Marketing automation best practices that drive real engagement

Highlights

You’ll learn about the best practices of marketing automation: 

• Integrate with a CDP for detailed customer profiles and data-backed campaigns
• Focus on dynamic lead nurturing to tailor interactions to individual needs
• Build buyer personas for targeted, personalized strategies
• Track key metrics like ROI and conversion rates to optimize efforts
• Create engaging content that resonates and drives action
• Use A/B testing to improve campaign performance through data-driven adjustments
• Prioritize email marketing by maintaining list quality and crafting appealing messages

Do you want to achieve better results with less effort? Enter marketing automation. It frees you from the repetitive and tedious analytical and marketing tasks, which otherwise are time-consuming. Still not convinced? These stats below will compel you to start thinking about what marketing automation can bring. 

• 76% of companies using marketing automation witness a positive return on investment within one year.
• 77% of those using marketing automation see increased leads. 

Automated marketing can handle mundane tasks and improve your marketing efforts. But, implementing it is confusing and full of roadblocks. So, you need to follow marketing automation best practices to keep your company on track in meeting your goals, generating leads and increasing revenue. 

But what is marketing automation?

In this guide, we explore its ins and outs, including what it is, its benefits and marketing automation best practices.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation improves customer satisfaction and boosts marketing effectiveness by automating essential tasks like lead scoring, email campaigns, lead qualification and social media content scheduling. This lets you establish a strategy where you no longer have to press the hit button to send each message. Implementing automation, your team can spend energy on strategic and creative initiatives.

Let’s understand marketing automation using an example:

A customer browses an online store for a few products but leaves the website without purchasing. So, have you lost a deal? No. Marketing automation tracks customer behavior. In a few hours, you send a personalized email with a discount on the exact items they viewed and a clear call-to-action encouraging them to complete their purchase.

Before learning about marketing automation best practices, explore why it’s a must for every modern-day business.

Benefits of marketing automation

Enhances customer engagement

Automation delivers the right messages to the target audience when they need them. Your website subscribers receive welcome emails automatically after they subscribe to your newsletter or download your free e-book. Why? At the moment, your prospects are interested; otherwise, they will not subscribe or download. Based on their buying interests, you send personalized product recommendations. Before sending exclusive deals, you waited for several days after the subscription. Result? Higher customer engagement and loyalty.

Improves conversion rates

Automatic follow-ups and guided customer journeys keep your potential customers interested at every step of the sales funnel. For example, a streaming service could recommend shows or movies similar to ones a user recently watched, followed by a free trial for a premium plan to access exclusive content. Automation saves time, builds trust and keeps your brand top of customers’ minds. It’s an easy way to turn leads into loyal customers without missing a single chance.

Higher lead management

Automated lead scoring makes it easier to focus on highly qualified leads. These tools analyze your customers' interest level, shopping habits and details like their age or location to choose those with a higher chance of purchasing. For instance, if a prospect opens your email, checks your pricing page and matches your ideal customer profile, you focus on them first. Additionally, you spend time on those more likely to convert, closing more deals.

Better data for smarter decisions

Did you know that a company collects data from more than 400 sources? But they are clueless about how to use it. That's where marketing automation tools convert your data into valuable insights for:

• Improving your marketing strategies
• Enhancing customer engagement
• Ensuring better outcomes

The meaningful insights help you make smarter decisions.

Provides a 360-degree customer view

Marketing automation tools build customer profiles by analyzing customer behavior, giving you a 360-degree customer view. Such a view lets you find premium leads throughout your sales process. When you know your customers' preferences and predict their needs, you can understand them better. This ensures long-term relationships and drives customer loyalty.

Offers personalization

Marketing automation creates more personalized content through its reporting and segmentation features. You can target different customer personas on multiple channels. The tools achieve this by converting your website visitors into leads. By analyzing customers’ data, you can segment your audience and send personalized messages. For instance, an online store sends email discounts to those who searched for boots but never purchased. Personalized discount offers make customers feel valued and encouraged to buy the coats they left in their shopping cart.

Increases marketing ROI

Marketing automation optimizes your workflow and reduces repetitive tasks. You can use your resources at an optimum level. With automated campaigns, you send personalized messages to your audience, which means better engagement and more conversions. When your marketing is clear and on point, your return on investment (ROI) increases.

Marketing automation best practices

Integrate your marketing automation with a CDP

Your marketing automation, integrated with a Customer Data Platform (CDP), transforms how you use and handle customer data. A CDP like Lytics brings together different data sources to build complete customer profiles. Through these tools, marketers gain access to additional data sources to scale personalized marketing campaigns. The advantages of joining marketing automation platforms with CDP are:

• Accurate audience segmentation
• Stronger customer engagement
• Smoother multichannel experiences
• Smarter data-backed decisions

Tools like Lytics keep your data and insights consistent across platforms, ensuring every part of the customer journey is optimized.

Focus on dynamic lead nurturing

Do you force your leads down an already defined path? Create dynamic programs that meet individual customer needs. Rather than using a rigid storyline and predetermined path, build a framework that adjusts according to your customer's requirements. Give your leads a chance to choose their journey through multiple touchpoints that match their interest. For instance, if a lead downloads a whitepaper, automatically route them to case studies and testimonials related to the product to build trust. Or, if they interacted with your webinar, send them some additional resources or a link to a product demo. But why is all this necessary?

Lead nurturing is not a one-size-fits-all approach. You need dynamic lead-nurturing programs to respond to your leads' needs. 

