5 Ways Marketing Automation Makes Engagement Easy

Whether you prefer social media or email newsletters to reach out, you know it’s paramount you regularly connect with your audience. You can use this opportunity to introduce new products and services, yes, but you’re primarily building trust and nurturing your customer relationship.

Doing so can pay off big-time. According to 2016 stats from website optimization service SessionCam, engaged customers can account for 23 percent of a company’s relationship growth, revenue, and profitability for the year (cited from a Gallup poll from that same year).

There are stats by the industry as well:

• Insurance companies with policy owners boasting a higher level of engagement may see a 22-percent increase in the sale of insurance policies and products.
• Hotel companies with engaged customers should expect 46 percent more sales from those customers annually.
• Fast food restaurants with engaged diners can similarly expect more sales, this time 28 percent; casual dining restaurants see an even bigger boost thanks to engaged customers with 56 percent more monthly visits.
• Banks that engage with their customers may see a spike in annual revenue by up to 37 percent.
• Lastly, consumer electronics retailers can earn a traffic increase of 44 percent from engaged customers; in addition, while a disengaged customer will buy about $289 worth of merchandise on an average visit, engaged customers shell out more, about $373.

Even though these stats are two years old, they instantly prove how important engagement is across many industries. Still, if you’re a business owner, then you’re probably juggling many responsibilities every day. While you wish you could spend more time on customer engagement, this important job tends to slip through the cracks.

Luckily, there’s marketing automation for engaging more efficiently with your customers. Here’s how.

1. Website Visitor IDs Let You Identify Audiences

Who are those people liking your social media posts or visiting your blog? Could they be leads and thus potential customers? Typically, to find out, you have to wait until they eventually sign up to your newsletter. Sometimes, though, it’s months before that happens. In some cases, it doesn’t happen at all.

You can chalk that up to missed opportunities, or you can consider using website visitor IDs, also known as website personalization with an account at Marketo. This tracking feature makes a note of a potential customer’s referring URLs, location, browsing behavior, and more.

The best part is Marketo does this all for you. If you have hundreds or even thousands of potential customers coming your way each week (or each day if you’re really lucky), you know how time-consuming it would be to identify and group each one of them. It’s a necessary job, but who has time to do it?

Now you don’t have to worry about that.

2. Email Sequences Let You Weed out Uninterested Customers and Personalize Messages to Those Who Are Interested

Email marketing is one of the cornerstones of customer engagement. In fact, aside from social media, you’ll probably do the bulk of your interacting with customers via email offers and newsletters.

Of course, you’re not sending out the same blanket email to all your customers. Once you’ve tracked their information using website visitor IDs, you can segment your audience based on their interests and/or pain points. Then you’ll send a series of emails to one segment of your audience and a totally different series of emails to another segment.

Email sequencing allows you to organize and automate your email marketing. EngageBay, an all-in-one marketing solution, offers email sequencing in its suite of services. To use it, all you have to do is write your emails for each audience segment. Then create your segments in the system, format your messages, and schedule your emails.

If customers don’t respond to your initial messages, you can initiate a longer email sequence to try and engage again. If this fails, you can remove them from your email list.

3. Social Media Automation Keeps You From Getting Sucked In

Social media has become incredibly pervasive. It’s how millions of people connect with friends and family, learn of big news in their loved ones’ lives, read the news, play games, and otherwise entertain themselves.

While it used to be that the big three (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) were worth focusing on, today it would also behove you to master YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Snapchat as well.

In short, there are a lot of social media platforms out there. In a year or two, there will probably be even more.

With 2.80 billion users on social media across the world (as of this writing), you can expect that many of your customers will find you this way. You need to maintain an active presence across the platforms mentioned above, but this can be difficult. With social media automation like that offered at Buffer, you can schedule your social media posts from one convenient platform.

There’s no more logging into Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram. Even better, you can track brand mentions as well as review analytics all from one platform. This will keep you on-task and prevent you from wasting countless precious hours getting sucked into the social media black hole.

4. Mobile Marketing Appeals to a Crucial Market

According to the most recent data (which is from 2017), the average person uses their phone for more than four hours every day. Monthly, that’s over 86 hours, so that time does add up. This person may be playing games, texting, or using social media, but they’re also visiting websites and apps.

Website optimization for mobile became a must several years ago, and today it’s all about mobile marketing via apps. This includes the usage of customer service chatbots, in-app messaging, and push notifications about sales, new products, or other important news.

Of course, everyone has been annoyed by an app that sends too many push notifications per day. What do you do in that situation? You either disable push notifications, meaning you miss important messages, or you uninstall the app altogether.

That’s why a push notification must be timed as perfectly as an email sequence. The goal is to engage with the audience when they’re most interested. Mobile marketing automation allows you to do just that.

5. Analytics Let You See What’s Working (and What’s Not)

Any automation service worth its salt will generate a data report you can review to see the areas in which you’ve succeeded and what you can do better for next time. For instance, EngageBay’s email marketing automation provides statistics that track subscription (and even un-subscription) rates, open rates, click-through rates, and more.

Our social media dashboard lets you track the success of your social campaigns as well. By culling all these analytics and comparing it against your company’s uptick in ROI, traffic, and sales, you can get a complete picture of your automated engagement campaign.

Conclusion

The methods in which company owners engage with customers are always evolving, but these five automation tactics are worth considering for your business if you haven’t already implemented them.