2019 is just around the corner, so it’s a good time to re-evaluate your marketing strategies for next year. If you haven’t incorporated marketing automation into your core strategies yet, you’re certainly not making the most of your budget or time. After all, it’s not easy to manage large volumes of data across multiple platforms.

This is where automation can help you. Marketing automation strategies can help to streamline and manage complex marketing activities. They can help you successfully navigate through multiple channels while carrying out repetitive tasks.

A study by Forrester predicts that the global investment on marketing automation will increase from $11.4 billion in 2017 to $25.1 billion in 2023.

Image Source — Forrester

Nearly 70% of marketers reported that marketing automation has helped them improve the targeting of their messages. Another 45.9% reported that it has helped them improve customer experience, while 37.7% of marketers have reported that automation has helped them get better quality of leads.

Image Source — Lianatech

However, there are many marketers who haven’t started to leverage marketing automation yet. Other than the lack of expertise and human resources, the lack of automation strategies is also one of the top reasons for this. In fact, 35.4% of marketers haven’t been able to leverage marketing automation because they lack the strategies.

Let’s take a look at some of the most effective marketing automation strategies that can help you patch your entire sales funnel in 2019.

1. Create Evergreen Webinars as Lead Magnets

One of the most important goals of marketing is to generate leads. To do so, you need to make your audience realize that they have a problem that you can solve. You don’t need to start selling just yet. Instead, you need to provide useful information and help them realize their pain points.

Evergreen webinars can help you attract new leads and are one of the best lead generation strategies as well. 73% of B2B marketers reportedly agree that organizing webinars is a great way to generate high-quality leads. You need to create relatable content and talk about how you can solve your potential customer’s pain points.

For example, this is all a visitor sees (above the fold) when they arrive on Neil Patel’s homepage. A CTA to evergreen, on-demand webinars is all that you’ll see on many website homepages, which proves how effective a lead generation strategy this is.

You can create evergreen, pre-recorded, recurring webinars, and use them as an automatic lead-generation tool that runs by itself. Then you can use them on your website and schedule them automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Run PPC ads on to promote these evergreen lead magnets so that they can constantly bring in new leads at the first stage of the funnel.

ClickMeeting has introduced a new feature in their webinar management platform that allows you to pre-record your webinars. Their On-Demand Webinars allow your potential customers to access the webinar from anywhere and at any time. You can share the pre-recorded webinar on multiple channels and get quality leads.

Make sure that the content of your webinars is not text-heavy. Instead, use relevant images, graphics, or even doodles to make your webinars truly engaging. You can use tools like Piktochart or Canva to create interesting and attractive visuals for your webinars.

2. Use Laser-Sharp Targeting for Your Cold Emails

Evergreen webinars can give you a steady source of leads but what are you going to do with them? At this stage in your sales funnel, these prospects might be considering various other options that can solve their pain points as well. So, you’ll need to nurture your relationship with your prospects.

It can take a lot of time if you do this manually. Instead, you can use a series of automated emails to build and nurture your relationships with them. The content and frequency of the emails will depend on the marketing objectives you have in mind.

You can use tools like Growbots to create effective automated emails for your prospects. This tool can identify your target prospects and generate high-quality leads quickly. Not only that, it can also help you nurture these leads and convert them.

The tool ensures that the leads it generates for you match your requirements and criteria. It also allows you to send personalized emails to these leads, using the platform’s AI engine. The whole process is automated and streamlined making it both effective and efficient.

Here are some of automated email campaign ideas to engage with your prospects.

1. The Lead Magnet — You can send an email to your prospects with the link of your pre-recorded webinar. This will allow your prospects to view the webinar whenever they want. However, in order to view it, they’ll need to fill out a form to register. And that’s how you can get some quality leads via email marketing.

2. The Welcome Email — The content of the email should introduce your business and how you can solve the problems of your potential customers. It should talk about what exactly they can expect from you. You can also choose to combine the lead magnet email along with this.

3. The Soft Offer — You can share the story of how one of your customers saw amazing results after using your products or services. Also, don’t forget to mention where your prospects can buy your services or products. These emails can help to establish your credibility.

4. The FAQ Email — Once your prospects know about your offer and your product features, they might have additional questions. Create an email with some of the commonly asked questions and your answers to them. You can include basic questions about your returns and refunds policies or warranty periods.

5. The Complete Offer — In this email, you can pitch your products or services. And if possible, offer a discount on the price. This can increase the chances of your prospects buying your products.

6. The Final Call — This email serves to remind your prospects that it’s the last chance to grab the lucrative discounts you’re offering.