Build a buyer’s persona

Building a buyer’s persona is equally important as it ensures you reach the right target audience. Effective marketing starts when you know who your customers are and what they want. Only when you understand their needs, answer their questions and offer solutions at the right time can you guide them to conversions. Referencing these personas creates campaigns that resonate with your target audience, ensuring your messaging feels personal, relevant and impactful.

Mapping your customers’ journey with these personas creates workflows that speak to your audience at every stage. But the journey mapping is never-ending and requires constant refinement and adaptation.

Track your metrics

As marketing automation is a powerful tool for enhancing your marketing workflows, you cannot set it and forget everything about it. Once you have set up the automation, keep a close eye on how your campaigns perform. Based on what’s working and what’s not, make changes. 

Track key performance metrics like:

• How many leads converted to customers?
• How many total market qualified leads (MQLs) did you generate?
• What is the ROI of your automation?
• Did your bounce rate reduce?
• Has your email unsubscribe rate decreased?
• Did you reduce the percentage of cart abandonment?
• Is there an increase in the average order value?
• Have more free trial customers converted to paid customers?

Tracking these metrics helps you understand your campaign’s performance. You can use this data to identify trends and uncover areas for improvement. 

Develop engaging content

Your customers receive tons of information from all corners, so making noise in such a cluttered market is essential. So, you need to create engaging content that resonates with your customers. Automated content and messages you share should be compelling. Your marketing automation is more effective when quality content supports you. Developing engaging automated emails, social media posts and other channels ensures your target audience is interested and responsive throughout the customer journey.

Embrace A/B testing

Conduct A/B testing on your subject lines, call-to-actions and visuals to see what resonates best. Running tests with different elements generates information about which components attract attention, encourage clicks and lead to desired actions. A/B testing lets you study different versions to optimize your marketing automation strategies so your content delivers better conversions. Testing multiple campaigns increases user engagement and conversions. Prospects will likely take the desired actions, such as email subscription, e-book downloading or free trial request.

Give importance to email marketing

Email marketing is an essential part of your marketing automation. But it’s not as simple as composing an email and blasting it off to an extensive email list. Email reputation functions as your marketing foundation. Start by choosing your audience and making each message enjoyable. You need to allow readers to freely unsubscribe from your emails. Constant maintenance of your email list preserves your reputation by ensuring it contains subscribers dedicated to your products or services. Such customers are likely to report your emails as spam. Maintaining a positive email reputation is important but often overlooked during automation. 

Benefits of integrating Contentstack’s headless CMS with automation tools

Higher efficiency

Contentstack’s headless CMS system integrates with automation tools for eliminating repetitive content updates, distribution and scheduling. Removing these tasks allows your team members to develop innovative marketing approaches. Also, it reduces errors and speeds up your otherwise slow workflows.

Personalization that connects

With automation tools and headless CMS, analyzing data and segmenting your audience becomes easier. So, you deliver content tailored to individual preferences. Personalized content keeps people engaged, builds loyalty and increases conversions. 

Scalable content management

Combining automation tools with Contentstack’s CMS makes managing large amounts of content less overwhelming. Whether for multiple platforms or channels, you can handle it efficiently while maintaining quality. As a result, you deliver consistent brand messaging even when you scale.

Faster time to market

Manual processes can slow your workflows. When you automate your workflows, creating, reviewing and publishing content becomes faster. Your team stays flexible and reacts to trends or changes in the market much faster.

Data-driven insights

Automation tools integrated with a headless content management system (CMS) provide access to detailed analytics. You can see what’s working, spot improvement areas and adjust your content strategy for better results. When you make informed choices that support your goals, you win customers and expand effortlessly. 

Case study: How a cloud service provider modernized its partner programs with Contentstack?

A cloud services provider revamped its partner program by ditching an old system and building a new portal on Contentstack. The platform is super user-friendly, with automated workflows and built-in reporting to solve past issues like clunky manual processes and scalability headaches. Now, partners can create and manage profiles, access self-service training tools and enjoy automated certification validation that saves tons of time. Updates happen fast, making it easier to handle partner requests quickly. The new portal not only supports partner growth and improves collaboration but also tracks data to show the program’s impact. The results? A 100% increase in verified partners and stronger relationships all around.

After using Contentstack, the Director of the company said:

“I think with a massive ecosystem of partners and working across the globe with our thousands of customers, the efficiency of a portal like what we have with Contentstack is really key to our success. Contentstack provides us with a portal with the latest technologies that allow our customers to find partners wherever they are in the world, in whatever time zone and in whatever language because it’s localized for many different languages. Without that, we wouldn’t have the value back to our partner ecosystem.”

Read the complete case study here. 

FAQs

Which marketing automation tool is best for my business?

The best marketing automation tool suite meets your requirements and integrates with your existing technological frameworks. Easy-to-use and scalable tools help you deliver desired results. 

What is a marketing automation strategy?

A marketing automation strategy outlines how you will use automation tools to improve your workflows, customer engagement and ROI. Using this strategy, you can define your automation goals, select the right tools and create personalized campaigns.

How can I automate a marketing process?

Identify repetitive tasks like email campaigns or customer segmentation. Next, use an automation tool to build workflows. The tools encourage actions based on the user's website activity or email responses.

What is marketing automation in CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools integrated with marketing automation manage customer interaction and relationships. The CRM platform divides your audience into groups and tracks their activities to deliver customized messages directly through the system.

Learn more

So, you now have the answer to the question “What are marketing automation best practices?” These best practices can optimize your processes, improve customer engagement and drive better results for your business. Do you want to see how Contentstack’s headless CMS, along with your chosen marketing automation tools, helps your marketing efforts? Talk to us today.