Instant chat. Live video. Triggered emails. These marketing tactics have become mainstream because they answer to a growing desire among modern audiences. Customers crave immediacy. The demand is so prevalent, that expediency is even more important than quality to some customers. In one survey, 33 percent of respondents said they’d recommend a brand that offered a quick but ineffective response, nearly double the number (17 percent) of respondents who’d recommend a brand providing a slow but effective solution. Even no response was preferred (19 percent) over a slow but effective response.
To fulfill the growing urgency to connect with customers, brands have turned to technology. It’s nearly impossible for a marketing team to immediately respond to all leads, all the time. Marketing automation works as another set of hands, saving you time and fulfilling your visitor, lead, and customer needs for immediate…
Crisis Acknowledgement
When crisis hits, your brand needs to act quickly. Consumers will demand to know the details of the problem, how it affects them, and your solution plan. Long gone are the days where a single press release is enough to show you’re on top of the situation. This means getting the word out even before the press release publishes. While the majority of crisis management is handled manually, automation can help you get your message out to the right audience, faster.
Social media is your advocate in a crises, as recently demonstrated by Southwest Airlines. After a problem arose, they continuously updated their social media channels with the latest information and promptly responded to audience members who expressed questions or concerns. To follow in their footsteps during your next crises, write a social media post optimized for each platform. Within the first post, acknowledge the problem to avoid any backlash over ignoring an issue. Use your automation platform to schedule your posts to publish across all platforms at the same time. This ensures your social audiences will see your message wherever they go looking for information. Track messages from your followers and respond to them all in a timely manner. Through automation, you can do this all from one interface, which cuts down on response times and tracks all of your communications. Continue to release synced updates your social platforms. Once your solution plan is established, invite followers to contact you through social media and continue to track engagement through automation.
Gratification
Instant gratification isn’t a novelty anymore, it’s a necessity.
Prime Now. Hotel Tonight. Instacart. The names of these apps alone prove that when consumers want something, they want it right away. Instant gratification isn’t a novelty anymore, it’s a necessity. Marketers should respond to this need by offering premium content and delivering it to consumers at the click of a button. Offer an ebook, checklist, template, or other useful deliverable through a landing page built on an automation platform. Provide visitors with a form prompting an instant download along with a thank you email containing the offer. By utilizing automation in this way, leads can get your best content offers without having to ask a salesperson or wait for an inquiry response.
Answers
Research suggests humans have an eight-second attention span. That’s less than a goldfish! That means you have less than eight seconds for a visitor to find what they need on your website, before you risk losing them. To predict what your visitors need and show them that information upon arrival, marketers tap into an automation capability called progressive profiling. This feature records the habits of each visitor in your contacts database, from their demographic details to what pages they peruse to how long they spend navigating your website to the offers they download. Automation technology uses this information to present tailored content when a user arrives at your website. Instead of navigating through pages and pages to find answers to their questions, the user gets the information they’re looking for, right on the homepage. You choose which content to provide to audience members that meet certain criteria.
Progressive profiling also gives return website users a streamlined form experience so they can get your premium content offers, faster. Since your automation system will remember each contact’s information, it will automatically fill in any form fields they’ve previously filled out. That means quicker content for them, and happier leads, for you.
Information
Providing visitors with the information they need right when they arrive at your website may seem very immediate, but there’s an even quicker way to get your visitors key information. Even before they go looking for it. Through automation workflows you can send your contacts a set of emails when they perform a specific action, without having to lift a finger. For example, if a website visitor fills out a form opting in to your newsletter you can send them subsequent emails confirming their subscription, offering a piece of premium content, and providing information about your services. This keeps subscribers interested in your brand and answers common questions they may have, before having to ask.
Along similar lines, you can schedule social media and blog posts through automation. This way, your followers can receive content throughout the weekend or when you’re not in the office. If a persona is seeking insights or information, they don’t have to wait.
Readability
Our mobile devices have become our landlines, our desktop computers, our televisions, our books. Another top use for mobile phones is reading email. 75 percent of Gmail users access their accounts on mobile devices. That’s a significant amount of people, considering Gmail now has 900 million users. It’s imperative that you optimize your emails for mobile. Responsive design has become the standard way to do so. By making your emails responsive, your email will adjust to the size of the screen being used to read it. Marketing automation makes that task as simple as either a click of a button, or potentially no action at all. By taking advantage of automatic responsive design, you only have to build one email that your viewers can experience right away, wherever they are, on whichever device they prefer. On some platforms, such as HubSpot and Act-On, templated emails are automatically responsive, so you and your email recipients can read your content on a multitude of devices. Certain platforms, such as Salesforce Pardot, offer a variety of responsive templates for you to choose from.
Personalization
Audiences today expect their brands to know them as well as they know their brands. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates than non-personalized emails. Personalization makes audiences feel appreciated, valued. By using an automation platform, particularly one with customer relationship management features, you can gather and store data on your customers. From there, you can provide them with relevant content and personalized communications throughout their journey to purchase, without having to directly ask them for it. This means using their name in an email. Sending them blog posts and premium content that apply to their interests, needs, and stage in the buyer journey. Personally following up with them when they request more information. Automation streamlines this process for you, by automatically collecting data, tracking communications, and even sending out content based on criteria that you set up.
Marketing automation arose because audiences craved immediacy in marketing. And marketers couldn’t possibly do everything on their own in a reasonable timeframe. Automation acts as an extra pair of hands for marketers and enhances the brand experience for consumers. Because of its benefits, there are plenty of tools to help you get the job done. So, what are you waiting for?
