Marketing automation is one of the hottest areas of the digital marketing world, and for good reason. A marketing automation system in the hands of a skilled marketer can be an extremely powerful tool. Allowing them to create individual profiles of their customers and use automated, personal, timely, targeted messages to help move prospects through the customer journey and drive sales on a scale previously unfathomable.
Traditionally, the only information available to marketers was demographic information but with these systems, we can now identify, track and guide individual prospects with the right messaging at the right time no matter where they are in the customer lifecycle.
In the image above you can see a fairly common template for a customer journey. In it you may have:
- A Welcome Campaign: Here you are welcoming and introducing new prospects to the brand. Along with generally having some of the industries highest email open rates a welcome campaign can help set the tone for the entire customer life cycle.
- Customer Maintenance Campaign: Once a prospect becomes a customer you can change gears with them. Now that they are part of the “family” you can introduce loyalty rewards, make them feel remembered by sending birthday or anniversary messages. You could ask for referrals or ratings, even start them on the upsell or resell path.
- Rescue Campaign: With the right tracking in place you can tell when a prospect begins to loose interest. Here you may want to entice them back with offers or survey them asking why they have lost interest. Allowing you to potentially win them back depending on how they respond.
- Lost Customer Campaign: Inevitably you will loose some customers. Here it becomes essential that you don’t further harm to the brand by continuing to pester prospects who have clearly lost interest.
- Welcome Back Campaign: But for those who do regain interest, you should have systems in place to welcome them back with open arms.
Once you have a system in place you can continuously improve on it by optimizing poorly performing sections, adding to existing campaigns, or creating new campaigns.
