Top 5 Questions
I had the honour of being asked to speak for a Virtual Event session for Medical Practices across Canada this week! The session focused on Digital Marketing Strategies, and included other experts speaking on branding and website design, demand generation strategy, SEO and social media, copywriting, and my topic, which was sharing critical elements about what you need to know about marketing automation and email marketing. It was such an exciting event and I was honoured to be asked to present! This was actually my first speaking event and my first time presenting in a webinar (as opposed to hosting them which I have done many)….talk about scary!
Marketing Automation - It's Not Just Email
This is obviously a broad subject but something I am absolutely passionate about! The presentation had a lot of information from laying the groundwork about what is a CRM, how that differs from a Marketing Automation tool, the difference between email marketing and marketing automation and some helpful tips about how and when to implement a marketing automation solution.
How does Marketing Automation work?
As I have covered this more in depth in other articles, I will not dive too deeply into this topic here. I will say that Marketing Automation allows you to collect lead data through many interactions: emails, website visits, paid advertising, on social media, and across all of your marketing channels.
This data helps create a 360-degree view of each prospective customer.
From there, marketing automation does all the work: streamlining segmentation and targeting processes to determine the right audiences, quickly and at scale. It allows you to:
- Tailor messaging to each customer automatically based on their profile.
- Create relevant and personalized messaging across email, mobile, social, web experiences, and beyond with a few simple clicks.
- Deliver personalized experiences for your customers, whether you have 100 or 100 million, efficiently and effectively
What Marketing Automation is NOT…
- Spam Emails - Mass emailing is a thing of the past. They are not successful, they irritate people and they are impersonal and do not make sales.
- A list of people who aren’t quality leads - List purchasing is NOT marketing automation. The leads generated through marketing automation are actionable leads who have expressed an interest in the service you are offering
- A Robot behind the scenes running things - This software does not replace a human, but it does free up resources to focus on other more important things, by helping to nurture leads, notify team members of lead actions and track information specifically about each lead.
- A creepy tracking tool - When we get into a creepy tracking tool...This one is a tough one. In this day and age, we cannot go on google or social media without getting ads from a site we just visited. Creepy. Marketing Automation is a tool through which you can collect data and then utilize that data to provide a unique experience for that person. This can be very helpful in delivering the right message to the right person, avoiding point 1.
- Just Email - Marketing Automation spans across all digital channels. The customer journey isn't linear and on one platform. A customer may see your ad on social media, sign up for an email, read your blog, etc. All of that is valuable information that will help indicate where that customer is in the buying cycle and help you deliver more relevant content.
- An inbound marketing strategy - Marketing automation won't create the DEMAND and drive leads to you. What it will do is help you process those leads once that strategy is defined.
Top 5 Questions about Marketing Automation
From this session, there were 5 top questions that I wanted to share with you all!
- What do you recommend goes into a welcome email?
Tell the readers what to expect from you.
Get inside the client or subscribers head and ask WHY they want to give you their precious email address for the first time.
In fact, ask your clients. Run a quick survey of your existing subscribers and see what they want to hear from you!
Or better yet, include this on your subscription preference management page!
- How long is the ideal nurture program?
There’s no set length for how long this type of campaign should run. In fact, this is often referred to as a long-term email campaign.
Some organizations run nurture programs for years
The important thing to think about is: HOW LONG is your sales cycle and leverage a personalized, automated nurture program to move people through the sales funnel to make the sale quickly and efficiently.
Read my Top 10 Tips to create winning nurture programs.
- What time of day is the best to send an email?
Unfortunately there is no magic day and time that works best. BUT the best time to send emails is NOT Tuesday at 10 am as we all used to think many years ago.
It’s important to test your audience and determine when is the best time for them to consume email.
That being said, in general, in a B2C context, the highest click-to-open rates are:
10 AM at 21%, 1 PM at 22%, and spike at near 6 PM.
Click here to read more about the best time of day to send emails.
- How do I start to gather information about potential customers on my existing website?
Marketing Automation! A MA tool connects to your website and tracks visitors as they navigate around your website. Once they have completed a form, marketing automation will cookie them on your website, and follow them around as they click around.
- Do I need a new website to get started with a chat service?
Nope! There are lots of chat tools that you can add to your existing website to bring this functionality to your business.
