10 Marketers Share Their Best Marketing Automation Tricks

Good marketing takes time, but with the right marketing automation tricks — it doesn’t have to take as much time. In this post, 9 expert marketers share their best tricks.

Marketing Automation Tricks

 

If you’re not using marketing automation to its utmost potential, then you’ll want to see these 10 Pro marketers best marketing automation tricks and put them to work ASAP.

 

Gone are the days of responding to emails, filling out excel sheets for client relationship management, lead acquisition, and more. Tech experts are setting out to help businesses gain efficiency. Whatever you’re looking to automate, there’s likely a software solution for your business. Read on if you’re looking to find out how you can use marketing automation to better your business. 

 

Our Interview with 10 Marketing Experts on their best marketing automation tricks:

 

1. Work On Your Customer List

“Retaining current customers is extremely important for keeping your business alive, so you must put tons of effort into customer relationship management and utilizing important KPIs. Having a detailed understanding of what your customers want from you and what they think you offer, you can ensure you’re planning your marketing campaigns effectively and that your customers have a positive outlook on your business. Many automation services help analyze those important metrics so you’re not spending too much time looking at data and determining what metrics to plan around.”

Sam Rogers, Outreach Manager for Ziebart

2. Make Your Automated Messages More Organic

“Automated messages can sometimes come across as robotic. When sending out your email campaigns, you’re not going to get many responses by sounding impersonal and robotic. Email campaigns need that personalized touch that is sometimes lacking in automated messages done through software. Instead, find an email marketing platform that allows you to utilize custom merge fields. This can help you personalize each email while still remaining efficient. Always remember to proofread just in case something breaks along the way. An email with a broken format and merge formula will rarely get a response and could get your email flagged for spam.”

-Rich Rudzinski, Founder of Drivey, Oversight, and Tragic Media

3. Lead Nurturing

“Marketing automation is an excellent way for business to grow by tracking engagement and customizing user experience. Lead nurturing is a significant aspect to automate in your marketing strategy. Setting automated reminders to follow up on prospects that have gone cold can save time and money. Most prospects need good exposure before a sale is made, so creating an automated lead nurturing pipeline will help deliver results. Automation tools can also track how your recipients engaged with the email with metrics such as open rate, number of clicks, and amount who unsubscribed. This is essential data as it could help you understand what lead nurturing tactics are working for you.”

– Gregg Dean, CEO and Co-founder of Layla Sleep

4. Content Calendars

“If your business relies on social media marketing, you can automate the content calendar process. One of the biggest challenges in maintaining effective social media accounts is posting enough engaging content to keep your pages relevant. Creating content calendars is the best way to eliminate the guesswork of posting often enough because you have time to plan out engaging content that works well with your audience. You can also schedule posts to be shared automatically and make edits before your posts go live, so the posting is less stressful and more seamless.” 

– Kevin Mako, Founder of Mako Design + Invent

5. Follow Up with Your Customers After Purchases and Transactions

“If you plan on sending an email campaign for the post-buyer stage after your customers make a purchase, there are ways to automate this for efficiency. It’s good to understand customer behavior during this stage and whether or not they are satisfied with the product. If you don’t take advantage of your customers’ post-purchase feedback, you could be missing out on a significant opportunity to grow your business. Using automation lets you set up follow-up campaigns that check-in with those who have bought from your business. You can link them to a customer feedback page and put some incentive, like a sweepstake or access to a future discount code. Sending a thank you message to customers after making a purchase will help build stronger relationships and retention to your business.”  

– Bill Lyons, CEO of Griffin Funding

6. Try Out Split Testing

Split testing is one of the most popular ways to analyze your marketing campaign KPIs. Software solutions now give you time back by automating features. These tools can help you analyze and understand important metrics and help you figure out what works for you and how to implement those features into future campaigns. By testing different variables in your campaign, you can see the hard data and gain better insights into what needs to be improved.

– David Ring, Senior Marketing Manager at MCT Trading

7. Focus on Content

“Having high-quality content that appeals to your audience will ensure that your marketing automation successfully drives in customers and conversions. There are tons of content marketing tools that help to give you an outline of target keywords to hit, potential titles for the piece, and even how long it should be. These automated metrics and content planners can make content writing more efficient and help your content get better metrics and rankings.” 

– Doug Crawford, Founder of Best Trade Schools

8. Automate Your Reports

“If you work for an agency or present your marketing reports to managers, there are ways to help automate reporting to be more efficient and can help make them look better too! Using automation for reporting to help create a template and be more consistent across your reports. Some have features to easily create infographics to help visualize and understand important data and metrics from your report. By having a cleaner and more informative report, you’ll have your clients and managers left with a good impression and can focus on strategizing for the next quarter.” 

– Joe Spector, Founder and CEO of Dutch

9. Segment Your Contact List

“If you’re a small to mid-sized company, you’ll want to segment your leads into different groups depending on where they’re at in your marketing funnel. Your message to someone at the top of the funnel shouldn’t be the same as one sent to someone in the middle or bottom of the funnel. Different leads have different priorities and needs, and having personalized messages for each segment is crucial in fostering continued relationships and conversions. Consider creating a set of messages for each step of the customer’s journey and individualize where you can. Segmenting your contact list can automate this necessary but tedious communication process and save you time to focus on other tasks and processes.”

– Daniel Kane, Founder of Ridge

10. Utilize QR Codes

“Introduce QR codes in collateral marketing materials. QR codes can be used in many marketing techniques. QR codes can send marketing materials by using messages that include getting more information on a product, hosting a giveaway for a product or receiving updates on future product sales.  Once people click through a QR code’s link their information can be stored for future promotions and company news. QR codes automate a transaction or a customer relationship from their first point of contact.”
-Peter Reagan, Financial Marketing Strategist at Birch Gold Group

Summary

It’s clear there are many ways to get you and your team some time back to spend in more critical areas. These marketing automation tricks can not only give you some time back, but they can also help your marketing campaigns perform better. Automation and SaaS tech are an investment, but when you find the right areas for your business to utilize automation in, it becomes clear the money is well spent. Now that you’ve freed up some time, what will your next campaign look like?