Think of an automation as a series of events that are sequentially triggered to create steps towards your desired goal. These are often created to nurture a customer and create ‘customer journeys’ that incentivise the customers loyalty to your brand.
You can create a simple marketing automation to remind someone that they have left something in their online shopping cart, or something a lot more complex. Maybe a customer has viewed a particular product more than once, they are then added to a targeted mailing list for that product line, we then wait 2 days and automatically send them a free shipping discount on that particular product if purchased in the next week. Maybe we then monitor if this email has been read by the end of the week, and if not we can send them a SMS text to tell them of the special shipping offer.
Perhaps a customer has bought an expensive guitar this week, we create a simple automation to create them as a VIP customer and add them to the VIP mailing list so we can market to them in the future. One month later we send them an automated email that shows them the higher grade guitar strings they could purchase for their new guitar, but first we automatically check if they have bought guitar strings in the past month and see that they had, so the automation sends them an alternative email showing them all our amazing guitar cases instead. They then purchase a new guitar case, and we send them an automation incentivising them to purchase something else in the next month to become an Elite customer and qualify for discounted shipping on all purchases in the next year.
Not all automations are bound to email or SMS marketing, some may not even be used for 'marketing', for example an automation is created within the website ask how the customers last purchase and delivery went (sentiment feedback), or maybe it just helps with internal website or admin processes.
Some automations may gather information about a customers spending within a given time frame and promote the customer into a new category which gives them new product options, or discounted prices if buying bulk - or anything else you can think of.
Automations are so incredibly powerful, so it isn’t possible to go into every possible scenario, but here is an example of how easy it is to set up an automation within the Oncord website and marketing platform.
We see many different systems to create marketing automations these days, these can be extremely complex and expensive to run (like HubSpot) and some automations are very simple and only allow for a very limited amount of functionality within the system (like Shopify automations).
One of the biggest things we hear from our clients is how much easier it is to have; automations, email marketing, blogs, e-commerce and all customer data in one place. With everything talking to each other there is no need to export data from system to system, and having everything in once place just makes the whole process a lot easier (and more cost effective). If you want to showcase new products to a potential buyer, the product images and data is all there, if you want to send a customer a blog on a product range they are interested in, it’s all there - no copying and pasting from your website needed. On top of that, all your customer data is in one place, from pages they are browsing, to a comnlete purchase history, and more - nothing is lost in translation.
As
you can see, marketing automations are very intuitive to create and very easy to monitor their effectiveness, and extremely vast in what
can be achieved. We have only touched upon what can be achieved with these powerful marketing automations, and in our eyes are one of the
best ways to increase sales online (and offline).
If you want to know more, just give us a call or contact
us here
to see how Marketing Automation and well planned Customer Journey's can help Fuel YOUR online business.
