7 Incredible Marketing Automation Best Practices to Transform Your Business

Map Your Buyer’s Journey

The first step to marketing automation success is understanding your ideal buyer’s journey from initial awareness to becoming a customer. Map out the different stages, key questions, pain points, and emotions at each stage.

This buyer journey mapping allows you to:

• Identify the right content to nurture leads at different stages
• Set up automation triggers that engage prospects when they need it
• Create highly targeted, relevant campaigns

With a detailed map of your unique buyer’s journey, you can automate highly personalized experiences that convert.

Integrate Your Tech Stack

Another marketing automation best practice is integrating your tech stack. Marketing automation software shouldn’t work in isolation. To get the most value, integrate it with:

Integrations provide a 360-degree view of prospects so you can automate ultra-personalized experiences.

Focus on Lead Scoring

Lead scoring allows you to differentiate prospects based on criteria like demographics, interactions, activity on your site, etc. The resulting scores let you identify hot leads to prioritize and nurture.

Some best practices for effective lead scoring:

• Profile-based scoring: Award points for things like title, company size, industry, etc.

• Behavioral scoring: Award points for on-site actions like visiting pricing pages, downloading resources, time on site.

• Progression scoring: Award points when prospects hit key milestones like attending a webinar or requesting a demo.

• Custom scoring: Add scores for actions unique to your business like booking a sales call.

• Negative scoring: Deduct points for actions like visiting 404 pages, quick bounce rates.

• Contextual scoring: Vary scores based on factors like source campaign, geo-location, referral sites, etc.

With strategic lead scoring, you can identify hot leads faster and use marketing automation to priorities follow-ups.

Automate Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is using carefully timed marketing messages to “nurture” prospects through their buyer’s journey. The goal is to build relationships and accelerate conversions by providing value at each stage.

Some tips to nurture leads with marketing automation:

• Send personalized content recommendations to prospects based on interests and behavior.

• Set up automated email nurture paths based on lead score, source campaign, recent site visits, etc.

• Enroll prospects in tailored nurture programs like abandoned cart or post-event nurturing.

• Develop segmented lists and campaigns to target prospects by profile, interests, and lead stage.

• Track engagement metrics at each nurture stage to optimize your approach.

Effective lead nurturing makes prospects more sales-ready by the time they talk to a sales rep. This results in more pipeline and revenue.

Automate Workflows

Marketing workflows are a series of actions that help move leads through your sales funnel. Marketing automation enables you to easily set up and automate complex multi-step workflows.

Some examples of marketing automation workflows:

Lead generation workflows

• Welcome new contacts
• Request contact info in exchange for an offer
• Add new contacts to nurture tracks

Lead nurturing workflows

• Enroll contacts into post-download nurture programs
• Segment contacts based on profile attributes and recent behaviors
• Progress contacts to new nurture tracks based on engagement

Lead handoff workflows

• Notify sales when a lead hits threshold lead score
• Schedule sales follow-up calls with high-scoring leads
• Remove stagnant leads from nurture if sales doesn’t follow up

Automating these repetitive workflows saves enormous time and drives results.

Create Lifecycle Campaigns

It enables you to set up personalized, automated campaigns across the entire customer lifecycle.

Campaign types to use at each stage:

Prospects

• Lead generation campaigns like gated offers
• Lead nurturing campaigns with relevant content
• Retargeting campaigns if they don’t convert initially

New customers

• New buyer onboarding campaigns
• Education campaigns to drive adoption
• Upsell and cross-sell campaigns

Existing customers

• Loyalty and advocacy campaigns
• Retention campaigns to prevent churn
• Re-engagement campaigns for dormant customers
• Expand revenue with upsell campaigns

Automating full-lifecycle campaigns provides an amazing experience that increases retention and lifetime value.

Measure Results and Optimize

The key to marketing automation success is continual optimization based on data and testing. Some tips:

• A/B test content, email subject lines, calls to action, page layouts, etc.

• Review metrics like email open, clickthrough, and conversion rates.

• Analyze multi-touch attribution to see what combinations of actions drive conversions.

• Survey customers on messaging, content usefulness, campaign satisfaction, etc.

• Conduct multivariate testing to see how multiple variables combine to impact results.

• Track ROI to identify your best campaigns, channels, segments, content offers.

Use the data to identify what’s working well. Double down on successful strategies and continuously refine those not delivering desired results. This results-driven optimization approach is key to get maximum value from marketing automation.