Evolve Your Marketing
Because digital marketing is constantly evolving and developing, small business marketers are presented with a unique opportunity — the opportunity to level up their marketing game and add new, impactful strategies to the mix. Solid, ongoing email, social, and text messaging strategies can help build relationships and create success — but what’s out there to help you understand your customers, personalize your messaging even further, and reach them in their preferred online locations?
In this three-part series, we’ll be hitting on three big ways small business marketers can take their marketing efforts from status quo to something truly spectacular through automation, personalization, and more.
Make it Easy and Scalable
The work of optimizing and fine-tuning your marketing is never done — after all, your audience is unique and constantly changing. But as a small business owner or marketer, your time is in short supply, making it a challenge to get to all the things you know can make a difference in your marketing.
Digital marketing automation can help take some of the sting (and the time commitment) out of your marketing, of course. But how can you automate something that’s different for each and every customer? The answer is the perfect combo of customization and automation: custom automations for your marketing.
Custom Automated Marketing Paths
What are custom automations and how do they work?
A welcome series is a basic marketing automation that you are likely familiar with — when a contact opts in to hear from a business, they then receive a series of emails, spaced out over a period of time, welcoming them to the mailing or text messaging list and educating them about the company and its goods or services.
With custom automations, automated email flows can be crafted to be more sophisticated and tailored to the customer by using delays, triggers, and conditional splits.
- A trigger is a behavior or action a customer takes that kicks off a messaging workflow, such as subscribing to a list, having a birthday, clicking on an email link, or placing an order.
- A delay is the time between the trigger and when the message is sent. This can be any time period from minutes all the way up to months after the initial trigger.
- Conditional splits are moments in your digital marketing automation where a contact’s next communications are determined by their actions and information. Based on these splits, your users are segmented and sent down different messaging paths tailored to their activity. Splits can be based on things such as contact details, engagement activity, location, and interests.
When combined, triggers, delays, and splits determine when an email or text messaging series starts, how much time passes before they receive a communication, and how those communications change and personalize in response to their activity.
How does this help me?
Custom automations can help you achieve the best of all worlds, customizing your outreach for your business and its needs while also providing timely, relevant, and personalized content for your customers. This provides a number of benefits, including:
✓ Time savings
✓ Consistent messaging
✓ Increased engagement
✓ Relationship building
Even in the most finely-tuned marketing plan, there is always room for marketers to improve by paying careful attention to their customers and nurturing those important relationships through evolving, personalized communications.
However, as all small business owners and marketers know, time is the hardest thing to come by when operating your business — which means constantly streamlining, automating, and improving your marketing efforts in order to run efficiently.
Adopting new tools and technologies that allow you to foster your valuable relationships across hundreds or even thousands of customers, prospects, and other supporters can take your current marketing from “good” to “great,” all while delighting your customers and saving you time.