It’s the Personalization Stupid!
That’s right, marketing automation can (and should) lead to more personalized communication. If you are not currently using your CRM software for marketing automation, you may think I am crazy for making such a dubious statement.
You may ask, “How in the world can creating an automated email campaign be more personal than what we are currently doing to get sales?”
Thanks for asking that question.
10 Steps Toward Highly Personalized Marketing Automation
- 1. Get to Know Your Current Customers. Good marketing begins by identifying your very best customers. Take as much time as you need on this step because the rest of the process targets duplicating everything you know about them.
- 2. Know their position in the company, age, income level, hobbies, family status and anything else you can determine. After you gather this information from a sampling of your best clients, create a composite persona to guide you through all the next steps.
- 3. Use what you know about this special composite persona to create content that addresses the struggle the customer had prior to finding your solution.
- 4. Send short emails to potential sales leads that are statistically similar to your ideal client. Don’t sell your product/service…sell the content.
- 5. Have someone in your sales department contact each person that clicks on the content.
- 6. Set up your sales process in your online CRM to guide your sales staff. This step will make it really easy to follow the process and also record the results.
- 7. Pay close attention to the responses and continually tweak both the sales process and the messages you send to the sales leads with the goal of duplicating your ideal clients.
- 8. With time and careful attention your marketing automation will evolve into a highly personalized experience for sales leads. They will feel that you “get them”. Trust develops in the customer relationship.
- 9. Connect with sales leads and current customers on a personal level in as many ways as you can. After all, marketing automation is saving you staff time. Invest that time deepening the customer relationship.
- 10. Collaborate with the buyers by demonstrating your proactive and responsive approach to their needs. That way the buyer becomes a partner in the process and feels safe moving the sale forward, purchasing more, or referring your company to others.
According to a recent study called“What Sales Winners Do Differently”, solution selling no longer is sufficient to win the sale. They found that the customer relationship and collaboration are key components of today’s success. Winners get to know the aspirations and goals of the buyer…not just the afflictions and pain that needs a solution.
Another aspect of this way of selling is easing their mind about any risk in making the decision. Few buying decisions are made without other people in the company second guessing. Decision makers need to feel safe and confident. The goal is much bigger than scoring a sale. Instead, the goal is to be in a position to win future sales and increased referrals.
New Customer Experience Management Goals
From the moment a new sales lead is brought into your CRM and an email campaign is sent, your CRM software can be used to collect data about the customer and the sales process. In Scott Liewehr’s paper about this new aspect of digital marketing, he goes into detail about the fact that companies are literally “sitting on a treasure trove of information about customers”
It all begins with knowing your current customers and consistently tweaking your marketing automation to personalize communication more and more over time.