We’re already midway through Q1, and we can already feel the demand for personal touchpoints and instant engagement rising.
The bar for marketing campaigns has been set high. If you’re an enterprise-level organization, “good” doesn’t cut it anymore.
If you strive to achieve (or maintain) your organization’s position as a leader in your industry, marketing automation (MA) isn’t just a strategic choice—it’s a must-have.
According to The State of Marketing Automation 2023 Trend Report by Ascend2, 35% of organizations reported that their customer journeys were “mostly to fully automated.”
We expect this number to increase in 2024, so it’s businesses must up their MA game to keep up with the rapidly evolving market.
So, what are these companies automating, anyway? Well, with MA, you can:
- Nurture connections with your leads and customers
- Track leads throughout the entire journey
- Accurately attribute sales to specific marketing campaigns
- Keep your campaigns running with minimal human intervention
- Save time and resources while delivering highly personalized experiences
But don’t be fooled—it’s not enough to simply have a marketing automation platform in place.
To truly stand out and drive results, you need to continuously improve and optimize your MA campaigns.
Here are five strategies to develop and enhance your MA campaigns in 2024:
1) Personalization and Strategic List Segmentation
We live in an era where technology reigns supreme, but consumers still crave personal connections.
When you think of “personalization,” attributes like name and company name may come to mind. It’s a great idea to use merge tags to pull in this information and greet your leads, customers, and prospects by name.
But in 2024, personalization will go beyond just using merge tags. It’s all about crafting experiences that tune into individual preferences and behaviors.
By strategically segmenting your email lists based on data like demographics, interests, and engagement history, you can create targeted campaigns tailored to specific groups of individuals.
For example, let’s say you have a travel agency. You could segment your email subscribers into different groups such as…
- Adventure Seekers
- Luxury Vacationers
- Budget Conscious Travelers
You can filter your contacts into these segments using criteria based on their past booking habits, expressed preferences, and engagement with previous campaigns. With the right configurations, this filter will be automated.
This will help you deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time, ultimately leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
2) Omnichannel Approach
An omnichannel approach integrates multiple marketing channels to create a seamless experience for the customer across digital and traditional platforms.
This unified strategy is vital in today’s market because it ensures consistency in messaging and strengthens brand presence—wherever the customer may be.
Marketing automation in 2024 will see the integration of multiple channels to create seamless customer journeys.
Whether your audience is scrolling through social media, reading an email, or browsing your website, your message needs to reach them with coordinated messaging and consistent branding.
According to HubSpot, it takes an average of eight touchpoints to close a sale. An omnichannel approach ensures that these touchpoints are consistent and coordinated, increasing the chances of converting leads into customers.
Here’s a breakdown of the process you’d follow to achieve this:
- Collect and integrate customer data across all channels. This creates a unified customer view that helps tailor communications.
- Map out the customer journey, identifying key touchpoints where your audience interacts with your brand.
- Design and automate contextualized content for those touchpoints. Your messaging should be targeted and relevant.
- Use MA tools to schedule and deploy these campaigns across the various channels. (Ex. Email, social media, mobile, or web platforms.)
- Use analytics to measure the performance of your omnichannel efforts. Look for insights on customer behavior and preferences to refine your strategy.
- Continuously test and optimize your campaigns for better engagement and conversion rates. You can A/B test email subject lines, call-to-action buttons, or landing page designs.
By following these steps, you’ll create a coherent and compelling customer experience that supports your sales cycle and boosts your marketing ROI.
3) Advanced Analytics
Data doesn’t lie—and embracing advanced analytics within your marketing automation strategy is a game-changer for this upcoming year.
After the AI boom in 2023, we’re already seeing MA platforms incorporating more advanced analytics features like predictive lead scoring and behavior tracking.
These features help you by transforming vast amounts of customer interaction data into actionable insights. By analyzing customer behavior, purchase patterns, and engagement rates, you can uncover the underlying factors that drive conversions.
Predictive modeling takes your data analysis a step further by forecasting future trends based on historical data.
Using predictive analytics, you can:
- Forecast conversion probabilities
- Calculate customer lifetime value
- Predict which customers might churn
With this newfound knowledge, you can proactively adjust your strategies. You’ll be making the ultimate data-backed decisions that maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Instead of just responding to marketing trends, your team can leverage advanced analytics to get ahead of the game and capitalize on future opportunities.
4) Automation Optimization
Automation isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it tool. (Are you shocked?)
If you care about efficiency, you should already know that it’s essential to continuously optimize your campaigns.
The same goes for marketing automation. In 2024, marketers will need to put more effort into fine-tuning their automated campaigns regularly. Streamlining ensures that each step in your marketing campaign is purposeful and directly contributes to your overarching goals—all while reducing unnecessary complexity.
It’s also about refining the paths within automation workflows. For example, if a lead receives an automated welcome email but doesn’t open it, they could be funneled into a re-engagement sequence instead of proceeding down the main campaign track. This ensures that each communication is targeted and relevant, increasing the likelihood of lead nurturing and conversion.
5) The Human Touch
“Everything should be automated.”
As marketing automation experts, our team surely won’t tell you that…
We do love efficiency, but the human touch is still irreplaceable. It may seem like AI is taking over the marketing world right now, but we believe that we’ll soon see a resurgence of human-based marketing. Why? Because nothing beats the personal touch of genuine human connection.
While AI and automation can handle the grunt work of data analysis and repetitive tasks, it’s up to us as marketers to create authentic connections with our audience through creative storytelling and personalized interactions. So, don’t forget to sprinkle in some real-life conversation into your automated campaigns. It’s all about finding the right balance between AI-powered marketing automation and the human touch for a truly effective marketing strategy.
