How To: Increasing Engagement Through Marketing Automation

As a site owner, especially in ecommerce, you have already learned a lot about marketing campaigns. You probably started small, with a newsletter, worked your way through email campaigns, social campaigns, and paid search, and you finally reached the point of integrating your marketing automation system. While this system will revolutionize your marketing process, at the end of the day, there is one thing you cannot forget to ask yourself: how much are your customers engaging with your efforts?

You should always be looking to improve – and customer engagement is no different. Marketing automation can be a key tool in the process of targeting buyers in more meaningful ways, as well as boosting your visibility, and it can also help you measure the current levels of engagement. Let us take a look at some of the ways you can use your automation system to increase interactions:

1. Lead nurture

This advice is central to marketing automation: send the right message at the right time! Your customers do not want their inbox inundated with random email blasts, especially about promotions or products in which they have no interest. Instead, send a slow but steady stream – or “drip” – messages to specific groups over time, to make sure they get the information they need. The more relevant, the more likely your customers are to engage, increasing open rates.

2. Target, target, target!

You cannot lead nurture without personalization! Using the data you know about your customers (location, product interest, profession, and more), marketing automation lets you build and segment lists. These lists can be used to send targeted emails that are even more relevant to the buyer – increasing engagement rates. This is one of the most powerful tools offered by marketing automation!

3. Get busy on social media

It is increasingly likely that customers will purchase a product after seeing it featured in a peer’s post. It is also more likely that if there is any issue with a product or order, your customers will take to social media to ask you for help – or to complain. In all of these cases, the best thing you can do is set your automation system to actively monitor your social media channels. Respond to comments, both positive and negative, as soon as possible, even if it is after business hours. You have to be online when your buyers are online!

Marketing automation will assist with keeping your company first in customer’s minds. Use it to schedule post uploads to social media channels, and to monitor engagement levels for various types of posts. If certain times or themes gather additional engagement, replicate for success.

4. Keep web and email content dynamic

Customers are more likely to enjoy and interact with a website that contains content specific to them and their preferences than one that presents the same information no matter who is on the site. Dynamic content personalizes your website and emails to the viewer, so your customers are always seeing relevant information.

5. Make data gathering more painless

If you are eagerly pushing form after form at a customer upon checkout, oftentimes you will find they do not make it down the conversion funnel. Why? Because no one wants to spend all that time filling out information – or giving it away to make a quick purchase.

Make it easier on your customer by feeding them the forms more slowly. Upon the first purchase, have them fill out the minimum of information necessary, usually around 3-4 essential form fields – and upon subsequent visits and purchases, present your visitor with different form fields. This is called “progressive profiling”, and allows you to collect a varied amount of information over time without presenting an obstacle of fields at the outset.

6. What are people clicking on?

The simplest way to ensure increased engagement is to focus on what is already doing well, and keep doing it. Using custom redirects, you can see which links are getting clicked on, and which are ignored by your audience. Look at what is resonating with your buyers, and use this data to enhance future campaigns, reached out with similar targeted information, and stay up to date on your buyers’ preferences.

In the end…

All in all, marketing automation is a powerful tool to have in your ecommerce arsenal. From day one, you should be strategizing how to use it to its fullest potential. By using digital strategy to provide an outstanding experience for your customers – be it through a user friendly, value added website; targeted and personalized email campaigns; or through your digital presence on social media – you can leave a lasting (and awesome) impression. When your customers are happy, they will in turn share their experiences with others – sending potential customers straight to your online door!