A marketing automation campaign is the planning and execution of tasks, within marketing automation software, to implement a strategy and meet objectives.
Among the strategies you can implement are: recruitment, subscription, nutrition, and qualification of leads, as well as sales, retention, and customer loyalty.
Regardless of what strategy you decide to execute, a marketing automation campaign must follow a series of good practices to be effective.
I explain some of them:
Define your buyer people
Create the profiles of your buyer people with the fundamental characteristics that your ideal buyers must have. In doing so, keep in mind that your interests, likes, motivations, and needs may vary over time.
Therefore, I recommend that you constantly analyze the actions and behaviors of your leads as they interact with your campaigns.
Thus, you can keep your buyer persona information updated and attract the right people to your conversion funnel more and more.
Identify the objectives of the campaign
For your marketing automation campaign to be successful, you must set goals that are:
- Specific.
- Measurable.
- Achievable.
- Relevant to the general and specific objectives of your organization.
- Achievable in a certain period of time.
This step is key to not lose focus and measure the results obtained in the end. Also, when you go to create your campaign in the marketing automation software, you will have to specify what type of objective you want to achieve.
Depending on that configuration, the platform will provide you with specific elements and functionalities. So from the beginning, you must be clear about where you want to target the actions of your campaign.
Define channels
It is essential that you define the channels through which you will implement your campaign.
I recommend you do it based on your goals, as well as the platforms and messaging systems that your buyer persona mainly uses to communicate, among them are:
- Websites you frequent.
- Social networks.
- Emails.
- Online chats.
- Short message services (SMS).
According to the characteristics of your target audience and the contact information they provide you, you can use multiple channels and create specific campaigns in each of them.
Determine the stages of your conversion funnel
When you identify the stages your leads go through to become customers, you’ll be able to plan what specific actions can be automated to make your sales funnel more efficient.
For example, prospects who are ready to start a specific nutrition process for the middle part of their purchasing process can enter automatically. In this way, they will receive the necessary campaigns without requiring manual action from your marketing team.
Because of this, it is important that your automation campaign is programmed with information and content that meets the needs and interests of your prospects, as they go through the stages of the conversion funnel.
Set KPIs to measure the performance of your marketing automation campaign
KPIs are key to know if your goals are being met or not. Therefore, depending on your strategy and the results you want to achieve, you must define performance indicators.
I show you some examples:
- Email open percentage.
- Percentage of qualified leads.
- The conversion rate of leads converted into clients.
- The average value of qualified leads.
- Number of leads accepted for sales
- The average value of a customer.
- ROI.
Integrate marketing automation software with your website and a CRM
The platform you use to implement your marketing automation campaign must link to your website to track the behavior of the users who visit it.
This step is essential to get your leads into automated flows related to the content they download and the web pages they visit.
On the other hand, integrating your campaign with a CRM helps you centralize and classify the information of your prospects and clients according to:
- Demographic data and labor characteristics.
- The stage of the conversion funnel they are in.
- The scores obtained in the lead scoring process.
Plan the flow of actions to be automated
In this step, you must plan the sequences of actions that will be carried out automatically and the time that will elapse between each of them.
For example, the action flow for a lead nutrition campaign can be:
- Contacts who download an ebook on the fundamentals of inbound marketing will automatically enter a campaign.
- Two minutes after downloading, the user will automatically receive an email where they can also access the ebook by this means. In addition, said email will also suggest reading the article: “Differences between inbound and outbound marketing.”
- Three days after the last action, you will receive an email with the article: “How to create an inbound marketing strategy effectively?”.
- Three days after the previous email, you will receive another email with the invitation to attend the webinar: “How to align your marketing and sales teams?”.
- A day later, and only in case the user has not opened the invitation email to the webinar, they will receive a new invitation with another email subject.
This process can follow as many steps as you need to be given and can also be divided into different automatic campaigns, related to each other.
In summary, for the entire process to take place automatically you must plan and organize the actions that must be carried out, sequentially, according to your objective.
Identify the tags and triggers to be triggered during the process
Labels and triggers are key for your marketing automation campaign to run efficiently.
Tags are used to identify leads according to specific characteristics, while triggers allow you to activate an automatic task based on certain particularities or actions.
To program labels and triggers you have to define a series of conditions and associate them with them. For example:
Triggers: Click on the advertisement
The task to be automated: Activate the sending of a landing page.
Triggers: Contact form completed
The task to be automated: Activate sending an email with the requested content.
Triggers: Email open
The task to be automated: Add tag for leads who opened the email.
Triggers: Email not opened
The task to be automated: Add tag for leads who did not open the email.
Triggers: Contacts who downloaded the content
The task to be automated: Add tag for the leads who downloaded the content
Triggers: Downloaded Content
The task to be automated: Activate sending a new email within 3 days with related content.
It should be noted that most marketing automation software provides you with a variety of triggers and labels to connect the actions and elements of your campaign in a personalized way.
Monitor the process and analyze the results
Despite the fact that one of the advantages of creating a marketing automation campaign is to reduce the workload of your marketing and sales teams, it should always be supervised that the sequence of scheduled actions is being carried out correctly.
During campaign setups, it is likely that errors have been made in the planning of events, triggers, and labels, so be careful with the behavior and the results that it throws.
Creating a marketing automation campaign does not mean setting it up and forgetting that it exists, on the contrary, it deserves constant monitoring and analysis by your collaborators to corroborate that the established KPIs are being complied with or not.
In conclusion, a marketing automation campaign helps you increase the efficiency of your marketing and sales teams, program the key actions of your strategies and measure their results in the short, medium, and long term.
If you want to implement automated marketing in your company, contact us! We will help you create campaigns according to your strategies and needs.
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