One of the most important considerations in marketing automation is the strategy. The first thing you should figure out is the marketing automation strategy that your business will be built on.
The strategy phase includes identify an end goal i.e. what are you planning to automate? Here are some examples:
Signups or onboarding: People came to your website and sign up to use your product. They are now the potential customers. Why? The next immediate step you want is to convert them into paid members. That’s how to receive revenue for your product.
Outbound: You’re running a B2B company, where you need to contact some prospects (or leads) through an outbound manner. You’ve passed the contact detail of your leads to an outbound salesperson to do his job i.e. Convince the leads to become paid clients of your service.
Lead nurture: You have people visited your website and signed up an inquiry form. But obviously, they’re asking all kinds of questions about your product. It shows they’re still in the phase of research of a suitable product that will help their businesses. They aren’t yet ready to become paid clients of your product, which is okay for now. Now it’s the right opportunity for you to help answering their questions whether it is through a virtual assistant who you have hired, or an intelligent chat bot.
A campaign that involves the entire customer lifecycle: Once a user has signed up on your website, you start with sending out a welcome email. You will follow up with further engagement including a second email which is a user guide of your product. In your product, there are opportunities to upsell and cross-sell which you don’t want to miss. Lastly, it would be retention – You’ll want to retain this customer by having her to renew to your product (after her first year subscription expires).
Achieve the end goal
All the actions (or campaigns) mentioned above have a common end goal – Get the revenue to your business.
You may be aware that most of the actions must first be triggered by a result of an interaction with a person. Others are triggered by the users’ interactions.
These days, there are two main ways to achieve this. One of them is rely on using multiple tools. For example, you’ll use one tool to build your landing page for lead generation. You’ll install an email lead generation tool to automate the communication between your website and your “leads” (through emails).
The second way is to use a single all-in-one tool – The big SaaS marketing automation tool. The big tool is comprehensive and powerful, and you will have most (if not all) the lead/customer data in one place. The drawback is that this big powerful tool is often very expensive – Mostly too expensive for mid-size and small-size companies.
