As experienced marketing automation consultants, here are our top 10 tips to increase effectiveness of marketing automation while simultaneously improving your overall productivity:
- Comprehensively configure your tools. Configure everything you can that is pertinent to you. Look at add-ons/connectors, search marketing and social settings, etc. to make sure you are getting the most out of your software.
- Explore all of your options within the tool. There are hidden gems in your software that are incredibly useful. Functions like “Prospect Audits” and “System Emails” are good examples of features that have become hugely valuable to our work that are buried in the high level set of software features.
- Create real-time alerts for the most critical events happening on your site. Someone fills out a form—fire alerts on all cylinders! Someone hits your pricing page—notify a sales rep by email.
- Set internal calls to action in the subject line of notification rules. In other words, if someone fills out a form, my subject line to my sales rep is “CONTACT NOW”.
- Schedule as many of your emails and social posts in one batch, aka time blocking to get into a rhythm and remove distractions.
- Do micro-targeting and split testing to get as much intelligence about your message as possible.
- Map out your drip campaigns and logic in collaborative campaign documents so you can work better with the necessary parties. Using a cloud content management service is one way to do this.
- Do weekly/monthly audits of rules, dynamic segments, auto-responders and any other automated tasks to make sure that they are still 1) accurately working for your campaigns 2) necessary (otherwise, clean out the clutter).
- Ongoing training. Make sure the people actively using the tools are continually learning how to most effectively use the tools. Software gets updated, best practices are established and your team needs to be informed.
- Staff a marketing technology specialist. A growing profession is the tech-savvy, marketing-minded professional. Both creative and technical, marketing technologists can help you get the most out of your marketing automation software.
For more tips on how to increase effectiveness of marketing automation, you can download our Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
