You’re probably well aware of this, but when it comes to digital marketing in 2024, you don’t have to do everything manually anymore.
You can rely on a little something called marketing automation.
In the past decade, marketing automation has revolutionized the world of e-commerce, making it possible to streamline and optimize your business’s marketing efforts.
Between 2021 and 2024, the worldwide marketing automation industry revenue has been forecast to grow by 38.2% to $6.62 billion, according to Statista.
Right now, email (63%), social media management (50%) and paid ads (40%) are the most reported areas for currently using marketing automation, but it doesn’t stop there.
There is a wide range of marketing automation tools that can help you consistently reach your target audience, increase your conversion rates, and improve customer engagement and retention.
Not to mention that marketing automation can save you loads of time by doing repetitive tasks for you.
Whether you’re a small business or an e-commerce leader, mastering marketing automation is key to taking your business to the next level.
Lucky for you, our team at eAccountable Digital Agency has created a comprehensive guide of our 7 best practices to follow to ensure your automated campaigns not only work seamlessly but drive real results.
7 Marketing Automation Best Practices
Anyone can use marketing automation, but not everyone can do it well.
Here are our 7 best practices when it comes to making the most of your marketing automation tools:
1. Build Clear Buyer Personas
Before you can jump into workflows and automated campaigns, you need to ask yourself: Who is your target audience?
To truly understand your audience, you should build detailed buyer personas.
What are buyer personas?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile of an ideal customer that’s based on market research and customer data.
By understanding the different buyer personas contained within your target audience, you can tailor your automated marketing campaigns to different customer segments.
For example, let’s say you’re an e-commerce business selling organic tea subscriptions. Who are you selling to? And what are their pain points?
- Wellness Wendy
Wendy is a 25-40-year-old health-conscious wellness coach or yoga instructor with a yearly income of $50,000 – $75,000. She is looking for high-quality, organic, and sustainably sourced teas that provide health benefits like detox, relaxation, and cold care. To pick up more buyers like Wendy, you should highlight the health benefits of the tea in your marketing while pitching a subscription that contains health-focused tea blends.
- Busy Executive Brad
Brad is a 30-45-year-old busy executive with a yearly income of $80,000 – $120,000 who wants convenient, high-quality tea options to replace coffee or energy drinks that can boost focus and relaxation during a busy workday. Brad is looking for a hassle-free tea subscription that eliminates the need for him to shop, so you should highlight the convenience of the subscription while emphasizing the high quality, curated selections of your tea selections.
- Gifting Greg
Greg is a 35-55-year-old mid-level manager with a yearly income of $75,000-$100,000 who needs a thoughtful gift for a tea-loving family member for the holidays. Greg is not an expert when it comes to tea, so you should provide clear product recommendations for him and promote gift-ready subscription boxes with customizable, premium packaging.
Get the idea?
Now you might not be selling a premium tea subscription, so to get a better idea of who your different buyer personas are, leverage customer data from your customer relationship management system (CRM). Some commonly used CRMs are Salesforce, Monday, Hubspot, and Nutshell. Then there are some specific CRMs for certain industries like BlackBaud or CharityEngine for nonprofits. Some e-commerce-only organizations use Klaviyo as their de facto CRM even though it’s really an email service platform (ESP).
2. Map Out Your Customer Journey
Buyer personas help you send the right message to the right person, but buyer journeys help you map out the right time to send the message.
A customer journey (or buyer’s journey) is the path a customer takes with a company from first contact to becoming a loyal customer. It visualizes all touchpoints a customer has with a company, both direct and indirect, and across all channels.
To build an effective marketing automation strategy, you need to have a thorough understanding of the customer journey. Your customer journey will help you decide what customers should receive and when.
Here’s an example of a customer journey map:
Once you’ve mapped out your buyer’s journey, you can build out automated workflows that engage your audience at every stage. For instance, you can set up a welcome email campaign for new subscribers and follow-up messages for cart abandoners can help guide customers down the sales funnel.
Automated workflows based on the customer journey ensure that you’re providing the right content at the right time while improving the overall customer experience.
3. Personalize Your Lead Capture Form
Now that you have an idea of your target audience and customer journey, it’s time to personalize your lead capture forms.
Your subscription form is the main way you are cultivating lead generation, so it is important you capture relevant information that you can use to cultivate a connection with your target audience.
If you want your automated marketing campaigns to stand out against the competition, personalization is the way to connect with your audience and plays a critical role in lead nurturing.
