Marketing Automation Best Practices for Midsize Businesses

Marketing automation makes it possible to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time — but to take full advantage of the software, it’s important to understand your prospects’ buying cycle and deliver marketing that fits with their current stage. The first step of planning marketing automation implementation should focus on developing buyer personas. The offers and emails you create should be based on each of your buyer personas. One of the best aspects of marketing automation for eCommerce is that it enables you to reach a customer at exactly the right time. Once you have workflows in place to identify loyal customers, you can automatically send them an invitation to your loyalty program using your email marketing software. Creating segments with automation workflows will save you enormous amounts of time. By tracking purchase behavior of your eCommerce customers, you can create highly relevant segments with ease. Small and growing businesses need to squeeze every drop of value out of the technology they use. They typically have limited resources and need to maximize efficiency and productivity, often with a small team of marketers. You should revisit the qualification process with sales every quarter at a minimum to ensure the point scale is accurately qualifying leads at the right time. When you set up your scoring model in your marketing automation solution, you can specify that those actions get scored the same number of points that it takes to become marketing qualified. Messages sent with personalized email addresses are more trustworthy. Your lead doesn't want to hear news from a robot but from a real person. Study your audience and find out which words are more interesting for your public. In the meantime these words can be somewhat helpful: love, free, results, new, save, offer, immediate, etc. Increase your engagement and your brand awareness by adding social buttons to your emails. This is particularly interesting if are offering some sort of benefit to your customers such as contests, discounts, etc. It's no secret that 55% of emails are read on mobile devices, so create responsive layouts to ensure that your email is being read everywhere. This guide to B2B marketing automation best practices for midsize businesses will help you review your requirements for marketing automation, select the best vendor and create or review your lead generation and nurturing programme. Marketing Automation is a relatively new category of marketing technology combining CRM, Email marketing, lead scoring, personalisation and analytics. Marketing automation software continues to change the way businesses communicate with customers. Selling to existing customers costs less than recruiting new customers, so customer service and satisfaction will continue to dominate the business landscape this year. Automation involves maintaining contact with customers and keeping them conscious of a particular brand or product. To match relevant content, firms must attract prospects to their website and then track their on-site and off-site behaviours. One of the biggest pitfalls of a basic solution is the lack of reporting or misleading reports. One example being single source revenue reports. Tying all the revenue from won business back to one campaign just makes zero sense.