5 essential campaigns for your marketing automation platform

Marketing automation. Love it, hate it, it’s here to stay.

With over 50% of companies using marketing automation, adopting the technology is no longer an advanced technical luxury, but an expected aspect of digital marketing for both your company and your leads.

Having said that, there are so many companies that implement marketing automation but do not execute some of the simple automation campaigns that every company should have. These are campaigns that anyone can setup and start achieving remarkable results relatively quickly within the marketing and lead sales cycle.

That’s why this blog post will show 5 campaigns you should definitely be running already, and a basic outline of how to implement each campaign.

New Customer Orientation

Every lead needs a beginning, and every customer deserves an orientation. Marketing automation gives every company within the B2C or B2B space the opportunity to introduce new customers to their product or service almost without effort.

This marketing automation campaign is a great way to warm your customers up to your marketing communications as well as keep your customers engaged after they convert. Some topics and content to consider include training and tutorials, complimentary services, usage suggestions and support options.

How to set it up

1. Create a set of emails that escalate in complexity as an introduction to your product or service.

2. Create a 'customer' status for your contacts.

3. Set the emails to begin sending as soon as a contact is updated to 'customer' status.

4. Delay each send by 4 days to a week to keep your contact’s interest and to allow them to implement your email’s suggestions.

Bonus: You can create an ‘educated’ status for your contacts to further send relevant communications to your contacts in the future without swamping your new customers.

Customer Satisfaction Workflow

The leads in any company will ebb and flow, and customers will naturally fall in and out of love with your company. Sometimes, that’s just how things go⁠—but marketing automation is something you can rely on despite the whims of your customers.

If you administer regular surveys and have other avenues where you can monitor how happy your customers are, you can provide your customers with the support and content they need at the right time. A customer happiness workflow also allows you to ask for positive reviews and recommendations when your customers are most likely to support you.

How to set it up

1. Create and send regular surveys or other customer satisfaction measuring devices.

2. Create dynamic lists for your 'happy' customers and your 'unhappy' customers.

3. Allocate scores to each contact depending on their reactions and scores of your company.

4. When a customer falls below a certain score threshold (for example 40), add them to your 'unhappy' list. All other customers should be in your 'happy' list by default.

5. Create separate offers and emails for your 'happy' list and your 'unhappy' list that address their concerns or appreciate their support.

6. Send your emails and content to each list appropriately.

Bonus: HubSpot customers can setup Net Promoter surveys of their customer base and use the scores as a property to trigger workflows. You can find out more about this here.

Upcoming Purchase Reminder Cycle

A lot of B2B businesses focus on providing a limited service or product that has to be renewed or restocked, thus ensuring repeat business. However, some customers simply seek a product or service when they need it, no matter who or where they get it from. This can be a problem for most companies, yet an opportunity for companies who use marketing automation.

Sending a reminder when a customer’s supply or service contract is about to run out not only keeps you top of mind for that customer, but it provides an easy and convenient way for the customer to repeat their business with you.

How to set it up

1. Observe and take notice of when customers purchase, and when they return.

2. Create a set of emails that remind the customer to restock or renew their purchase for a month up until their stock or service is finished.

3. Once a customer purchases stock or service, trigger the emails to begin sending a week before their supply or service comes to an end⁠—for example, if a customer purchases 6 months worth of supplies, contact them on the 5th month after their purchase to remind them that they only have a month of supplies left.

Bonus: Rewards and discounted rates help ensure your customer stay with you. You can setup a counter that counts to a number to enable the special rewards or discounts with each purchase. Your reminder emails are an excellent place to include a countdown to these rewards.

Interest Workflows

Many companies have multiple aspects or products to their industry. For example, if a hardware store’s topics include electrical, carpentry, plumbing and painting, they could bundle their content marketing offers by these topics, create an email workflow for each topic and send the appropriate workflow whenever a contact displays enough interest in a particular topic.

This is a great tactic to interest your leads and keep them on the hook with similar content that compliments their current interest. What matters, of course, is that your company will become associated with their interests⁠—and you’ll be their first stop when making a purchase.

How to set it up

1. Organise your content and emails by topic and then complexity.

2. Set individual lead scores based on the pages they visit. For example, every time a lead visits certain pages, it adds to their interest score for that particular topic.

3. Set the appropriate emails and content to be sent to the contacts matching the topics they scored highest in. In the case of our hypothetical hardware store, if their score is highest in electrical, send them electrical-based content until their score changes.

Bonus: You can also trigger these kinds of workflows based on form submissions, whether they interacted with an email, whether they downloaded a piece of content, or if they’re a customer of a particular service or product you offer.

Re-Engagement Operations

Sometimes leads just go cold, they lose interest, and there’s nothing you can do about it, right?

Wrong.

If you’re using marketing automation loss of engagement or interest is never the end of the road. You can easily setup a re-engagement workflow and spark interest in your lost leads again without spending a large amount of effort or human resources to make it happen. 

For example, you could set the condition to the length of time since their last form submission, website visit or even email click that triggers the re-engagement workflow.

How to set it up

1. Create a string of re-engagement emails that will recapture the cold lead’s attention.

2. Setup or enable lead degeneration, which gradually subtracts the lead score the longer a lead is inactive.

3. Once a lead has fallen below a certain score threshold, or the lead has simply not engaged in a while, add them to the re-engagement email list.

4. Send the re-engagement emails until either the email string runs out (asking if they wish to unsubscribe), their lead score improves, or they re-engage.

Bonus: Try sending your leads exclusive offers or coupons to entice them to engage with your company again. You can even use their interests to offer certain discounts⁠—see above section on interests workflows.

Start Automating Your Success

These basic workflows and automation campaigns are just the beginning of completely automating your success with digital marketing and marketing automation. There are thousands of different applications for your marketing automation platforms and the only limiter is your imagination.

Of course, not having the right partner, consultant or guidance could also be a severe limitation on your marketing automation goals, and getting started in automation can be confusing at the best of times and unbearable at the worst. That’s why Demodia, a marketing automation consultancy, is such a great asset to businesses of any size that want to get the most out of their automation platform.

With decades of experience, Demodia can guide you through the right workflows, approaches and tactics to make your business a marketing success story. Contact Demodia today and find out what your business is truly capable of.