3 ways to get more leads with marketing automation

The backbone of any digital strategy is its potential customer base, and getting more of it is like oxygen to any business. The problem is there’s only so much time in the day and so many different channels potential customers live in.

Email marketing campaigns have generated the highest return on investment for over 10 years running.  In 2015, companies generated an average of $38 ROI for every $1 invested in an email campaign, and email is 40 times more effective than social media in getting people to take action. It’s safe to say that email marketing is here to stay for the foreseeable future – but are you doing enough to maximize the medium?

Here are some email automation strategies to ensure that your messages are well received across digital channels.

A content calendar is everything when it comes to planning your messaging. There are several reasons you need to plan your content – from finding optimal/seasonal times for messaging to ensuring you avoid topic fatigue. Using tools like CoSchedule, bloggers can create a content calendar that helps you schedule regular content alongside event or date specific information.  The most important reason to schedule your content calendar in advance is so it coincides with any product messaging you may be sending out.

For example, you may sell a course on how to build a highly engaged social media following which encompasses many different disciplines. Every week you send emails to subscribers with your latest content and an offer for your product. By knowing your content calendar in advance, you can craft each email to include content that discusses the importance of different strategies that coincide with your product offering. Once the content and email messages are planned out, automate the entire process and sit back to watch the conversions roll in. To further automate the strategy, you can create customer journeys that send follow up emails based on what content the recipient consumes.

Cisco estimates that by 2020, video will account for 75 percent of all online traffic. People like watching, not just reading, your messaging. For a business, this could mean creating how-to videos or an entire video course. A great way to use automation to deliver video content is through customer journeys. Email automation platforms allow marketers to create automation workflows where each video is sent based on how the recipient interacted with the last one. Businesses can use this to promote their educational course product to their subscribers. For example, once a subscriber signs up to receive your exclusive content an explainer video can be automatically sent to them talking about what they will learn and links to additional content and videos answer potential questions. Based on how long they watch the video and which links they click to learn more, additional videos will dynamically be sent to move them further down the conversion funnel.

Per the National Center for Biotechnology Information, your content has about 8 seconds to capture your reader’s attention.  We live in a world where we get our news and information in 140 character bites, so speed is essential. Just like all other communication channels, your content, and its delivery time, should coincide with overall messaging. Just because email is your best conversion channel doesn’t mean to let social media slip. Social gives you the opportunity to continuously stay relevant to your readers.

Tools like Hootsuite allow you to schedule posts in advance. This allows businesses to schedule posts along the same schedule as blog content and emails. This way the same messaging is reaching readers across all digital channels.

Your messaging serves as your blog’s ambassador to readers, but with so many channels it can be hard to stay consistent. Using automation takes away this problem by allowing you to deliver the right messaging at the right time to your readers.