Automation has become a key part of everyday life. It excels at processing vast pools of data, performing repetitive tasks, and predicting behaviors — making it ideal for vital, time-consuming marketing tasks and gathering important customer insights.
Many marketers use an automation workflow to improve their campaigns. But there are risks to using automation. If implemented poorly, it can be seen as depersonalizing and lacking the human touch that makes companies stand out from the crowd.
So, how do you marry automation and personalization when improving your marketing campaigns?
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation means using software to automate marketing activities.
Marketing departments constantly carry out repetitive tasks to reach out to and convert customers. It could be through email marketing, social media posts, or ad campaigns. These tasks help them nurture leads by providing personalization for their customers but can be time-consuming.
With digital marketing automation, repetitive, time-consuming tasks are automated, saving marketers time and allowing them to focus their energy on more creative aspects of the marketing campaign.
For example, companies that specialize in remote desktop manager tools would prefer their marketers to create a comprehensive guide to how to get the most out of these tools, rather than manually sending out cold emails.
Additionally, automation can process and analyze data faster, providing critical insights into customer behaviors and interests and improving the customer experience.
What is personalization in marketing?
Personalization is providing your customers with relevant marketing content and materials to provide better customer experiences. It enables you to boost engagement, loyalty, sales, and retention by making customers feel valued.
Personalization works well when businesses know the needs, interests, and demographics of their desired audience. With this information, they’re able to target current and potential customers effectively.
For example, you may consider segmenting customers by location, and using SMS for business to let customers know about sales or events local to them.
How to make automation and personalization work together
- Define your audience first
A well-defined target audience allows marketing efforts to target the B2B companies interested in your products and services. It’s the first step in building a digital marketing automation strategy.
Free to use image from Unsplash
- Consider personalizing according to customer segmentation
Customers purchase products based on their needs. Therefore, dividing customers into groups based on their common traits allows for a better-targeted approach when targeting them. It can be invaluable to B2B marketers to deliver a personalized experience for potential customers.
- Map out the customer journey
Understanding a customer’s touchpoints in their purchasing journey helps you identify potential pain points. You can also see where to apply your marketing processes and automate them to improve the customer experience and increase conversions.
- Personalize the content and automate processes in the customer journey
Based on customer interests and needs, personalize content for each segment of your target audience. Look at where in the customer journey personalization will be effective and see if you can automate it.
- Combine personalized and automated messaging
Automation can analyze individual customer interests and send dynamic emails with customized content for each customer. For example, customers interested in website themes could be sent website personalisation examples and guides to spruce up their site.
- Use automation and personalization in your customer support
Customer support deals with repetitive questions from customers daily. Using solutions like an automated chatbot can alleviate the burden on support teams and provide quick assistance for common problems and questions.
For example, a chatbot can direct customers asking “what is a virtual phone system?” to a resource page or provide a definition, without human intervention.
But, if the issue proves too challenging, chatbots can redirect enquiries to human employees, providing effective personalized support.
- Use automation to gather insights for personalization
Data analysis is vital in providing personalized customer experiences, such as email marketing or optimizing websites for different devices.
Automation excels in processing large pools of data faster than humans. It lets you gather insights in real-time and provide instant personalization based on customer needs or relevant product recommendations.
Benefits of having an automation and personalization powerhouse
It brings your customers together
Instead of interacting with your customers individually or on different platforms, automation brings them together and delivers personalized experiences based on their interests.
Image sourced from spiceworks.com
It boosts the quality of your marketing campaigns
Automation can track customers’ interests and behaviors. With this information, it can disseminate personalized content, much like in email marketing, but target them better.
Additionally, with automation, campaigns can scale up to reach a larger target group. With more personalized, cold emails, sales automation can increase the chances of generating leads and conversions.
It attracts more quality leads
Automation can create customer profiles and determine which products or services a customer is likely to buy. Using this data customers can automatically be sent personalized content on the products they’re interested in.
By creating specific content for a segment of your audience, you can generate and attract higher-quality leads, improving sales and retention.
It produces valuable and high-quality data
Data is vital to providing a seamless, personalized customer experience. Automation can measure and process vast amounts of data quickly, providing actionable insights about customers at speed.
Furthermore, automation provides more accurate insights as it collects additional data. It allows you to predict patterns and trends, providing you with an edge over your competitors.
It helps handle customer queries
An AI chatbot can cater to customer needs 24/7 as it never needs a break, ensuring your customers have a brilliant experience. Additionally, by taking care of repetitive customer queries, your human teams are free to spend more time dealing with complex customer issues.
An IVR system can direct customers much more swiftly than human operators. Automation drives customer recommendations and retention, and increases satisfaction levels.
It eases the workload
With automation taking care of repetitive tasks, your marketing team doesn’t have to worry about executing a simple marketing process, such as sending remarketing emails or collating data for analysis. Instead, they can think creatively and work on new marketing campaigns to improve conversions and reach more customers.
Image sourced from marketingcharts.com
Why are businesses afraid of onboard automation?
Businesses aim to provide customers with the best experience during their buying journey. It involves providing a human touch in creating personalized content and making customers feel appreciated. A good customer relationship is essential to build customer loyalty and achieve success.
When it comes to automation, businesses are afraid they’ll lose the valuable human element in their marketing strategy, leading to depersonalization and a less enjoyable customer experience.
Another big concern is control. Automation takes over routine, repetitive tasks and analysis that are important to a marketing campaign. The idea of letting an algorithm or machine handle them is unsettling for a marketer or business owner who wants to be involved in every stage of the process.
However, with automation, marketing or sales teams can direct their attention to more important and complex tasks, like creating a killer sales pitch.
A few tips when implementing automation and personalization together
There are many ways to use automation and personalization together to boost engagement, conversions, and customer loyalty. For example, using automation to add customers’ names to emails makes them feel valued and increases the chance they’ll open it.
A few more tips for implementing a digital marketing automation solution include the following points.
Time your messaging
Your customers could be anywhere in the world. With varying time zones, it’s vital customers get their emails at the right time, or they could get lost in their inbox.
Use insights gathered with automation to see where your customers are and when they’re active to personalize when you send your message.
Use relevant themes
Sending automated emails themed around the time of year, the holiday, or even the weather outside can engage and build relationships with customers. With personalization like this, your business suddenly feels much closer, allowing your customers to connect, and helping to build customer loyalty.
Image sourced from activecampaign.com
Don’t overdo it
Overly personal emails that arrive too often can put customers off. Consider your automation workflow and how best to reach out to your customers through personalization.
Ready to go all out in automation and personalization?
Personalization is essential in interacting with customers and making them feel valued. The importance of personalized content on your website or in emails can’t be understated. It boosts engagement, loyalty, sales, and retention, giving you an edge over your competitors.
Using automation, you can boost your marketing efforts by expanding the scale of your campaigns and better targeting customers for increased social media conversions.
Automation takes care of the repetitive tasks holding your marketing and sales team back, ensuring they’re free to dedicate their time to more creative avenues, like developing lead generation tactics to find more paying customers.
With added data collection and analysis, automation can improve the customer experience and provide insights for increased personalization.
There are many ways to combine automation and personalization. By analyzing your customer journey, you can improve your marketing process and develop a successful digital marketing automation and personalization strategy.
The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing for Small Businesses in 2024