You may be surprised to learn that marketing automation got its start in the mid-to-late 1990s. In the last 20 years, the collection and new-found applications of big data have allowed marketing automation to become the fastest-growing software segment in the CRM space. If your company isn’t already using marketing automation to help track leads, automate personalized marketing messages, and measure your marketing activities’ effectiveness through multiple touch-points, it’s a safe bet that it’s on your team’s wish list.
With a tool so great that it sells itself, why wouldn’t every company be using marketing automation already?
Oh, right — because it’s a huge investment. Not only does the software required to run effective marketing automation campaigns cost more than many companies fiscal budgets, it also requires dedicated resources for setting up and managing the infrastructure that keeps the wheels turning.
Below are three digital tactics marketers can use to test aspects of these personalized campaigns. Garnering positive results from these tests may even help marketers make his or her case for the real deal!
Digital Tactics toward Personalization
Facebook Custom Audiences
According to a Salesforce and Facebook study, a leading online retailer who ran combined email and Facebook campaigns saw a 22% lift in likelihood to purchase.
At Collective Measures, we’re fans of Salesforce’s Journey Builder and Social.com capabilities that allow automated messages to be sent based on a set of rules tied to a series of actions. While Salesforce products allow for the automated, graduated step of email plus social marketing, there is an alternative way to coordinate your efforts.
Through Facebook’s Custom Audiences, marketers are able to manually upload email lists to Facebook Business Manager. Marketers can upload multiple email lists of segmented audiences to match the targeting of their email campaigns. Facebook will match the list of user emails to their Facebook profiles, allowing marketers to align messages across their customers’ news feeds and inboxes.
For example; if a marketer is sending an exclusive offer to their loyalty customers via email, they can also create a promoted post to show in only the loyal customer’s Facebook timelines. As shown through Salesforce’s study, this type of tactic can help improve response rates for your overall campaign initiatives. Learn how to set up Facebook’s Custom Audiences here.
Remarketing List for Search Ads
One of Google AdWords’ top features released in 2015, was their ability to add remarketing lists to your search campaigns. What’s fascinating about Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA), is that marketers set them up with the acknowledgment that not all search traffic will convert on a user on their first visit. These campaigns are set up with the hope that marketers can re-engage with site visitors throughout their consumer journey so that we are present in all the possible moments that customers need us.
In a recent blog post, NHI’s Vice President of Client Services, Allison McMenimen, writes about leveraging moments that matter. She thoughtfully explains Google’s I-want-to-know, I-want-to-do, I-want-to-go, and I-want-to-buy micro-moments. These micro-moments inspire so many random, natural searches throughout people’s days. It is through each of these moments that marketers want to be interacting with customers. And by using RSLA, marketers are able to modify ad messaging and cost-per-clicks to match the user they are targeting based on the value of their stage within their consumer journey. Learn how to set up RSLA here.
Dynamic Remarketing
Dynamic Ads on the Google Display Network allow you to show image ads to users that contain the exact products they viewed on your site. By running remarketing campaigns using dynamic ads, marketers can improve effectiveness by displaying the most relevant content to each user and by allowing that user come back to the site, right to where they left off.
Dynamic ads provide the one of the most automated solutions for re-engaging with your customers (without a marketing automation tool) as they create the ads from one’s own product feed in real time. Learn how to set up Dynamic Remarketing here.
Next Steps FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION
As one tests these different tactics and works to get marketing automation adopted within their organization, they must remember that the main purpose of creating a personalized experience is to be of service to their customers. Marketing tactics should make customers lives easier and success will follow.
