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Event Recap: Marketing Automation

January 31, 2017

The first step to implementing marketing automation is to ensure your CRM is clean. Your CRM is your main source of truth about your customers – without that, you have nothing. This was Eric Lehnen’s first pieces of advice during the AMA Minnesota event “The Future of Marketing: Automation” on January 24.

Eric is a certified marketing automation and CRM consultant and Marketing Lead at Redpath Consulting Group, a sales and marketing technology consulting company. He is also co-author of the book “Shout in the Right Direction”.

Automation combines marketing platforms to amplify your existing strategies and improve sales and marketing outcomes. Among other things, it can save time for the sales and marketing teams that could be used for other things and helps the two teams work more efficiently together.

The marketing automation toolbox and common use cases for automation may include:

  • Email  – build a decision tree to define the journey and logic of when customers open emails to customize content and decide when and how to send it (mass automated emails, drip emails, or more targeted emails).
  • Social media – track more detailed impressions, clicks, and conversions.
  • Web – get deeper analytics using forms, landing pages, websites, and ads to better understand your customers and get the full picture of what they are interacting with.
  • Events sign up/follow up – better track sales leads from seminars, tradeshows
    and webinars.

The top three things that will make automation successful are technology, process and content strategy. Prerequisites to a successful automation platform include:

  1. Understanding your marketing and strategy
  2. Documenting your sales and marketing process
  3. Creating a strategy
  4. Having someone on your team who understands the technology
  5. Setting a clear vision, goals and objectives
  6. Developing content

Eric ended with this last piece of advice: Keep it simple with your first automation campaign. Start with one segment first, then you can learn from it and expand.

Want to learn more about automation?