Can sales be planned? To some extent, thanks to marketing automation scenarios – yes! In this blog post, we want to show you how your sales and marketing-related activities can be automated and tailored to specific customers, depending on their characteristics and actions on your website. Here’s what you need to know about scenarios of marketing automation.
To show you how marketing automation scenarios can work, let’s use two examples. One from the e-commerce world and one from the SaaS world. We will analyze these scenarios step-by-step to see how MA scenarios can be applied in real life.
The first scenario is about a very common situation – an abandoned cart. That’s a true plague of online trade. According to Baymard Institute, 69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned. This means hundreds of thousands of dollars lost every month. Of course, your goal as an online seller is to limit the number of abandoned carts to a minimum.
The second scenario is common in pretty much any online service – a new user creates an account. This means they are interested in your service and have already taken some steps to prove their engagement. You shouldn’t leave it like that, should you?
Now, let’s analyze these two scenarios a bit more thoroughly to see how the scenarios of marketing automation can help you with them.
The user takes action – what’s your response?
Marketing automation is rarely about targeting random users and wishing for the best. On the contrary, you want to focus on users that are more likely to buy something from you. This means that either they have to already know you (e.g., they are in your newsletter base) or take a specific action that requires a response from you.
SCENARIO 1
In the first scenario, such an action is putting a product into a virtual cart. Users that do that are interested in a product you have in your offer. But there can be a whole list of situations that cause them to drop their plans and leave the cart with unfinished order. Sometimes, they can simply forget about their order, e.g., because they had to take care of something urgent. In such a situation, a short friendly reminder can be very effective. That’s what marketing automation is all about.
You could create a marketing automation scenario in which everyone who put a product in the cart but didn’t finish the order within one day receives a reminder. Such a reminder could be distributed in different ways, depending on the customer contact data that you process. The most popular ways comprise:
- Text messages
- Newsletters
- Push notifications
The very next day, your user receives a notification about their unfinished order. You can also add a small incentive, e.g., a free delivery or a small discount. As a result, they decide to go back to your website and finish the order. Will that happen in every case? Of course, not. But if you manage to save at least some of the abandoned carts, that’s a win! Especially given that when the MA scenario is already set, it requires no special attention.
SCENARIO 2
In the second scenario, there is a new user who has just created an account on your online platform. Surely, you want to reach out to them to help them in this first stage of their customer journey. You can reach out to them manually, asking whether they need some information and providing them with some materials, but that’s just time-consuming and inefficient.
What you should do is opt for marketing automation and create a MA scenario in which every new user automatically receives a set of emails guiding them through your platform. In the first email, you can send a friendly welcome message along with a link to a short (keyword!) tutorial or guide showing how your platform actually works.
After a few days, you could send an automated email with a quick question about their experience with your platform. You can even direct your users to the NPS survey to find out more. Shortly before the end of the trial period, you can send another automated email showing possible pricing plans with a small discount for the first month or year. This way, it is more likely that your user will feel taken care of. Although every such email could be sent automatically, you should always encourage your users to respond or ask questions if they feel like they need help.
The benefits of marketing automation scenarios
Such a strategy is beneficial for both you and your customers/users. You, as an online entrepreneur, can save a lot of time doing repetitive, mundane things like sending emails or distributing promo codes. You also make sure that each customer is taken care of. That’s crucial because when you have hundreds of customers every day, you could simply omit someone or forget about an email waiting in your mailbox. With marketing automation, such a risk is limited to a minimum.
On the other hand, your customers don’t have to wait for you to get what they need. That’s especially vital when it comes to delivering promised materials. Suppose you have a customer on the other side of the globe, and they’ve just ordered some digital assets in the middle of the night. With MA, they can get their materials instantly, and you don’t have to worry that you provide a poor customer experience when you sleep. Marketing automation is the way to ensure that everyone gets what they want or need as quickly as possible.
How to set marketing automation scenarios
You need a platform or a tool that will enable you to create marketing automation scenarios. Of course, for such a tool to be effective, you need to integrate it with your website and other sales tools that you use in your company (e.g., a CRM platform). This way, a marketing automation tool will have access to all the necessary assets and data so that it can work effectively.
Here at iPresso, we offer a comprehensive marketing automation platform that comes with a whole list of interesting features. On top of all of them, you have marketing automation scenarios that enable you to use different tools and techniques to reach out to your customers and be effective. Here’s an example of how such a scenario could look like:
To help you streamline creating such scenarios (which can be really complex, for that matter!), we’ve made an iPresso Studio creator to guide you through the scenario creation process. Our platform allows you to make the most of multi-channel communication and is based on conditions (typically, actions taken by your customers) and actions (carried by your company in response to them). See how intuitive our creator is:
With it, you can easily create your own scenarios and benefit from instant, automated communication with your customers. Do you want to find out more? See our marketing automation scenarios offer and start a free trial today!
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