There are companies that embrace automation, and then there are those that fall behind. The reality of the modern business world is that success is not achieved solely by delivering the best customer experience, but by combining quality with speed in order to deliver a prompt, seamless, and enjoyable experience to boot, all in the hopes of driving customer acquisition and retention forward. Fail to leverage automation to achieve these goals, and you will invariably waste precious resources while allowing your competitors to get ahead.
Luckily, automation is not only easy to implement into a comprehensive marketing strategy, but will actually allow you to make long-term financial savings while reallocating resources to other important processes in your company. With all of this in mind, let’s break down the five effective ways you can use marketing automation to boost customer experience, acquisition, and retention.
Gather relevant insights quickly
First up, let’s take a look at how marketing automation can help you speed up market research, collect and collate relevant industry insights, and put vast amounts of data into actionable report that you can implement right away. There’s no denying that a machine is way better at research than any team of experienced professionals, simply because of the immense computing power that AI-driven automation brings to the table. This is called big data analytics, and it can revolutionize your business.
The ability to gather industry data from around the world, create unique filters to refine your research methods, and put all of that together into an actionable report is invaluable for a modern business looking to effectuate a stronger marketing strategy. But there’s more to it.
Automation also allows you to gather customer feedback on the spot by sending out automated email surveys, social media messages, or generating website surveys that are quick and easy to fill out. Combined, these methods will help you gauge your brand’s true standing in the competitive market and tailor your message.
Find influencers quickly to improve WOM
Word of mouth marketing is a big deal nowadays, especially when you consider that we live in an age of inbound marketing, meaning that you have to inspire and incentivize your online and offline audience to come to you rather than pushing your products and services their way. A big part of inbound marketing is WOM, and a big part of WOM is influencer marketing. Now, finding influencers isn’t easy, especially the influencers that are right for your brand, it’s values, and identity.
Automation aims to solve this problem as well with specialized tools you can use to locate influencers easily in the online world. From the people who are professional influencers, all the way to your regular commenters and brand advocates on social media, smart software allows you to locate these individuals based on a variety of factors, and check whether they’re the right fit for your company.
Enhance the customer’s experience on-site
The modern marketing world is constantly buzzing about the importance of online reputation management, online PR, online customer satisfaction, and so on and so forth. But what about the customer’s experience and engagement in your store or office? Keep in mind that offline marketing and customer experience are equally important as their online counterparts, so be sure to integrate automation here as well in order to create a more appealing offer for your audience.
Just as you would use an online chatbot to raise customer satisfaction in the online world, you can leverage the potential of a dedicated visitor management app in your office in order to digitize customer reception, and take the whole process into the 21st century. But it’s not just about the flashy technology, it’s also about the valuable features that come with this type of automation, as a visitor management station will allow you to gather feedback and customer statistics, manage visitors easily, synch to various devices, and much more. This is an amazing way to promote your brand, but also develop your competitive edge.
Improve remarketing to incentivize a purchase
If you’ve been in the entrepreneurial game for any amount of time, you know all too well how difficult it is to close a deal, or make a potential customer finish a purchase. Most of the time, the customer will abandon their cart and move on to a different site, so you have a small window of opportunity to reach out and incentivize them to come back.
Your best bet is to automate the remarketing process and send out automated emails to your potential customers with special bonuses, coupons, or discounts that will inspire them to finish what they’ve started. Likewise, you can use remarketing tools to place personalized ads on your customer’s social media and across the web, which might just make them come back to your site.
Take email marketing to the next level
On a final note, remember that email marketing is currently one of the most powerful digital marketing methods in the world, so there is a need to invest in it sooner rather than later. The three main elements of successful email marketing are:
- Personalization.
- Quality content and incentives.
- And email frequency and consistency.
If you want to improve your email-click-through rate, you need to automate your email and ensure that you’re sending them out frequently and regularly. Instead of doing this manually and inevitably allowing something to slip through the cracks, be sure to use automation to schedule your emails.
Wrapping up
To improve customer experience in the online and offline realms, you need to optimize your entire marketing strategy, and integrate modern solutions to develop your competitive edge. Use these tips to integrate automation seamlessly and improve your brand’s trust, authority, and reputation.
