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Writer's pictureChristian Baun

Getting the Most Out of Your Marketing Automation Platform: 5 Best Practices (That Worked for Me)

Updated: Jun 14, 2022

In this blog post, I want to go over some best practices that you can do to scale your organization with marketing automation. But first, let’s recap: With marketing automation you can set up automated flows that nurture your customers and leads at the right time. And one of the best things about it is that once you have once set up your flows, automation will do the rest for you by continuously generating more value for your customers without you actually working harder.


Below are 5 examples of marketing automation flows I've personally used that I found worked really well for building and scaling my automation programs:


1. Website visits

You have web pages that are more valuable than others. These could be your contact or pricing pages, and when certain leads or prospects visit these pages, it could indicate that they were ready to become a customer. With most enterprise automation systems, these handraising activities are automatically noted by your CRM, which gives your sales team a golden opportunity to follow up. From a brand perspective, if the lead or prospect has already opted in to receive communications, you can set up automated flows that nurture them with additional information about your products or services - it’s all about providing value at the right time.


The advantage here is that you do not have to manually send out value propositions to leads, and you can instead focus on personal inquiries while the nurture flow is running on its own until leads are ready to take that next step.


2. Onboarding of new customers

The buying cycle is typically longer in B2B since it requires more stakeholders - and this is where marketing automation can really shine. Once a lead has converted to becoming your customer, have a drip email flow explaining how your product works, and how the customer can make the most of it (value added resources). It would be equally valuable to include a “trial nurture” for new leads that have entered your trial funnel, with valuable tips and tricks. More on this later!


3. Lead nurturing

The purpose of this best practice is to ‘nurture’ the potential customer. There are several ways to do this, but one of the most popular methods is to blog about the industry you are in, publish how-to’s or guides, make videos, etc. and send them to your audience. This builds trust and credibility and may ultimately be what converts the lead to a customer. As the process advances, and you build more credibility to your leads, you can begin to incorporate more sales-based material. But treat your inbound marketing as a compliment to your outbound sales process to avoid overlap.


4. Reduce churn

For SaaS companies in particular, there could be many reasons for why a business no longer wants to subscribe to your product or service.


Maybe they aren’t using the product, maybe they don’t know how to use it. Has the product become too expensive? Has their focus shifted to other parts of their business?


By creating a Marketing Automation flow where you ask why your customers want to cancel their subscription, you could potentially reduce churn by providing additional support or onboarding.


Another way to ensure a low churn rate is to stay top-of-mind with your customers (see 2) and become a “thought-leader” in your industry to make your customers feel confident in their choice of product.


5. Reward your brand ambassadors

Studies have repeatedly shown that recommendations from friends, families or colleagues have higher credibility. By setting up a referral option in your email flow, you can automatically reward those who refer your business to others on their network. And let your customers know that if they refer your business to others in their network, they will be rewarded with a discount code or something else.


The Hustle does an excellent job of this by offering awesome swag to their ambassadors. This program earned them 300,000 fanatic followers 👀


 

Christian Baun


Christian Baun is a marketing automation specialist with a background in demand generation, content marketing and email marketing.


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