Successfully delivering appropriate messages helps you to lead customers step-by-step through their buying cycle. Marketing automation best practices enable you to set up a workflow of highly personalized marketing messages designed to convert website visitors into leads, and then your new leads into paying customers.

Here are 5 best practices to get marketing automation working for your business.

1. Identify Your Audience
Before you can start creating your emails, autoresponders, workflow messages and landing pages, you need to know your audience. Create buyer personas to help you understand how to produce content that addresses your customer’s specific needs and challenges.

2. Sales and Marketing Alignment
Your marketing automation campaigns should be aligned to your sales processes. Recording every point of engagement to an online CRM will provide detailed customer profiles for your sales team to successfully nurture leads through their buying cycle.

3. Create Valuable, Helpful Content
Delivering the right message that appeals to your target audience, will not only drive an engaging marketing automation process, it will also qualify your leads from the start. So be creative, be informative and be focused.

4. Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing
Effective marketing automation campaigns will feature a multi-channel approach – with touch points including dynamic website content, email, social media, re-targeting, and interaction from your sales team.

5. Test, Tweak, Repeat
The beauty of digital marketing is that it provides a constant flow of data to assist you in optimizing campaign results. A consistent program of monitoring and improving your workflows will increase your overall competitive advantage.

In addition to increasing leads, marketing automation best practices can help increase cross sales and up-sells, and improve customer care processes, turning your customers into active fans who will be ready to recommend you.

This blog was first published on the WSI Digital Marketing blog.

If you would like help getting started with marketing automation, or improving your current campaigns, get in touch with me today.