3. Create Dynamic and Personalized Web Content

Some 47% of leads are known to engage with 3 to 5 pieces of content before they engage with a sales representative. Also, 96% of B2B buyers want to see content with greater input from thought leaders and industry experts. This indicates that you need to create useful and engaging content to warm up your leads.

Dynamic and personalized web content can help to engage your leads effectively and motivate them to make a purchase. According to a study by Adobe, 77% of marketers agree that real-time personalization is vital for business success. However, 60% of marketers face challenges personalizing web content in real-time.

Website management platforms like Duda can help you create dynamic and personalized content easily. Instead of sending your leads from PPC or email campaigns all to the same generic landing page, you can set up rule-based triggers and actions to display different versions of the content, depending on who’s visiting.

Image Source — Duda

Based on your lead’s location, browsing history, timing, and campaign URL parameters, you can send them automatically to their personalized version of web pages containing specific keywords,laser-sharp creatives and targeted calls-to-action. This can boost the conversion rate of these pages and will save you the hassle of building several pages for A/B testing.

According to a report by Gartner, with the help of smart personalization engines, businesses can increase their profits by 15%. So you need to make sure to customize your web content based on the interests or past behaviors of every lead.

4. Turn Your Employees’ Support into Brand Awareness

Your employees know your products and services the best. Some of them might have been part of the development of your products and some might have been involved in promoting them. And in the process of doing so, they might have become aware of all the little details of your business. So, leverage the connections and reach of your own employees.

It will be easier for you to convert your employees into brand advocates if they’re aware of your vision and mission. Ensure that every employee speaks the same language when it comes to discussing your business in their social circles.

Utilize your employees’ brand advocacy to create social engagement and increase brand awareness to bring people to your website. Motivate your employees to talk about your products on their social media profiles. But make sure to enable them with the means to do so. It is also important to design guidelines for your employees and ask them to stick to them.

Image Source — Smarp

To get the most out of this strategy, you can use employee advocacy tools like Smarp. This platform can enable your employees to discover informative content related to your business and niche — and to share it. Each blog post, social media post, and relevant piece of content can be automatically integrated into Smarp’s platform using their API or third-party tools like Zapier, making it super easy for your employees to share your businesses’ stories and successes.

5. Maximize Customer Lifecycles to Increase Sales Revenue

Marketing automation tools can give you the power to study and analyze customer data. They can help you identify the purchase patterns of your customers and generate detailed reports and graphs. Along with this, they can also give you information about their past purchases, lead scores, and old interactions.

With all of these, automation can help you maximize your customer’s lifecycle through cross-selling and up-selling.

Automation tools like Monetate give a complete overview of your customer’s behavior. It includes pre and post-purchase activities, conversation history, engagement details, and other customized data. Your sales team can use all this information put together to understand your customers better and can make smart decisions.

Instead of shooting in the dark, this will help you customize your offerings to your customers.

But what if your offers aren’t relevant to them?

According to Accenture’s Personalization Pulse Check report, in 2018, 48% of consumers have abandoned a brand and made a purchase from competitors. The reason? They were not offered a personalized experience.

It’s not easy to create brand loyalty. You need to invest a lot of time into building an emotional connection with your customers. And personalization is the key to developing this relationship. You need to offer your customers what they want and when they want it.

About 76% of customers feel that it’s important to receive personalized offers based on their past purchase history. So, what are you waiting for? Collect all the required data and information and offer customized solutions to your customers.

6. Re-Engage with Old Leads

Marketing automation strategies are not just about nurturing new leads and pushing them through the sales funnel. It’s also about re-engaging with the old ones.

Did you know it costs 5X to 7X to gain a new customer compared to retaining current ones? So, it better to re-engage with your old leads. They might have shown interest in your products in the past and might have become dormant for some reasons.

You should create content to re-engage with them. Dig through your CRM software to connect with old leads by promoting fresh content. It will help to boost your sales if you can provide them with a great offer. It’s easier to multiply your sales with old leads because they need less nurturing than new ones.

One of the most effective ways is to leverage the power of social media platforms to re-engage old customers. On social media platforms, you can directly get in touch with your old leads. Also, ensure that you customize the content to provide a personalized experience.

Parting Thoughts

The truth is that marketing automation carries endless possibilities for marketers. Initially, you might face challenges implementing it, but once you have done it correctly, it will make your life easier. It can save you time, energy, and money. It can also deliver major results and multiply your sales.

The benefits you can gain from marketing automation totally depend on the marketing automation strategies you have implemented. So, implement these 6 marketing automation strategies to patch your sales funnel and watch your conversion rates increase dramatically.

Do you know of any other effectively marketing automation strategies? Let us know in the comments below.