Personalization doesn’t stop at inserting a customer’s name in the subject line. Your subscription forms are a fantastic way to capture customer data like birthdays, product interest, location, and other relevant demographics. By capturing this information and storing it in your CRM, you can deliver relevant content via SMS and email marketing automation.
Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by another 10%—you’re leaving money on the table by avoiding them.
4. Set Up Lead Scoring (More B2B focused but can apply to D2C)
Not every lead is ready to buy, which is why lead scoring is an essential practice for understanding your sales cycle.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring assigns a value to leads based on their behavior and level of engagement with your brand.
For example, actions like opening an email, responding to an SMS, attending a webinar, or visiting pricing pages can increase a lead’s score, signaling a higher likelihood of conversion.
With a lead scoring model in place, you can automate the process of routing leads to the sales team when they’re ready to be contacted.
This helps your sales team focus on qualified leads, improving efficiency and boosting your chances of conversion.
CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Nutshell make it simple to implement lead scoring, allowing you to automatically nurture leads based on their score and advance them through the sales funnel with personalized, relevant content.
5. Clean and Segment Your Contact List
As you’re scoring your leads, make sure to clean and segment your contact list. An outdated contact list can negatively impact your email and SMS marketing campaigns and hurt your sending reputation, which can adversely affect your deliverability.
What’s the best way to go about cleaning your list?
You can use a free email cleaner like JitBit as well as create suppression lists on your email service platform for contacts who are unsubscribed, suspended, undeliverable, blocked, or non-existent.
Make it a habit to consistently clean your contact database regularly to ensure you’re only engaging with opted-in and active subscribers.
In addition to keeping your list clean, it is essential to segment your contacts in order to deliver targeted automated messages.
Leverage customer data such as:
- Demographics: You can group customers by age, gender, or location for tailored offers. Utilize customer data to create segments that match your different buyer personas. This way, you can cultivate targeted messaging for each segment of your target audience.
- Purchase History: Here, you can create a variety of segments based on whether a user “Has Never Purchased”, “Hasn’t Purchased in 30 Days”, or “Has Purchased X Item”. Using marketing automation tools, you can offer a first-purchase discount to users who have never purchased, and you can send product recommendations or upsell/cross-sell offers to users who have purchased before.
- Customer Engagement: You can create a segment of users who haven’t opened an email in over 100 days; you can target them with a “Win-Back” automation campaign, encouraging them to engage with your content. Or you can create a “Browse Abandonment” segment of users who have viewed a product page but then abandoned it so you can follow up and see if they’re still interested. You can even create segments for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
With segmentation, your marketing teams can create personalized automated flows that will deliver engaging content to the right audience at the right time. This will help reduce unsubscribes and cultivate a stronger connection with your target audience.
6. Leverage Multi-Channel Marketing Automation
When it comes to marketing automation, email marketing is just a small part of the puzzle.
To truly optimize your marketing efforts, you need to engage with your audience across multiple channels, such as SMS, social media, paid ads, and content marketing.
With marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, Klaviyo, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), or Active Campaign, you can run multi-channel campaigns that provide a consistent message across multiple platforms.
For instance, you can set up automated SMS reminders for flash sales, while simultaneously sending email newsletters and retargeting customers with social media posts and paid Google ads.
By diversifying your marketing channels through automation, you’ll maximize your reach and create multiple touchpoints for your audience to discover your brand while eliminating the time-consuming grind of doing it all manually.
7. Test, Tweak, and Optimize Your Campaigns
One of the greatest benefits of marketing automation software is the ability to continuously test, tweak, and optimize your campaigns.
Many marketing automation tools allow you to A/B test your campaigns, letting you experiment with different subject lines, content formats, and call-to-action buttons to determine what resonates most with your target audience.
Beyond A/B testing, it’s crucial to track the performance of your automated campaigns using key metrics (KPIs) like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. By consistently monitoring and analyzing these metrics, you can optimize your campaigns for better performance.
Remember, marketing automation isn’t a “set it and forget it” process. You still need to keep your finger on the pulse.
Optimization should be ongoing, as customer behavior and preferences are always changing.
Continually refining your strategies and content based on real-time data will help you drive growth and stand out against the competition.
Work With An Expert Partner
Marketing automation can revolutionize your e-commerce business, but it requires expertise to implement effectively. That’s where eAccountable comes in. As a full-service e-commerce agency partner, our team of hands-on account managers specializes in building customized marketing automation solutions that align with your business goals.
From setting up your CRM system to cleaning your contact lists to automating multi-channel workflows, we’ll streamline your marketing process so you can focus on growing your business.
Interested in taking your marketing automation to the next level? Drop us a line here for a free consultation with our team.