Marketing Automation must have platforms for all the SME and Large enterprise brands. Today Every brand wants to provide the best customer experience to their users, and they want to engage more than ever before as the market is very competitive.
Automation Journey helps brands listen to their potential users, understand and analyze their interests, preferences, and behavior, and take corrective actions to engage, retain, and convert users into loyal categories. Automation Journeys are the backbone of any business and before knowing the actions that a brand should take when an automation journey fails, it’s important to understand first how it works.
How do Marketing Automation and Automation Journeys work?
1- Marketing Automation collects potential customer data through website visits, email clicks, app usage, links, google searches, or other marketing resources.
2- Based on the collected data, bases/real-time data and brands create a series of lists of prospective customers as per source.
3- Segmentation of prospective customers based on their interests, behavior, habits, age groups, and locations.
4- Create a personalized Automation Journey as per the User life cycle and sales life cycle add various digital channels like emails, SMS, chat, and social media within automated Journeys.
5- Analyse the campaign data (email open rates, CTR, conversation rates across all the digital points) and identify the areas for improvement, and take the next corrective action to boost the conversions.
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Five Best Automation Journey’s Best Practices
1- Campaign Objectives and Goals
A brand must first define the objective of the campaign. Is it for Brand building, Informative, Promotional, and Conversations? It is important to define the end goal for each campaign.
2- Experiment and Scale
The brands need to define the use cases and experiment with various Automation journeys using different communication channels. Based on the engagement, the Brand can identify the preferred channel and deploy the next strategy accordingly.
3- Identify Use Cases
Defining the right use cases at the planning and strategy stage is the key. It’s important to send the right message to the right user with the right content and at the right time. The more segments you create the more personalized journey you can deploy and better results you can expect from each journey or campaign.
4- Integration and Implementation
A smooth integration and 100% binding with all the applications like CRM, LMS (Lead Management System), Website, Mobile App, Data modeling, and follow of data at all touch points is critical for the success of Automation Journeys.
5- Establish Performance Metrics
The Brand can clearly define and establish Performance metrics to understand the impact of automation journeys. This helps brands monitor the performance of each automated journey very closely and helps them to make changes as and when required as per flow/User habits and Business requirements.
8 Actions when the Automation Journey Fails
1- Data Validation
Brands must immediately go ahead with the Data Validation In case they see a sudden decline in the performance of the Automation Journeys.
Usually, at the time of Sign up/ registration, The user entered the wrong email ID ( Typo error, Syntax error) which results in a Hard Bounce or Soft bounce which means you are not able to reach out to your potential customers who actually show an intent to purchase your product/services from your website.
2- Personalisation is missing
We are living in a world of personalization, where each user has their own expectations. To exceed expectations, the Brand can use personalization at most of the critical touch points.
For Eg. Cart Abandoned where the user added the product to the cart but didn’t purchase it. A brand can reach out to the registered user with a personalized message over the preferred/most active channel, say WhatsApp.
3- Target Double Opt-in User Base
One of the most obvious reasons for the failure of Automation journeys might be the Third-party database users. It’s suggested that the brands can target only double opt-in users while automating the user journeys. The First-party database performs 100 times better than the purchase database.
4- Content is the King
As you are aware, the customer is the king but when it comes to Marketing Automation and Automated journey Content is the real king. Brands need to send the right message, to the right user via the right channel and at the right time. Selecting catchy subject lines is the key to success.
5- Platform Training and Skill gaps
You can buy a Helicopter, but you need a certified pilot to operate the same. Similarly, Brands can easily buy the Marketing Automation platform, but they also need to hire industry and domain experts who understand the Business, Use cases, and Marketing automation platform.
A regular workshop is required to polish team skill sets. It would be great if the service provider could also provide dedicated training modules along with certification.
The platform must have the adoption rate which indicates the Adoption ratio of the platform as per the usage. Fostering a culture of continuous learning encourages a mindset of continuous improvement and adaptability among teams.
6- Not Enough Data to Nurture
Brands must keep checking the status of the data on a regular basis as it’s tough to get the results from Dormant users especially when it comes to Automation journeys. The Active and real-time Users contribute more as compared to dormant users. It’s important to understand when to pause the automated journeys.
7- Analyse the data with Analytics
Brands must analyze the data using Funnel Analytics, Cohort, RFM (Recency, frequency and Monetary), Drop offs stage, and Reasons of Drop-offs and must immediately change the flow. The brand has data-driven decisions based on its history, experience, and segments.
8- Innovation
Reach out to your customers where they are! The brand has to be super active when it comes to modern-age communication channels, such as Rich Communication Services ( RCS), True Caller, telegram, and more. It’s important to implement these channels and enjoy the first-mover advantage as users are more active on new-age channels as compared to traditional channels.
Automated Journeys are critical to the overall success of Marketing Automation. Brands have to consciously monitor their implemented Automation journeys in order to see the impact on business. We at EnR, help brands with our MarTech Consultancy and Growth services with an aim to achieve the brand’s long-term engagement, retention, and conversion goals.
Let’s connect and discuss more at length! Please write to us at hello@enrcloud.com or call at 7502500001 to speak with our subject matter experts.
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Amit Bhateja is the co-founder of enrcloud and helping brands and Unicorns from the last 15+ years and overachieve their Engagement and Retention goals. He is passionate about solving customer problems with modern technology, new age solutions, and consultancy approach. Besides Building ENR, He enjoys reading books, spending time with his family and Teammates, traveling, meeting new people, learning new things, and love to close the business deals.
