation.
NOTE: If you aren’t sure in your abilities to create a powerful and effective copy for the template(s), hire a professional. You don’t have to overextend your budget. Make them write several useful emails which you can work with yourself in the future. Alter and modify them according to what an audience requires at a certain period of time.
#3: Personalize Everything
To personalize messages effectively, gather numerous user profiles for data. Segmentation is crucial for organizing data, utilize digital tools for efficiency. Consider using existing publicly available data to save time and resources.
Personalization is crucial for message content. Segmentation and testing can improve content delivery, but true personalization goes beyond just targeting the right audience. It includes formatting and visual elements as well.
Here’s an example of a personalized message.
If the goal of your automated marketing campaign is to drive more purchases in a retail app, you might segment your audience and send product recommendations to active users. But what products should you recommend?
To boost sales, recommend related items to recent buyers (e.g. a cutting board with kitchen knives) or suggest popular items in their searched category to first-time visitors. Personalize promotions to increase conversion rates.
And if you still aren’t convinced, consider this: Personalized push notifications earn up to 800% more opens than their non-personalized counterparts.
#4: Focus on the Goal
A successful campaign starts with setting a realistic and relevant goal that can be achieved in a reasonable time frame. It’s important to have short-term goals as stepping stones towards your long-term objectives.
In business and life, choosing the right goal for automated marketing campaigns is crucial for success. While increasing sales and profits is a common objective, the approach to achieving this can vary based on the type of business.
Here’s an example of going towards the ultimate goal through completing several short term ones first:
Running a campaign to reactivate dormant users in an app? Focus on engaging inactive users as the immediate goal, rather than conversions to paying customers.
This is not to say, the long term goals that most often every business shares shouldn’t be paid special attention to. Of course, long-term goals like conversions are important too, even if they’re part of a separate campaign. In fact, that brings us to the next point.
#5: Plan For the Complete Customer Lifecycle
Short term goals contribute to achieving the long term goal of completing the customer life cycle, which involves various factors of consumer behavior. These factors influence purchasing habits and interactions with your business beyond transactions.
Understanding the customer cycle is essential for growing your business. It can turn one-time customers into loyal ones and attract new customers through word-of-mouth promotion, whether intentional or not.
Market analysis is crucial. Identify your target audience and study their purchasing habits through A/B testing. Tailor promo campaigns based on the test results.
NOTE: Pay lots of attention to creating a satisfactory customer experience by offering your buyers a great customer service. Available to them whenever they need it.
Here’s how you can do it:
When reactivating dormant users, consider existing campaigns and lead them towards a new one focused on engagement and conversions for better results.
Have one campaign for discounts to inactive users and another for suggesting products to active users. Once a user reengages with the app, they will enter the second campaign to encourage purchases. If an active user becomes less engaged, they will transition from the conversion to the reactivation campaign.
In other words, the best approach is to have a series of campaigns that cater to each step of the customer lifecycle. The individual goals of each campaign might seem short-term, but the campaigns work together to achieve long-term goals like conversions.
#6: Work With What Marketing Automation Tools You Have
This is crucial for new business owners and those with limited budgets. Instead of trying out many tools, focus on researching and selecting the best ones for your needs to avoid overspending on automation tools.
As for the business that have been around and using automation. Push notifications are powerful, but what if you haven’t secured push permissions from your whole audience?
To avoid campaign setbacks, segment users based on collected contact info. Send push notifications to those with permissions, email to those without, and use in-app messages as a last resort.
The same could be said about personalization.
Personalized content is usually more effective than non-personalized content, but there are times when you may not have enough user information. In such cases, sending a standard message is still better than sending nothing.
Even with limited contact info, automated marketing campaigns can still reach users. More resources allow for expanded data applications. Detailed data can be found for free online, unless it’s very specific or unique. Just search for what you need.
#7: Go Cross-Channel & Multi-Channel
In today’s marketing landscape, it’s crucial to choose the right channel among many options available. Cross channel marketing involves selecting the best channel, while multi channel marketing utilizes multiple channels for greater impact.
Imagine relying solely on one social media platform or one marketing method, like email marketing. While they may work well for you, limiting yourself to only these outlets will not yield good results in the long term.
Why pick the single best marketing channel when you can reach your users on all available channels?
Cross-channel marketing uses various channels effectively, such as push notifications and emails. The strategy involves switching between channels based on user behavior and preferences to improve open rates.
Cross-channel marketing involves utilizing multiple communication channels strategically, rather than bombarding customers with messages on every platform. It’s crucial to consider the timing and frequency of messages on each channel, as customers may have preferred channels they engage with more frequently.
To avoid overwhelming your audience with too many emails or push notifications, tailor your message frequency to match their habits. Segregate your audience based on their email checking habits and adjust your communication strategy accordingly.
#8: Check & Double-Check the Results
Monitoring how well something is doing and whether it works should be the last step of every marketing and promo campaign. Otherwise, you won’t know whether the money and resources spent will be returning to you as a profit.
After running an automated marketing campaign, review the results for necessary changes due to rapidly changing trends. Timely adjustments are crucial based on accurate data from your target market’s response to different campaign aspects.
How this process works:
When analyzing campaign results, remember to look at not just the target metrics, but rather all metrics that were impacted by the campaign. Sometimes, campaigns have unforeseen consequences on metrics that you weren’t even monitoring.
For example, a push notification with clickbait copy might score a high open rate, but it might have a negative or neutral impact on your conversions inside the app. At first glance, this campaign might seem like a success, but in reality, it didn’t move the metrics that really matter.
The results of automated marketing campaigns are always unpredictable. That’s why whatever tool you use, the analytics dashboard should be displaying all statistically significant changes at the end of a campaign. And not just the ones you were monitoring. This helps marketers see the true impact of their campaigns, good or bad.
Setting Up an Automation Marketing Strategy
To create effective automated marketing campaigns, use an integrated platform that provides detailed information and offers flexibility and options. Choose a tool that can deliver robust campaigns to keep users engaged and active, ultimately impacting ROI.
To start mobile marketing automation, research and contact options. Schedule a demo to test compatibility with your business before deciding. Demo testing is crucial to ensure the tool fits your niche. Don’t overlook this step.
Don’t forget to monitor how well the tool you choose is working. Switch to a back up option or select a new one whenever you see a problem arising. Unless you create a marketing automation program yourself, you don’t have anything to lose by switching between options.
Conclusion
Here are eight essential tips for using marketing automation in your business. Automation tools are crucial for any business, whether traditional or niche.
If you have been using automation tools and found them useful, feel free to share your own tips in the comments section down blow. Drop a comment if you have any questions too, we’d be thrilled to help you out if we can.
