Marketing automation will create captivated and engaged customers

It might seem counterintuitive, but marketing automation can actually increase levels of brand engagement.  Customers now expect relevant and personalised marketing interactions with brands across various channels and platforms, so automated marketing makes this much easier and effective. This ability to personalise experiences with your brand for each customer creates better engagement, improves business workflow and increases campaign ROI. We’ll take a look at some of the ways marketing automation can be used to captivate your customers, leading to a more engaging journey with your brand.

1. Identify your customer journey with automated analytics

A customer’s journey with your brand is never going to be linear. Increasing marketing channels such as social media, email and online ads mean customers will all take individual routes through brand interaction. Marketing automation tools make it much easier to track a customer journey, easily identifying key milestones in the entire process which can then be used to up engagement. This can include the initial channel, buying behaviours and the different paths customers take within the process. Even better, you’ll also be able to clearly identify key areas where the customers lose interest or disengage completely, allowing you to reconnect with these customers quickly and with relevant content. These insights combine to develop an informed, user-focused strategy to make your sales funnels much more engaging. And that will make them more effective.

2. Use automatically triggered emails to boost engagement

Email is an often under-used marketing tool, but utilising email automation is an effective way to segment, personalise and engage with the customer. Automatically triggered emails let you nurture the customer with carefully created content based on their past interaction with your company, with automatic systems making this easy. Sending welcome emails, special date reminders and discount codes all personalised to the customer after a sale or specific action makes them feel valued and appreciated, increasing engagement. You’ll also be able to send automatic requests for reviews after a purchase or visit to your store, in addition to individualised upsells and recommendations. Automated behavioural emails are a great way to maximise your sales as well as creating a more loyal and engaged customer base.

3. Boost social media engagement with marketing automation

Social media is really important for any business when it comes to engagement. Your customers want to interact with your brand via various platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, and marketing automation will underpin all of this activity to amplify your brand message. Marketing automation makes the whole process much simpler, making it easy for you to integrate content, analytics and other marketing campaigns.

Social marketing automation lets you:

• Know which types of posts your customers find engaging, and create future content accordingly.
• Add sharing buttons to all of your site content to make it easier for your customers to share all posts with their friends. This increases levels of social proof and brand awareness.
• You’ll also be able to assess engagement through knowing click through rates, which content is downloaded the most.

4. Test to maximise engagement

Every business needs to test the effectiveness of any marketing campaigns. Marketing automation gives you the tools to easily test new products and marketing promotions with easily identifiable groups. Automation makes data selection and segmentation of your customer base much more simple, so you can test different marketing messages to different demographic or customer groups.  Analysing the results is also made simple, giving you real-time insight to develop, roll out or improve certain campaigns. This information will allow you to segment future campaigns to maximise engagement, offering each customer their preferred to interact with your brand.

5. Use real-time automation on mobiles

Marketing automation through wi-fi proximity marketing or SMS messages on a mobile gives you the tools to communicate with customers in real time. The ability to send a push notification, pop-up with chat-bot or send a special offer through a downloaded app to a customer close to your business increases sales and upselling opportunities. This is particularly useful for retailers or hospitality businesses who can target customers with relevant, but automatic communications. Interaction with customers via their mobiles also gives your customers a cohesive marketing strategy across all devices, as well as providing your business with extra data to improve your sales strategies.

6. Website tracking will increase customer engagement too

Marketing automation through web personalisation allows you to tailor your website experiences to your website visitors, even before they’ve shared their personal information with you. Website ID technology gives you the tools to use browsing data and location information to create a more engaging visit for your customer. For example, visitors can be targeted with ads based on location, or directed to certain products based on their click throughs. This is a really useful tool to increase engagement; not only can you direct visitors through a more relevant website journey, you’ll also gather important tracking information on how and where customers do (and don’t engage). This allows you to tailor and adjust your campaigns to maximise leads and sales funnels.

Marketing automation creates more engaged customers

Marketing automation is a key tool to increase customer engagement. Its doesn’t just make regular communication with your customer base easy and instant, it allows you to create personalised and segmented marketing messages based precisely on the past behaviour of the customer. Used properly with triggered emails, website tracking and social media consistency, this data gives you the ability to create truly engaging content for each customer, increasing interactions, sales and loyalty.