Marketing automation for a positive communication experience - no fobbing off with empty phrases

Marketing automation is not the same as artificial intelligence

Even if the word "automation" might give the impression that the processes run by themselves and you have nothing more to do with them because the system can think or learn for itself, so to speak, this is by no means the case. We are not talking about an artificial intelligence that looks at the behaviour of visitors to your website and triggers appropriate reactions or suggests further content.

 

In marketing, automation rather means that predefined, thematically coordinated reactions to previous actions take place, predefined by you, set up in the system by you and analysed and optimised - you probably already guessed it - by you.

 

You are responsible for defining the process and creating the subsequent offers. It is also your job to set up, analyse and, if necessary, optimise the processes in the marketing automation system.

 

This means that you are by no means superfluous in the automation of your marketing communication, but retain control over the automated processes.

Prefabricated texts are always generic blah blah blah and therefore detract from the user experience

This is not true, but only if you send information that is irrelevant to the contact.

 

To ensure that your automated responses are really relevant for the user, you need to know them or the buyer persona beforehand, as is usual in inbound and content marketing. Based on this knowledge, you develop content offers that are staggered according to the funnel stages and thus turn a visitor into a lead and, ideally, ultimately into a customer.

 

The development of offers (e.g. white papers, videos or infographics) and the definition of the time periods in which a lead receives this information are entirely up to you. Automation only kicks in once you know a lead's interests and can provide them with information according to their thematic interests.

 

So you will be working with ready-made texts, yes. No-one who works with a marketing automation system can absolve themselves of this.

 

What is really important here, however, is that the information must be tailored to the interests of the contact. Let's assume you have offers on the following three topics:

 

• Inbound marketing in general
• Blogging for companies
• Marketing automation

 

If a visitor to your site now downloads something on the topic of blogging, they will only receive offers on the topic of blogging (if you have set up your automation accordingly, which we are assuming here).

 

This could be links to other helpful content, the offer of another free download or much more. Your buyer persona will certainly provide you with guidelines as to which format is worthwhile.

 

The user experience is designed positively based on the thematically relevant information - even with ready-made processes and texts.

So automation is a new term for "spam"?

No. Spam is the unsolicited receipt of unwanted advertising emails.

 

However, marketing automation goes hand in hand with the use of a double opt-in procedure. This ensures in the system that you cannot send anyone an e-mail without their consent.

 

In addition, the emails are not only thematically customised, as described above in terms of inbound and content marketing , but above all they are not promotional at all. You send relevant content from which the contact can learn something - without price details and without feature lists, indeed for a long time without even mentioning your products.

 

Last but not least, the entire period and frequency over which you nurture your leads is based on the buyer persona and how long it takes for their information procurement and purchasing process to be completed. You divide precisely this period into intervals in the marketing automation system and send your emails accordingly.

 

If someone has not carried out a predefined number of actions within this period of time, they are automatically (and again predefined by you) marked as not interested and removed from the process.

 

Of course, a contact can unsubscribe from receiving emails at any time. Most systems no longer allow emails to be sent without such an unsubscribe link.

Free up time for other tasks

This is not to say that using a marketing automation system can be done by hand. Done correctly, it definitely takes up a lot of time at the beginning. After all, you no longer have to manually thank leads for their interest in the company or enter a reminder in your calendar to send the next content offer to a specific group of your contacts on time.

 

This runs as predefined by you.

 

After the initial setup, you have more time to devote to analysing and, if necessary, optimising current processes and, of course, other tasks.