How to start automating your marketing | 5 strategies to effectively implement marketing automation

Marketing automation streamlines your marketing efforts, saves you time, and improves overall efficiency.

In this article, we’ll give you 5 strategies to implement so you can start benefiting from marketing automation and grow your business faster.

1. Set up an automated welcome email campaign to hit the ground running with opt-ins

When a new subscriber joins your mailing list or signs up for your service, have an automated welcome email triggered to greet your new contacts and provide them with useful information.

By automating this process, you can ensure consistent and timely first contacts, and nurture the relationship from day 1.

2. Personalise customer experiences with automated segmentation and touch points

Every customer is unique, and a personalised approach can significantly impact their experience.

Utilising automated segmentation tools, which will either be inbuilt into your POS or CRM system, or easy enough to integrate, will allow you to categorise your audience based on demographics, known preferences, or shopping behaviours. This allows you to deliver targeted messages and tailor your marketing efforts to specific customer segments.

Automating touch points across the customer journey, such as basket recovery emails and onboarding sequences, helps keep your marketing responsive, agile, and personalised. Most modern POS or CRM systems will either already carry this functionality, or integrate easily enough with another system that will.

Pro tip: A little bit of gamification can go a long way when it comes to yielding results at automated touchpoints. Marketing games, distributed across social media, websites, and through QR codes give you acquisition opportunities to generate more customer data to enrich. On the activation front, instant win games included on your website and in personalised marketing emails can be a fun way to distribute promotional codes and encourage sales.

3. Supercharge lead generation by creating branded gamification experiences

Capturing leads is essential for growing your business, and by integrating gamification elements into your marketing campaigns, you can essentially automate a major share of your efforts in this area. This is because you can include data collection forms with any experience you create on the Drimify gamification platform, and include email marketing opt-in buttons.

Drimify is full of ready-made game engines ready to be customised to your specific marketing needs. For example, you could create a branded Product Recommendation Quiz, which as well as capturing data and client preferences, can essentially educate your customers on your products or services through the content you include. You simply make it, embed it on the appropriate page, and let it work its magic.

You could also create branded Quizzes, contests, or longer form interactive experiences that encourage users to participate and share their information. You customise the graphics, the text, and the parameters of the game, then publish it, embed and distribute where appropriate, and you’ve automated a significant share of your lead generation efforts.

4. Re-engage dormant customers with automated reactivation campaigns

Dormant or inactive customers present a valuable opportunity for re-engagement. Set up automated reactivation campaigns that are triggered when customers haven’t interacted with your brand for a set period of time.

You can use targeted messages and incentives to encourage them to return, such as exclusive discounts, gamification experiences designed to reignite their interest in your brand, or personalised recommendations based on your existing data on them. By automating these campaigns, you can efficiently regenerate interest and boost customer retention. You set it up, and it takes care of the rest without you even having to think about it.

Pro tip: Sweeten the re-engagement pot with instant win games. Including Scratch Cards and Slot Machines that distribute promotional codes in your automated reactivation campaigns is a great way to re-energise an old customer’s enthusiasm for your brand.

5. Integrate your marketing automation with your marketing calendar

If you don’t already have a marketing calendar in place, this should be a priority. Identify key times of the year that have increased trade potential, such as Christmas, local festivals that bring a lot of tourists, seasons that favour your product or service offering, or other holidays or sporting events where you can piggyback on mass celebrations to maximise revenue.

You can then work on automated campaigns to trigger two weeks to two months before key dates, depending the time proximity to the occasion that your product becomes appropriate.

Automating your marketing around especially busy times of year frees up resources that could well be valued in other areas of your business, whether that’s re-allocating staff, wages budget, or other operating costs to your customer and client service side.

Pro tip: Big holidays, sporting events, and other occasions of national or international importance are typically playful affairs, so incorporating gamification into your marketing can literally tap into the very spirit of the festival or celebration you’re building your campaign around.

Key takeaway

Implementing marketing automation can make your marketing efforts far more efficient, freeing up time resources to focus on other things. It can also ensure a greater level of consistency in a lot of customer-facing elements of your business, as well as consistency in terms of reporting and what metrics are valued. By automating a lot of your marketing, it means you can implement big changes at scale, and have a bigger impact on growing your business faster.

The strategies above should be looked at as starting points to automating your marketing operations. Marketing automation, like so many aspects of running a business, is a journey, and not a destination, and new and exciting techniques will come to the fore from different solution providers, any of which could be the next big thing to give early adopters an edge over their competition.

Start with the above strategies, but keep your eyes open for innovative new automation opportunities.