Surely more than once your customers have received follow-ups, but have you used marketing automation to do so? Manually creating and sending these types of messages takes a lot of time, and there’s a risk that they won’t reach some recipients. Worse, the follow-ups may go to the wrong person, in which case they are unlikely to want to take advantage of the offers. See what marketing automation tools to use to create and send professional follow-ups that increase conversions.
What are follow-ups?
Follow-ups are short messages sent to people who have already made some contact with a company. Most often they are in the form of emails, but you can also use other communication channels. Follow-ups should be prepared for a specific purpose and refer to an activity performed by the recipient. For example, it can be a welcome email for new customers who have created an account, but there are also various types of post-purchase feedback survey messages, or even notifications reminding of an abandoned shopping cart.
Why do follow-up messages play a key role in customer communication?
Follow-ups allow you to establish a long-lasting contact with the recipient and instill confidence in your brand. They are helpful if you want to remind the user of an offer and maintain continuous communication. These types of messages are used in e-commerce, among others, and are useful at different stages of the purchase path. They can be used for both business and individual customers. Depending on the type of follow-ups, they can be sent either almost immediately or with a specific time delay in relation to the action the user has performed. It’s up to you what kind of follow-ups you’ll send, but even if you’re just getting started with marketing, don’t give up on them altogether, because without them your recipients won’t feel properly taken care of and you’ll lose some leads unnecessarily.
How to use marketing automation when creating follow-ups:
Personalize messages
It’s impossible to send personalized emails or text messages to a specific person without access to the relevant data. Marketing automation helps you build your contact database and organize the information that you will always have on hand and will be automatically pulled from the system. Without personalization, conducting communications is difficult, and on top of that you reduce the likelihood of reading or clicking on the links provided in the message. Want to increase conversions and encourage a user with an abandoned process to return to your site? Personalize both the content and the title of the message, and the chance of completing the order will increase. Someone visited the site and browsed various categories? A simple “See most viewed products” email is unlikely to catch the recipient’s eye, and your messages will be lost in the clutter of other emails. The title, “Hey Ania! We’ve got something especially for you!” is sure to get the potential customer more interested. In iPresso you can insert dynamically changing content, so the product recommendations placed in such a message will also be tailored to a specific person.
Test different variants of emails
Before sending follow-ups, it’s a good idea to check whether they definitely don’t have any elements that would unnecessarily discourage recipients. You may not even notice, for example, that the CTA button is too small or its color does not match the overall message, and you will already lose the attention of some people. Set up A/B tests and see which version of follow-ups will be more effective in achieving certain goals (for example, in increasing the number of clicks on a link). Testing several variants of your message will also help you create more MAs and marketing campaigns.
Use MA scenarios and automatically send real-time follow-ups
Imagine that for some reason you didn’t manage to complete the transaction in the store right away, and after a week you get an email reminding you about the waiting products in your shopping cart. You remember that the order has long since been paid by you for that time, but such a message fills you with anxiety and you contact customer service. The whole thing drags on for hours, until you finally receive your package and don’t understand why the notification about the aborted process just happened to come to you. Instead of encouraging you to return to the site, such information only upset you and discouraged you from making more purchases, and at the company many employees had to spend extra time and deal with a problem that wasn’t really there. The use of MA scenarios allows you to plan and trigger a specific action depending on the action the user performs. Thus, you can set that, for example, an hour after adding products to the shopping cart and aborting the order, you will notify the recipient that he has an unfinished transaction. Some types of follow-ups should be sent right away, and with marketing automation you will create scenarios that run in real time. For example, an email thanking the customer for making an order along with a discount code for their next purchase should arrive the same day.
Summary
Using marketing automation to create and send follow-ups will help you communicate with your audience in a seamless, personalized way. With MA’s tools, you’ll either choose a specific time to send them, or set up an action to be triggered immediately after a specific user action. Done well, follow-ups will make the customer (or potential customer) feel important and want to continue building a relationship with your company.
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