If you’re new to marketing, you’re likely overwhelmed with email templates, posting schedules, and KPI tracking. The good news is that you don’t need to do any of these manually in this day and age. Marketing automation turns these and other repetitive tasks into reusable, time-saving workflows. Here’s a step-by-step process detailing what to do and which tools to use.
Contact Management
Marketing boils down to making products and services sound intriguing and necessary to the right audience. So, the first step towards building successful campaigns is creating and automating a detailed database of leads and customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools do this comprehensively. They automatically create new contacts when someone signs up for your newsletter or orders a product. CRMs also update contacts after significant changes, like scheduled meetings or customer support interactions. Most importantly, collecting enough info lets them reclassify contacts from potential leads to loyal customers, which helps focus your other marketing efforts.
Email Marketing
Organizing contacts lets you naturally progress to email campaign automation through email marketing platforms. Rather than send emails out manually, you just create templates appropriate for different scenarios. The marketing platform can then personalize emails using recipients’ provided contact info and send appropriate emails out when needed.
For example, new customers get welcome letters when making their first purchase. Meanwhile, existing customers may receive discount coupons after not having bought anything for X months to encourage repeat business.
Analytics
Automation alone doesn’t guarantee success. You have to track progress and quantify outcomes to determine whether changes are impactful. Ironically, manually attempting analytics is so tedious and error-prone that automating them is an absolute must.
Analytics platforms inform your decisions by collecting data on what works. They provide you with insights into key performance metrics, like:
- Click-through rates;
- Website visits;
- Unique impressions;
- Engagement with content;
- Newsletter sign-ups, e-book downloads, and purchases.
This data creates a baseline that you can then use to refine ongoing campaigns and improve new ones.
Content Creation and Personalization
Once you automate marketing campaign mechanics, you can also start using automation to optimize content itself. Generative AI might come to mind first since it’s great for brainstorming, but prompting is still manual and can be time-consuming.
Creating core campaign content once and then having AI agents tweak it as necessary is much more efficient. For example, you can learn how to build an AI agent to automatically make changes to email subject lines if engagement starts to drop. Or, it can take your template and create personalized variations that account not just for specific customer interests but viral trends and other unexpected opportunities.
This way, campaigns stay relevant longer without needing constant manual input.
Campaign Management and Scheduling
Eventually, your marketing campaigns will start to become more complex. You’ll have to deploy campaigns across multiple channels and design entire customer journeys. At that point, you start automating entire workflows, not just specifics.
One piece of technology advice to give would be to use scheduling tools to make this manageable. They provide an overview of all marketing channels and help you launch entire message sequences in advance for maximum effect. Mastering them allows you to plan campaigns in advance and set off entire customer journeys with a single click from an interested website visitor.
Conclusion
Marketing automation simplifies the workflows you’re used to and introduces enhancements you don’t have to micromanage. It’s fine if you don’t automate everything all at once, take it one step at a time, see the benefits firsthand, and gradually become a much more efficient and productive marketing pro.
To read more content like this, explore The Brand Hopper
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