8 Ways Marketing Automation Improves Customer Experience
By Therese Tullgren | therese.tullgren@ungapped.com
In an increasingly challenging marketing world with ever-increasing competition, it becomes demanding for marketers to plan and execute campaigns, distribute them on different channels, meet customer expectations, and manage communication and analytics. The repetitive and time-consuming work of multi-channel marketing steals valuable time to plan and implement other business strategies. With the latest technology, you can simplify and streamline your marketing efforts, and marketing automation is the critical key to driving effective marketing forward.
Understanding Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is an invaluable resource for businesses. It helps identify potential target groups and leads them to the company’s sales department, where they can become customers. In addition, marketing automation optimizes the efficiency of the sales funnel, which leads to increased conversions, satisfied customers, and, of course, increased revenue.
Generating leads is a critical process in expanding a business. Imagine a company automating its marketing from scratch. If so, it gives the team significant time and information to focus on converting potential leads into customers.
Marketing Automation collects data from website visits, downloads, paid ads, and social media to offer insights into the behavior and activities of current and potential customers. It also helps the company understand consumers’ interests and identify what stage they are in their buying journey. By using this valuable and comprehensive information, a company can adjust its strategies to achieve desired reactions from its audience.
To illustrate this with an example, imagine that a person visits an online store. They are looking at different products on the website, which suggests they are beginning their buying journey. If the person adds effects to their wish list or spends more time exploring specific items, it can signal the sales team to work and try to convince the person to complete their purchase.
How Marketing Automation Improves Customer Experience: 8 Effective Methods
Customer satisfaction is of the utmost importance for businesses. If your customers are unhappy with your business, all your marketing efforts will be in vain, no matter how unique your products or how clever your advertising tactics are. In any business, the customer is king; therefore, their satisfaction is an absolute necessity if a company wants to dominate and make its mark in the highly competitive market.
1. Automate Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer feedback is invaluable in understanding their feelings and opinions about a company. You can quickly gather valuable feedback and identify improvement areas by automating customer satisfaction surveys.
Surveys are a great way to gather customer feedback, and they only take a few minutes for customers to complete. Feedback tools, such as star ratings or numerical scales, make it easy for customers to express their satisfaction with products or services.
Automation tools can also collect feedback at different stages of the customer’s purchase journey, for example, when they have received their ordered goods. This information provides insights that can help the company keep its customers happy and implement necessary improvements.
2. Update Customer Data
Companies often use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to track customer interactions and analyze data from various sources. Some companies prefer to have all customer data in one place, while others use several different tools.
Having all customer information in one place makes it easier to access and quickly avoid switching between different apps. If you use several other apps, it’s crucial to keep customers’ information in sync.
Setting up a two-way sync between your tools ensures that customer information is up-to-date on all devices. It enables efficient handling of customer cases, regardless of the means used by the sales and customer care team.
3. Automate Customer Messages
Manually sending emails to hundreds or thousands of recipients can be an overwhelming task for marketers. Following up on their responses and interactions can be tiring and time-consuming.
To effectively manage an extensive subscriber list, use automation to send customer messages. It ensures that emails reach recipients on time and reduces the risk of someone being overlooked on the list.
4. Use Bots for Immediate Response
When it comes to sales, more than quantity is needed. Effective marketing strategies generate more leads, and it can take time for your sales team to respond immediately to all new information.
You can use marketing automation to handle leads immediately to avoid losing information. The autoresponder feature in the marketing tool can confirm receipt of leads after they fill out the form. Some advanced tools can also notify the sales team to contact potential leads quickly.
Quick response is essential to maximize the chance of a sale and avoid losing customers to competitors.
5. Automate Employee Surveys and Feedback
Maintaining satisfied customers is only possible if the valuable feedback from employees is addressed. Employees’ opinions are just as important as customers’. Those who interact with customers daily have unique insight into the problems that may arise and can offer solutions to improve the customer experience. Just as marketing automation tools can help create customer feedback forms and surveys, they can also be used to collect employee feedback.
6. Reach out to customers at risk of churn
Several factors can cause customer churn, whether product quality, a lack of after-sales service, or a perceived lack of value for the price.
Marketing automation tools can help you quickly identify customers at risk of leaving. Their behavior on your website, such as abandoned shopping carts, searching for information on how to cancel an order, or leaving negative reviews, angry emails, or complaints, act as warning bells.
Contacting these unhappy customers immediately is critical. By emailing or calling them, you can listen to their concerns and work quickly to resolve them, increasing the chance of keeping them as satisfied customers.
7. Event Integration
Many marketing automation tools are compatible with event management platforms. Connecting these tools gives you quick and easy access to information about your event and webinar attendees. It gives your business valuable insights about the customers who have attended your events. The marketers can then use this information to offer attendees relevant conferences, training sessions and other informational opportunities that keep them engaged and interested in your business.
8. SMS marketing in a mobile world
In 2019, there were over 5.11 billion mobile users globally. SMS marketing has the potential to take business marketing to new heights. With an open rate of 98%, SMS significantly outperforms email in the available speed. To take advantage of this potential, you need automation tools. Manually distributing messages to hundreds or thousands of contacts takes time and effort. You can easily communicate with your customers and keep them informed about the latest offers and products using automated SMS marketing. SMS marketing in a mobile world can be your tool to ensure your message reaches the right audience at the right time.
Summation
With the rise of new businesses, standing out and converting audiences into customers has become increasingly challenging. Every company needs help capturing the audience’s attention through marketing campaigns.
Manual labor input is no longer sufficient for a company that wants to break through the massive competition. Marketing automation tools can minimize workload, reach a wider audience, and offer an outstanding customer experience.
The abovementioned methods are just a few examples of improving the customer experience. Marketing automation has even more to offer your business.
Its extensive benefits across industries elevate customer experience and reduce workload. Marketing automation has become the technology of choice for many marketers. It’s no longer a nice extra feature; it has become necessary for successful business organizations.
Your Next Step…
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