What is Marketing Automation Personalization?
You may already be using marketing automation (MA) for the amazing benefits it provides, but to ensure that communications to your customers and prospects stand out, you’ll need to supercharge your efforts using marketing automation personalization.
Marketing automation solutions have managed, in just a few short years, to appear, expand into, and utterly alter B2B marketing. On average, 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation, and more than half of B2B-specific companies (58% to be exact) plan to adopt the technology. Most marketers know that that percentage is only going to continue to grow.
As B2B marketers continue to maximize the power of automating marketing practices, they are freeing themselves of repetitive, mundane tasks and are giving themselves more time for creative, business-imperative activities. Solutions such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning allow marketers to create new efficiencies and optimize communication efforts so they can focus on building better – more personal – relationships with more highly targeted prospect and customer groups. This is effectively, marketing automation personalization.
But effective personalized marketing — or one-to-one marketing — requires a certain level of collection and analysis of account data. This practice allows marketers to inform and execute a strategy wherein the company delivers highly customized content, communicating to each account as an “individual,” so to speak. Through this process, B2B marketers can help drive conversions, boost ROI, and have better engagement with accounts across the board.
Below are several red-hot tips to help businesses upgrade their level of marketing automation personalization to stand out in the vast sea of other B2B organizations.
Red-Hot Tip #1: Be Armed with the Right Marketing Automation Technology
As stated above, in order to create highly personalized, relevant, and timely content, marketers must collect and analyze critical data on prospects and customers. This of course yields a large amount of information, and, as such, it can be extremely overwhelming, requiring huge outputs of time, resources, and expertise to sift through the volume of data. And that’s not likely something that many B2B marketing teams are able to do without the right marketing automation technology to help make things run smoothly.
Much of the day-to-day tasks marketers face can be alleviated through automation and artificial intelligence. By taking over the collection, analysis, and operational tasks, automation allows marketers to spend more time finding ways to be creative and push the limits. The artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities of MA will take that contact and engagement data, and use it to better adapt marketing efforts to each unique customer or prospect. The right technology can mean individualization at the highest level for each account and even for each contact within that account.
Red-Hot Tip #2: Push the Limits of Email with Marketing Automation Personalization
Email is the quickest way to work in superior personalization. But it goes beyond just dynamically inserting the organization or client’s name a few times. It also entails knowing when your prospect actually reads their emails, so that yours are delivered to the top of the inbox during the optimal engagement window! Act-On’s Adaptive SendingTM predicts the best time to send a message to the intended recipient, taking the guesswork out of the equation. By implementing the right marketing automation technology, B2B marketers can build highly targeted email campaigns that focus on providing the most relevant information to each customer or prospective customer and at the best possible time.
Red-Hot Tip #3: Make Account-Based Marketing Your Best Friend
Account-based marketing (ABM) can be a powerful and highly personalized form of both inbound and outbound marketing. This technique is used to better enhance communication from account to account more easily than ever before. Businesses all over the world are putting ABM into practice and are seeing significant results. According to SiriusDecisions’ 2016 State of Account Based Marketing (ABM) Study, 27% of survey respondents said they were devoting between 11% and 30% of their total marketing budget to ABM. Use ABM in combination with the right marketing automation technology to maximize your personalization efforts. ABM enables you to: aggregate contacts within accounts; create targeted account-based segments by industry or other relevant criteria; build unique nurture tracks for those accounts; and even personalize the content for individual contacts within an account.
Regardless of the number of people on each account, B2B marketers should find ways to treat prospects and customers as unique individuals – ABM coupled with marketing automation personalization makes this possible.
B2B Brands Must Never Stop Innovating
As the industry continues to shift to increasingly personalized marketing, it’s critical for B2B brands to shift that direction as well. Marketing automation personalization sets the stage for optimized, relevant communication, leading to an increasingly better overall experience for your prospects and customers with each subsequent interaction and touchpoint. This winning combination – the right technology, email integrations, and sharp focus on ABM – allows marketers to better individualize content for each account, and each individual within that account. In the end, this is how your organization can build relationships that increase loyalty and show each account how important they are to your business. It’s never too late to get personal and supercharge your marketing efforts!
Ready to learn more? Find out how your organization can adopt a winning marketing automation solution today.