In this post, we’re continuing to share tips and tricks for ways to use marketing automation to augment the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, beyond email.
Event Marketing
One way to integrate marketing automation tools such as Net-Results with outside and interactive efforts is to use it to promote, register, track and analyze webinars or online events. The first step in spreading the word to prospects about your upcoming event is to create an email invitation campaign. You can not only create a standard email invitation, but also you can add an action-based campaign that will track whether a recipient has signed up for your event, either through your email or a registration form. If a recipient does not register, you can configure the platform to automatically send them another set of emails until you receive the desired response.
Just like a traditional email service provider (ESP), a marketing automation platform will track all opens, clicks and visits to your website from your email invitation. Unlike an ESP, however, a marketing automation tool can track recipients’ visits to your site far beyond open and click rates—it provides individual contact information and site navigation every time a visitor returns.
In Net-Results, you can configure a real time alert sent directly to your inbox that lets you know when someone opens your email, visits your site, registers for your event, or opens your email but did not register for the event. You can even set up an alert to notify you when prior registrants return to your website!
When using marketing automation to track your event registration, you are doing more than collecting your data in a streamlined manner—you are also able to view your registrants’ return visits to your website and automate your responses when someone signs up for the event. What’s more, you can cross-reference your webinar vendor’s registration list with your web form data to ensure you are capturing each and every registrant and visitor. You see your registrants contact information and navigation on your site once they sign up for your event and you can also see all of their future visits—whether its next week or next year! You will have access to exactly what they’re looking for and when/how to contact them.
Web Form Abandonment
One of the easiest and most effective ways to build your email marketing lists is through your submission forms on your website. Marketing automation takes the effectiveness of these forms further by capturing visitor information from the forms, and then associating that information with the visitor’s record each time he/she returns to your site. You can also use your marketing automation platform to help you tackle the issue of web form abandonment.
At one time or another, haven’t we all begun to fill out a web form but left it incomplete? After mapping your forms, you can set up an auto responder email that can be triggered when a visitor fills out a form, but does not complete it. In addition to seeing when a form was left partially completed, you can send your sales team a real-time alert to let them know about this prospect. Utilizing these pieces of the platform, you’ll never miss a prospect again!
Inactivity Reminder
If your website asks or requires users to log in to view products, use the service or access certain pages, you can use Net-Results alerts to gauge activity…or lack thereof. You can set triggers when a user has not logged in for a designated period of time. Sending reminders and custom emails to non-active customers often increases retention, lifetime value, and customer loyalty.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
We’ve all started a transaction on a merchant’s website, completed 75% of the process and then abandoned it for any number of reasons such as: unexpected shipping fees, confusing checkout process, comparison shopping, etc. As the merchant in this scenario, you’ll do almost anything to woe that customer into purchasing.
With marketing automation software, you can do more than reach out to them—you can provide a “win back” offer to encourage him/her to return, make the transaction easier, and possibly, more affordable with incentives. When a visitor ditches the transaction after the first part of the process, your platform can be configured to automatically send an auto responder when the visitor fails to complete the transaction. The win-back offer could be anything from free shipping to 10% off the entire purchase. Additionally, if you sell larger ticket items, you could consider setting up an alert for sales so they can personally extend the win-back offer.
With these four tips in mind, we have no doubt that you’ll find unique and creative ways of your own to make marketing automation more relevant and valuable to every component of your overall marketing strategy.
