9 Marketing Automation Best Practices

1. Keep marketing analytics and lead scoring simple.

Having an overly complicated and extensive lead scoring system, you have a problem. You don’t want to rely on a team of interns just to gather all the information in Excel.

Keep it simple so you can create a clear baseline for performance expectations, one that can be adjusted based on feedback later. Having a simple and streamlined process is key to optimizing marketing campaigns as close to real-time as possible.

If you’re running your marketing analytics like a big ship that takes forever to turn, then you’re missing out on incremental opportunities.

2. Target your lead flow.

Mapping your lead flow is the key to creating a simple process that doesn’t require a large team to manage. You have a clear path to converting website visitors into leads that will increase your company’s revenue. Create a flow that is simple, includes all the right trigger points that affect your lead flow, and is used by everyone who visits your website.

3. Know the buyer’s journey.

For your marketing automation tools to be effective, you must first understand the buyer journey of your target audience. What kind of questions are asked? What online pathways are they using in the awareness, consideration and decision stages? And how can you deliver effective marketing at each stage? Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll be able to map out a workflow that you’ll be happy with at each stage.

4. Create buyer personas.

Build buyers to ensure you reach your target audience. Buyer personas are imaginary profiles of your typical customer base.

Buyer personas help you analyze your customers’ demographics, challenges, needs, and interests. These people will help you create marketing campaigns that deliver value to the right audience and convert prospects into customers.

5. Create engaging content.

Consumers are bombarded with information from countless brands and companies every day, so you need to create engaging content that cuts through the noise. This could be in the form of a blog, polls, quizzes, webinars, interactive videos, live streams, social media posts and more.

Engaging content such as videos has proven to be a successful strategy for many marketers. In fact, a recent Wyzowl survey found that 81% of marketers say video has helped them increase sales.

6. Consider email reputation.

The last place you want your automated marketing emails to end up is the spam folder. To make sure your emails reach your consumers’ inboxes, know your audience (remember those buyers we talked about?).

Create engaging and valuable content that your audience will want to keep receiving from you. We recently conducted a survey of email marketing benchmarks and of the US marketers we surveyed, 40.2% said that providing their marketing emails via email was most effective in achieving their email marketing goals.

Also, provide clear subscription management options to your potential customers and clean up your database so that only your activated emails are used and not spam.

7. Capture potential customers effectively by limiting distractions and avoiding lengthy processes.

You want to delight your customers every step of the way, so make sure you have attractive landing pages with easy-to-fill forms that make visitors want to provide their information. In our 2021 State of Marketing report, we found that email collection forms were the most successful at converting viewers, with a 15% conversion rate in 2020.

Don’t assume that every potential customer wants to make a purchase right away. Instead, provide avenues if you want to contact them about a product or service. And remember that distractions can stop conversions; therefore, focus only on one call to action, such as an event registration or an opportunity to download an e-book.

8. Make sure your marketing automation system integrates well with your CRM.

A marketing automation system is supposed to make marketing easier, and a CRM is supposed to make it easier to manage leads and customers. If they can’t talk to each other, you’ll end up doing a lot more work for yourself. Before you decide on marketing automation and CRM platforms, make sure they can integrate with each other, and make sure you have the budget to make it happen. You’ll thank me later for this one.

9. Build a non-linear feed.

Nurturing programs need to be dynamic to bring value to the people who come into contact with your business. Each visitor to your company’s website may be at a different stage of their buying journey, so make sure your leads are not linear.

For example, if a potential customer is already looking at pricing information, they should be directed immediately to where that information is available. If a prospect tuned in to a webinar, they should receive a follow-up email with additional information.

Marketing automation is meant to make marketing to your target audience easier and less time consuming. For best results, follow the marketing best practices above. If your marketing automation tactics are missing a few key points, now you have the information you need to improve your system.