A personalized customer journey can be the deciding factor for whether a buyer becomes your loyal advocate, or whether they turn to your competitors. Each piece of communication you send is an essential touchpoint in building a meaningful relationship with your customer. A marketing automation platform like Act-On is the perfect tool for creating cohesive messages, saving time and cost, and easing the burden of repetitive tasks.
In our latest webinar, Jennifer (Jenn) Pugsley, VP, Customer Success at Goose Digitial, and our own Jennifer Blanco, Sr. Customer Marketing Manager for Act-On discussed 3 foolproof ways to scale your business with marketing automation. Both have a passion for building customer relationships and helping customers adopt marketing automation as a key tool to growing their businesses.
We have the key takeaways from their discussion on how to leverage your tech stack through relationship building, automation, personalization, and adoption.
Takeaway 1: Nurture Your Budding Customer Relationship
Starting off with a memorable onboarding experience could mean the difference between a return customer and your customer turning to your competitor. Consumer expectations for highly personalized brand experiences keep rising, and landing the customer is just the beginning. Your best next step is to nurture that relationship, and it starts with a proper welcome.
In this clip, Jenn Pugsley explains “Companies have a major influence at this stage of the journey. Everyone remembers their initial experience with companies and more so after the deal is complete.” A carefully-made welcome sequence lets your customers understand what to expect and when to expect it. This gives you the power to take things further with personalized product recommendations based on what your customers have already bought.
Tip: Remember, keep your communications personalized and relevant to the customer’s stage in their journey.
Takeaway 2: Ask Questions
Act-On’s Jennifer Blanco offers one simple tip to further the customer relationship; ask questions. While you may not win the sale on the first touch, it will be how you build the relationship along the way that may generate more repeat business and referrals in the future. Engage potential customers by asking questions, finding their needs and pain points, then connecting your marketing programs to those needs, or sharing the details with your sales team. By showing interest in the specific success of their customers, sales is able to build the relationship with a soft sell approach.
Tip: Sales and Marketing working together can be the differentiator in the customer’s eye.
Takeaway 3: Take Action with Automation
Many marketers are either not fully tapping into their tech stack, or know they need to make improvements in they way they are using tools and technologies. Most tools have the ability to speak back to your automation platform, and the right configuration could mean the difference between order and chaos.
Do you know what tools you have in your tech stack? There are an endless number of solutions available to marketers, some that you may be already using today, and this number is growing every year.
Tip: By using your tools instinctively and to your advantage, you will be able to work smarter and become more efficiently. As you integrate marketing automation with other tools like your CRM, social listening platform, or ERP, you’ll begin to see increased results.
Takeaway 4: Request the Referral
According to Jenn Pugsley, one of the best ways to scale your business is to implement an automated strategy to ask for referrals from your most valued customers. Segment your request to only those you want to engage with and suppress anyone who doesn’t apply; for example a C-suite or within a specific region.
Tip: Referrals enable the most powerful marketing engine that you have; your own customers and at a fraction of the cost of a Google ad.
Takeaway 5: Create Relevant Content
Customers are engaging in content in new and different ways. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in content production and not just content for the sake of content, but content that is meaningful and relevant. Companies are building content not just to drive conversions, but to build brand awareness and start a conversation. As more consumers are working remotely, they are engaging in and consuming content on all different platforms; webinars, podcasts, social media, streaming services and anything else you can think of. Video has become essential to communication, and more customers are using their marketing automation platform to push out this ongoing communication and not just to drive new leads.
Jennifer Blanco suggests going to the places where your customers want to be engaged with, and are in search of your content.
Tip: Communication isn’t about email blasts or one-and-done posts, it’s the entire customer journey.
Takeaway 6: Personalize and Educate
You’ve collected data on your customers and prospects, so why not use it? Personalization is the key to communication, everyone wants to feel like they are being spoken to, not sold to. Use the data you have to segment your audience and deliver specific messages relevant to them.
Educate your customers with webinars, guides, and videos. Most people trust the companies that they are already engaged with and that are providing them entertaining, useful or inspiring content on a consistent basis. Use this opportunity to continue to nurture the relationship and cross-sell at the same time.
Tip: Personalization is more than just using the first name in the greeting, it goes deep into your customer’s data and delivers relevant information.
More Insights From Our Expert Panel
Ready for more insights from these marketing experts? Watch the full recording for more insight on how to utilize marketing automation and the tools in your tech stack to create a customer journey, nurture your customers, and create loyal relationships.