I don’t know about you, but I love marching bands. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching all the individual members work together to form patterns, spell out words, and even create “pictures” as they march around the field. It would be impressive enough of these bands managed to perform their routines with the help of “handlers” who would point them in the right direction — but of course, the best marching bands execute flawless routines completely from memory.
What does this have to do you with digital marketing, you may ask? Well, by harnessing the power of automation, your marketing can become like an elite marching band: a well-oiled machine that delights and captivates your customers without requiring any direct input from your team.
In case you’re not familiar, “marketing automation” refers to a system in which certain actions by your (potential) customers trigger automatic responses tailored to their experience. For example, many websites feature e-mail signup forms that encourage visitors to submit their e-mail address to receive, say, a monthly newsletter from your business. Without any automation in place, visitors who submit their e-mail address will simply receive the next edition of the newsletter whenever it is sent to the mailing list.
With automation, the visitor would immediately receive a personalized e-mail with some introductory content, and would then receive regularly scheduled follow-up e-mails that build on the previous e-mails they’ve received. It’s even possible to adjust which e-mails a particular user receives based on how they’ve interacted with previous e-mails and/or with your website — for example, if a user receives an e-mail, clicks a link within the e-mail, adds an item to their cart, but does not check out, they can automatically receive a follow-up e-mail that highlights the specific item in their cart when they abandoned it.
Historically, the downside of incorporating automation into your online presence was that your users and customers lost that sense of a “personal connection” with your business or organization. As technology has advanced, it’s now easier than ever to use automation to provide a highly personalized experience for visitors to your website. You can even add dynamic content to your website pages so that different visitors see different text and images based on how they’ve interacted with your website in the past.
For example, perhaps your business offers various categories of products and/or services. With marketing automation, website visitors who express an interest in a particular category can be “tagged” based on that specific interest. Then, the next time that visitor loads your website, the marketing automation scripts detect the visitor’s “tag” and load content based on those interests. Marketing automation can also work hand-in-hand with Google display ads — you can configure your Google advertising campaigns to show dynamically-generated ads with content related to the areas of your website that a particular user has shown interest in.
Curious about how your organization could benefit from marketing automation? Or just interested in learning more about how it works? Contact our marketing team and let’s chat further!
