Want to Convert More Leads? Use Marketing Automation to Personalize Messaging

Content Boost

Want to Convert More Leads? Use Marketing Automation to Personalize Messaging

By Peg E. Ventricelli, Contributing Writer  |  March 06, 2017

To grow your business, what you need is conversions, not simply traffic. Completed calls to action beat out number of visitors to your website any day when it comes to creating more leads and, ultimately, sales.

From a content perspective, quality over quantity is the key to changing consumer behaviors. That’s because delivering value to your key targets will help you develop deeper relationships with them. Whereas your content should always follow the strategy you’ve set forth for marketing your brand, it should be personalized specifically to address the unique wants and needs of your various buyer personas, showcasing how your products and services bring value to their lives.

You’re not just selling shoes, for instance, you’re selling sex, social status, and lifestyle. But you know this. It’s gotten you this far. Now, you want to go farther.

Let’s consider lifestyle as an example. Maybe your shoes are hiking boots. How do you attract the greatest number of potential buyers to your product? First, don’t make the mistake of assuming your market is limited to outdoorsy natural types. You need to expand your market by understanding the purchasing behaviors of populations from young urban dwellers to people who have aged-out of stylish shoes. This requires drilling down to the attitudes and behaviors of multiple cultures, subcultures, and other demographics. What’s cool on city streets? What’s driving sales among certain nationalities, genders, and classes? Only by knowing your key targets inside and out can you personalize messaging that will drive them to buy.

Personalizing Messaging and Converting Leads

Marketing automation, or MA, tools give you the ability to organize and analyze the vast amounts of data available to your business daily so that you can better know your key targets. Your MA tools will help you understand what customers want by tracking the very moments when they are bent on going somewhere, or learning, doing, or buying something. With that wisdom, you can develop truly relevant customer communications.

MA goes beyond what even savvy marketers know in their guts about their customers to pinpoint specific attributes that lead to purchases. What’s more, data insights gained will also support better ROI calculations and buy-in from business leaders for your marketing campaigns. You’ll be better able to articulate how your messaging (now personalized to the nth degree) will help grow the business.

Here’s a simple example: Customize your landing pages using data-derived personalized messaging that takes customers’ unique needs and desired outcomes into account. This has been shown to increase conversion rates by more than 25 percent, according to McKinsey.

Another benefit is that your MA technology will enable the sharing of customer intelligence throughout your organization, engendering a systemic and holistic approach to managing the entire customer experience with your brand. All in all, 77 percent of MA adopters have seen their conversion rates increase, according to the 2015 VentureBeat Insight report “Marketing Automation, How to Make the Right Buying Decision”.

Customer retention is another benefit of MA, and another capability that marketers derive from the technology to create value-added customer experiences. To retain a customer that has converted to your brand, your must consistently demonstrate trustworthiness through business transparency and messaging accuracy.

As you continue to provide relevant messaging – perhaps now in the form of ongoing product advice and support – your value for users becomes making their work easier, enabling them to be more competitive. Ongoing relevance, derived from ongoing data collection and analysis, is a key driver of customer stickiness.

Marketing Automation to Integrate Data for a Single View of the Customer

A report from Gleanster Research and Act-On Software revealed that top-performing companies are 20 percent more likely than average ones to use MA technology. These top performers use segmentation and behavior-based data to refine their customer engagement practices and increase the relevance of their messaging.

This is difficult to do with fragmented marketing technologies that are not integrated. MA tools, on the other hand, centralize common technologies like sales automation tools, social media, web analytics, and email marketing, enabling marketers to track metrics, such as sales accepted leads, across channels.

Top-performing companies use MA to create well-defined segments by combining profile attributes with behaviors (such as attending a particular webinar or visiting specific web pages). They also stage delivery of messaging by mapping it to customer life cycle stages for each new lead.

A unified MA platform can additionally be used to determine which touchpoints led to a sale – whether it was a marketing email, a call from sales, or an online chat with a customer service rep. This will show you which touchpoints are driving leads into the marketing funnel. Watching behavior in this way will allow you to send the right message to the right people at the right time.

In general, marketing automation technology is a boon for businesses looking to grow their customer bases and increase their revenues accordingly.

Peg Ventricelli is managing editor for TMC (News - Alert)'s Custom Publishing Division (http://www.contentboost.com/).




Edited by Alicia Young
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