How to Implement and Win With Marketing Automation

This post will show you how to implement marketing automation in your business, so you can save a ton of time, automate repetitive tasks, and grow your revenue.

We will talk about the exact strategies that helped our customers reduce costs on acquiring new leads by 77% while saving up to 320 hours a month!

We will go through the whole process of achieving the same results even if you are a complete beginner or have never heard of marketing automation before.

What is marketing automation implementation?

Marketing automation is the process of using software tools to automate tedious tasks in your marketing strategy. This will allow you to remove all the boring tasks and enjoy your business more.

To understand it better, let’s look at an example of what simple marketing automation implementation looks like.

Suppose you run a Software as a Service (SaaS) business and people sign up for your product.

Each time someone opts into your email list, you should send them a welcome email. It’s critical because it shows that you care about your customers.

(Welcome emails also have one of the best open rates, revenues, and CTRs.)

However, if you’re not using marketing automation software and want to send a welcome email to your customers, you’re in trouble. You’ll need to do it manually – which can take hours if not days. Plus, it’s also super boring.

Fortunately, you can automate this process with marketing automation tools like Encharge and check it off your to-do list. Encharge will work in the background and send personalized welcome emails to your new users, while you dedicate your time to more important things in your business.

How does marketing automation work?

Marketing automation would enable you to create customer journeys that appeal to customers’ emotions, desires, and needs.

You can build an automation flow that leverages all your insights like clicks, purchases, website behavior, email engagement, and more. The flow will automatically create unique customer journeys for each person by segmenting them into different groups and showing them the best content.

For instance, if a customer has just joined your list, you should increase their awareness and interest in your brand.

You can easily do that by showing them success stories, case studies, or testimonials from your clients.

Contacts that are ready to make a purchase will receive entirely different content. They’ll perhaps get a timely offer or a discount. By building automated marketing campaigns, you can stay more relevant and ultimately increase the profitability of your business. 

What does “bad” or “good” marketing automation implementation look like? 

Marketing automation can help you a lot. However, it can also have a disastrous effect on your business and completely turn off your leads or existing customers. That’s why you must know the difference between good and bad marketing automation implementation.

Bad marketing automation

Marketing automation done incorrectly can have abysmal effects on your business. If you don’t have a clear plan of what you want to automate, the automation might lead to unwanted or irrelevant marketing, which can be a huge turn-off.

You could be showing the wrong information to the wrong people, which inevitably will lead to poor results.

For instance, in the example above, we have written the field names (also known as “merge tags” or “conditional tags”) incorrectly, and the marketing automation tool could not fill them appropriately.

Aside from that, here are a few signs of lousy marketing automation implementation:

• Ignoring to plan before you implement
• Not knowing the goal(s) and objectives of your marketing campaign
• Poor segmentation
• Building automations based on ill-informed data
• Sending irrelevant emails, text messages, and other communication to the wrong people at the wrong time
• Not testing and optimizing your automation flows.

Avoid these mistakes at any cost.

Good marketing automation

Proper marketing automation can lead to massive success really quickly. It can increase your productivity, save you a lot of resources, and boost conversion rates by 15-20% – a significant sales boost.

Here are a few things to follow for achieving excellent marketing automation implementation:

• Have a clear plan, goals, and objectives.
• Stay relevant by leveraging segmentation.
• Monitor your essential engagement metrics like opens and clicks.
• Constantly test your emails and flows. Fix errors on time.

Following these actions will help you build a bullet-proof automation campaign that will lead to all of the benefits we’ve talked about earlier.

Aside from that, there is one more thing you shouldn’t forget about… Automation is excellent, and we all love having virtual robots working for us 24/7, but you can’t automate everything…

There are times when human contact is needed. Good marketing automation tools will identify these moments and tell you when it’s time for your personnel to come forward.

Encharge integrates seamlessly with some of the major CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, so you can take the reins of the communication when needed. You can achieve this by creating a task to follow up with your prospects or leads at the right moment of the customer journey.

How to perfect your marketing automation implementation

Let’s move from theory into practice. In this section, we will dive into how to perform marketing automation implementation properly. We will discuss each step in detail so there is zero confusion.

1. Create a plan

“If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.”

Steve Prefontaine – American long-distance runner

Every successful implementation starts with a detailed plan— an outline of what the tactic will look like and the goals you want to accomplish.

To do so, you must find answers to these three questions:

• What am I trying to achieve short-term and long-term? 
• What are the marketing activities I’ll need to do to achieve these goals?
• Are any of these activities repetitive / used multiple times?

Start with the big picture. Think about the big goals you want to achieve with automation. Then, move towards specific objectives. Use the S.M.A.R.T formula to set objectives.

When you can answer these questions, it’s time to start looking for the right marketing automation tool.

2. Find the right solution

Choosing the right software is critical for the successful implementation of marketing automation. You shouldn’t look out only for price, though.

There are a lot of other important things you should consider, such as:

1. Features – if it can fulfill all of your needs.
2. User interface – the overall ease of use, intuitiveness, etc.
3. Integrations – if you can integrate it with your favorite tools and platforms.

Aside from that, you should also check the tool’s learning curve and how responsive the customer support is.

