You have a website. You’ve been creating content. You’re running social campaigns, email campaigns, paid search campaigns, and more. But at the end of the day, do you know how your buyers are engaging with your marketing efforts?
As marketers, we’re always trying to improve. We’re believers in tracking, optimization, experimenting, testing, and progress — and our attitude toward our buyer and customer engagement levels shouldn’t be any different.
If you’re not actively trying to increase engagement levels with your marketing campaigns and content, you’re missing a large part of what it means to be a marketer. Fortunately, marketing automation can help give your marketing the boost it needs to reach more people in a more meaningful way.
Let’s take a look at six ways you can use marketing automation to increase buyer and customer engagement.
1. Send the right messages at the right time.
Lead nurturing (or drip marketing) is a great way to increase engagement levels with your email content. Instead of blasting your database with emails that may or may not be relevant, strategically “drip” emails to targeted groups of recipients over time, so they’re getting the right information from you, when they need it. This added relevancy can increase open rates and engagement levels with your content.
2. More importantly, make sure they’re targeted.
Lead nurturing is much less powerful without the ability to personalize your communications. With automation, you can build and segment lists based on criteria you set (think location, job title, product interest, and more). These lists can then be used to send highly targeted (read: highly relevant) email messages that will see much higher engagement rates than a traditional batch-and-blast message.
66% of marketers reported that the ability for enhanced targeting and personalization is a top benefit of marketing automation. (State of Marketing Automation 2014, Regalix)
3. Engage consistently on social.
Your buyers and customers are active on social media — and not just during business hours. If you’re hoping to maximize engagement rates with your audience, you need to be active where they’re active, when they’re active. Use the social posting feature of your marketing automation tool to schedule out posts to go out after you leave the office. Be sure to measure engagement with these social postings to see which are most popular, and use that information to optimize future social messages.
4. Personalize web and email content with dynamic content.
Which are you more likely to engage with: a webpage that conveys the exact same information to everybody, or a webpage that alters its content based on who is viewing it? If you’re like most people, you’ll prefer the latter. Dynamic content allow you to present your viewers with personalized web and email experiences, so they’re always seeing information that’s relevant to them.
5. Limit form fields, but not the information collected.
Want to improve engagement with your landing pages? Avoid overwhelming your page visitors with too many form fields for a start. At Pardot, we recommend sticking to 3-4 essential form fields — but we also understand the need to collect as much information from your buyers as possible. Progressive profiling solves this conundrum by presenting visitors with different form fields each time they fill out a form on your website, so you can collect a varied amount of information over time without presenting too many form fields at once.
6. See what your buyers and customers are clicking on.
One of the best (and easiest) ways to improve your engagement rates is to iterate on what you already know is working for you. Custom redirects are a great way to see which links are getting clicked on, and which are being ignored. See which content is resonating with your buyers, and use this data to optimize future campaigns, reach out with related information, and stay up to date on your buyers’ preferences.
Want more information about customer engagement? Take a look at our newly-released research report, “5 Engagement Questions — Answered.”
