Implementing automation marketing into your strategy allows you to contribute thoughtfully to a customer at a specific part of their buyer journey. Marketing automation software acts as a scheduled marketing tool that delivers specific information to customers who may be in an awareness, consideration or decision stage.

However, you must be careful about sending the right message, at the right time, to the right person. For example, as a customer, you don’t want to receive follow up emails about a specific product when you haven’t even browsed their range yet. Instead, automation marketing is about sending thoughtful reminders and prompts that’ll subtly push your customer to move to the next stage of the buyer journey.

But, how do you read the signs of whom to send what, and when? I speak to Jorge Casca from Three Steps Business about five signals to watch when implementing automation marketing.

Thoughtful automation

The automation direction and setup needs to be carefully strategised. When you look at your business plan (if you have one), ask yourself: why do I want to set up automation? Is it for saving time when gathering leads or is it to save time? Automation marketing will send leads to Zapier, allowing you to have visibility through the journey of gathering this customer database. However, after this is gathered, you must consider if the customer is going to end up in a sequence of receiving marketing that may or may not be relevant to them, depending on what they are thinking.

So, in doing this, consider if a stage of your automation marketing is relevant to a specific customer, such as offers. For example, remove offers from the nurturing stage.

By doing this, you can clearly separate and start reading the customer signals while they’re going through the nurturing stage, so you can clearly understand which customers are engaged and ready to make a move.

But, what’s going to tell you when you they’re ready? There’s five different signals to look for when analysing this behaviour:

Contact

The first signal is contact: this means the details of your prospective customer, such as a name, an email address and a phone number.

Clicks

The second signal to keep an eye out for is clicks. This falls under the category of engagement which is shown in a few more signs moving forward. Clicks on products, links and avenues that you offer all show a range of engagement that you can analyse to begin making a decision.

Email opens

Look deeply into which customers are opening your emails, the opening times and frequency. It’s data like this that’ll show engagement and interest from your prospect.

We recommend Active Campaign to track these opens and data, as MailChimp is a useful tool for topline observations, but cannot offer deeper insights into activity and offer in-depth automation.

Website data

Looking at your website data provides a  deeper look into your engaged prospects than the previous signals, as it shows genuine and qualified interest in your product or service. Analyse website visits, page clicks, and time spent on specific pages to recognise prospects who are serious about what you have to offer.

Purchase data

This is a fairly obvious sign that a customer is engaged and dedicated to your brand, however, in this case, you can implement ongoing offers that reward loyalty, or push the buyer towards similar products or services that may be of interest to them.

Automate your marketing

Now you know the five key signals to watch out for, are you ready to automate your marketing strategy? The end goal of automation is having a qualified and engaged database, which ultimately means more sales for your business.

If you’d like to chat about automation marketing, or have any questions, drop me a line or leave your comment below.