At Encharge, we provide personal hand-holding and all the learning resources you’ll need to start using the platform to the fullest.

If you have trouble choosing the right marketing automation tool, check our in-depth guide. 

3. Clean your data

Let’s be honest for a minute. Everybody hates cleaning contact data — it’s fiddly, boring, and extremely time-consuming. But unfortunately, it’s a critical part of successful marketing automation implementation.

If you have messy, unstructured data, you risk messing up your whole strategy and ultimately hurting your bottom line. You know, things like sending emails to email addresses that don’t.

Or even worse, sending the same email to a customer twice or more because you have duplicate contacts. (Fortunately, Encharge takes care of this as every contact in the platform can only have one unique profile.)

Another thing to consider is importing very old dormant contacts. You might want to say goodbye to all those ancient leads that have been picking up dust on your hard disk for years.

All these things will diminish your email reputation and make the whole automation process less productive.

The good news is that you can clean your data effortlessly and make it fresh with a few tools.

One of the tools we recommend is Tye, a CRM data cleansing platform that will prune your contacts based on freshness/decay, incorrect or missing data, bad formatting, and more.

It’s only fair if we tooth our own horn here, too:

Encharge is the only marketing automation platform in the world that offers 100% free email verification for all of the contacts that end up in your Encharge account. Whether that’s from import or other mediums like Zapier. The best part is that it works in the background and validates email addresses automatically. After all, that’s what automation is all about, right?

Once you’ve pruned your contact list, it’s time to get to funnier things and move to the first step of automating the marketing in your business.

4. Import your contact list

Before you can start automating your marketing, you’ll need to import your leads and customers’ data. You should import as much data as you can, from name and email to previous behaviour.

In Encharge, this is super simple. All you need to do is have a spreadsheet with your contacts and import it to our tool.

If you use Salesforce, you can import your data with a couple of clicks, thanks to our native integration.

5. Start simple

When you start implementing your marketing automation for the first time, it’s tempting to automate everything. You will want to create the whole email marketing automation campaign and be prepared for every possible situation.

Let me stop you there… You should not do that, at least not in the beginning.

Powerful marketing automation platforms will enable you to implement an email marketing automation workflow that looks like the one below, but these automations are incredibly complicated.

It would take you weeks to create, let alone to fix all the errors and perfecting it. And that’s why we suggest starting small. Your marketing automation doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it can be as easy as this.

You can kickstart your marketing with this exact flow. Copy this flow to your Encharge account in just a single click. Simply click on “Copy flow to your account” and create your free Encharge account.

You will also avoid overwhelming yourself or hating the whole implementation process. So start simple, learn as you go along, and make your marketing automation spot on.

Types of marketing automation campaigns you can implement

What is marketing automation primarily used for?

There are a lot of things you can automate in your business.  In fact, with the latest technologies, your options are limitless. So let’s now look at a few of the essential marketing automation techniques you can do with Encharge.

All of these techniques are vital and should be employed in every serious business.

1. Email marketing campaigns

Email marketing is where most of your marketing automation efforts should go. It’s also one of the best ways to see a positive ROI and maximize the profitability of your business. Primarily because of its crazy return on investment.

It still has the highest ROI of all marketing channels, and that’s why you should implement email in your marketing automation strategy.

So how does it work exactly? Email marketing can help you convert more leads, nurture prospects, onboard new customers, recover abandoned shopping carts, and a whole lot more.

However, email doesn’t cover every aspect of your business, and you’ll need to widen your efforts if you are looking to get that competitive edge. 

2. Customer relationship management (CRM)

Where marketing ends, sales starts. If you have a high-touch sales process, your marketing automation implementation must incorporate your CRM. 

Proper integration with your CRM will allow you to focus on qualified leads and build stronger relationships. The best thing about it is that it’s closely tied to your email marketing automation, which will help you with closing more deals.

Moreover, it will also help your marketing team by providing them with the exact stages your customers are at in the customer journey.

3. Social media

Social networks are the places where your customers spend most of their time online. We chat, share our experiences, and discuss things that are important to us. That makes it an exciting place for business owners to get closer to their customers.

By implementing marketing automation, you can reach customers on social media. You can create automated ad campaigns, share your most valuable pieces of content, or simply get in touch with the leads and customers.

It’s super powerful, especially if you are looking to increase brand awareness. After all, let’s not forget that the audiences need to see your message at least 7 times before they take action or buy from you. 

Encharge allows you to sync your contacts with your Facebook ad audiences, so you can deliver targeted Facebook ads at every stage of the customer journey. This tactic is especially effective for engaging users that are not opening your emails.

If you want to close more deals and grow your business, this is the way to go. But before you start drawing automation flows and customer journeys in your, it’s important to understand one thing.

All these marketing automation campaigns and techniques work differently for different audiences and at different customer journey stages. So it’s up to you to experiment, adapt and double down on what works best for your business.

Marketing automation implementation is waiting for you!

Implementing marketing automation will save you hundreds of hours, and if done correctly, be a major revenue-driving for your business.

We’ve covered everything you need to get started with the marketing automation implementation. We have even gone the extra mile and given you practical ways to perfect your email marketing game. Now is the best time to start implementing it and bring your business to the next level, so be sure to check our tool and get the ball rolling right now.