What if you could create a personalized journey for each prospective student? Imagine seamlessly guiding them from initial interest to enrolled learner, while nurturing a lifelong connection with your institution. This is the power of marketing automation.

By leveraging automation, universities can personalize their communication, nurture potential students effectively, and ultimately convert them into enthusiastic learners and future alumni.

Studies show organizations using marketing automation see a 14.5% productivity increase. Why? Because automation streamlines workflows, freeing up valuable time for staff to focus on what matters most – creating a thriving learning environment for their students.

In this blog, we’ll explore how marketing automation can benefit higher education and provide ways to implement it. We’ll cover how to build stronger relationships with students, improve efficiency, and ultimately achieve your enrollment and student engagement goals.

The advantages of marketing automation in higher education

Attracting and retaining students in today’s competitive landscape requires a smart strategy. Marketing automation empowers higher education institutions to achieve this by fostering stronger student connections, streamlining internal processes, and ultimately boosting enrollment. Let’s explore how.

1. Improved recruitment and enrollment processes: Marketing automation can streamline the enrollment process by automating time-consuming tasks such as email marketing, lead scoring, and prospect tracking. This not only saves valuable time for admissions personnel but also ensures that no prospective students are ignored, which can result in improved overall enrollment rates.
2. Enhanced student retention: By closely monitoring students’ online behavior and interaction patterns, marketing automation can help institutions identify valuable insights into potential retention risks and enable them to address these issues proactively.
3. Increased efficiency: Marketing automation eliminates the need for manual tasks like sending individual emails or scheduling social media posts. This frees up valuable time for staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
4. Improved personalization: By leveraging student data, higher education institutions can tailor messaging to specific needs and interests. For example, institutions can send targeted emails highlighting programs relevant to a student’s academic background or showcasing campus life for those interested in extracurricular activities.
5. Enhanced lead nurturing: Marketing automation facilitates the creation of automated email drip campaigns that nurture leads throughout the enrollment journey. This keeps your institution top-of-mind and guides prospective students seamlessly through the application process.
6. Measurable results: Marketing automation platforms provide valuable analytics that track campaign performance. Institutions can gain insights into open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement, allowing for data-driven decision-making and campaign optimization.
7. Streamlined communication: Marketing automation fosters consistent and timely communication with students. Automated responses to inquiries, application updates, and deadline reminders ensure efficient information flow and a positive student experience.

Now that we understand the benefits of marketing automation in higher education, let’s dive into strategies and programs that can help you put these advantages into practice.

How to use marketing automation in higher education

Marketing automation isn’t just about sending emails; it’s about creating a personalized and engaging experience for students throughout their entire journey with your institution. Here’s how you can leverage its power in higher education:

Nurture leads with personalized cross-channel communication

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can help higher educational institutions create personalized cross-channel communication with their students. With Dotdigital’s cross-channel automation tools, nurturing leads has never been easier. You can tailor your emails, SMS, push notifications, and other forms of communication-based on your students’ interests, demographics, and engagement levels. 

For example, you can send a welcome email to a prospective computer science student highlighting upcoming coding workshops, or a text message to a current student reminding them about upcoming financial aid deadlines. These personalized messages make your students feel valued and help to build a strong relationship between your institution and your students.

Streamline the admission process with automation

The admissions process can be a lengthy task, both for the admissions staff and the applicants. However, with the help of automation, this process can be streamlined and made much more efficient. 

By automating tasks such as sending updates on application status, delivering acceptance letters, or prompting students to submit required documents, admissions staff can free up their time and focus on more important tasks. 

Additionally, automation ensures timely communication with applicants reducing the risk of errors or delays. This not only improves the overall experience for applicants but also helps to create a smoother and more effective admissions process for the institution.

Identify fundraising opportunities with alumni segmentation

Fundraising is a crucial aspect of any higher educational institution or non-profit organization. However, identifying potential donors and rekindling relationships with alumni can be a challenging task. That’s where alumni segmentation comes in. 

By utilizing segmentation templates within your marketing automation platform, you can categorize alumni based on factors like graduation year, major, or giving history, which allows for targeted outreach and personalized fundraising campaigns.

One tool that can help you with this process is Dotdigital’s intelligent segmentation tools. With intuitive student contact dashboards powered by WinstonAI, you can identify quick wins and see the bigger picture at the same time. 

Dotdigital’s unified view and eRFM tools can help you target the right student audience with the right message every time, giving you an edge when it comes to fundraising. By utilizing these tools, you can create campaigns that resonate with your alumni and inspire them to support your organization’s mission.

Deliver real-time course updates with SMS and push notifications

Institutions can use triggered SMS and push notifications to deliver real-time course updates to their students. This allows them to instantly send important information such as course cancellations, schedule changes, and registration reminders. 

As a result, students are always informed and up-to-date, which helps them keep track of their schedules and assignments. Additionally, this helps students feel more connected to their institution and faculty.

Furthermore, SMS and push notifications are highly personalized and can be customized to meet individual students’ needs and preferences. For instance, some students may prefer to receive notifications via SMS, while others may prefer push notifications. By offering multiple communication channels, institutions can ensure that they reach their students in the most effective way possible.

Leverage lead scoring and reporting for strategic insights

Marketing automation platforms play a crucial role in helping higher educational institutions gain valuable insights into their student pipeline. One of the key features of these platforms is the ability to assign scores to specific actions taken by prospective students. This process, known as lead scoring, helps identify high-potential students, allowing for targeted outreach efforts.

Lead scoring is typically based on a set of predefined criteria that indicate a student’s level of engagement and interest in the institution. For example, a student who downloads a brochure or attends a webinar may be assigned a higher score than someone who simply visits the website. By assigning scores to these actions, institutions can prioritize outreach efforts and focus on the most promising leads.

In addition to lead scoring, marketing automation platforms also provide automated reporting on campaign performance. These reports provide valuable insights into which campaigns are working and which are not, allowing you to refine your strategy for better results. By analyzing this data, institutions can identify trends and patterns in student behavior, allowing them to adjust their marketing efforts accordingly.

Boost event attendance with personalized invitations

Boosting event attendance is often a challenging task, but it can become easier with personalized invitations. Whether you’re organizing a career fair or a sporting event, sending personalized invitations based on the interests and preferences of potential attendees can significantly increase participation.

If you’re looking for an effective tool to help you boost your event attendance, you can try Dotdigital’s Eventbrite integration. This integration allows you to send personalized invitations to potential attendees based on their interests and preferences. It can help you showcase relevant events and highlight how attending can benefit them academically or professionally.

With Dotdigital’s Eventbrite integration, you can also create custom event pages, manage event registration, and track attendee engagement. This way, you can better understand what’s working and what’s not, enabling you to refine your approach and improve your results over time.

Automate onboarding and orientation for a seamless transition

Automating the onboarding and orientation process can greatly benefit both new students and your institution. By implementing automated workflows, you can ensure a seamless transition for new students, providing them with the necessary information and support they need to succeed. 

Automated workflows guide new students through the entire onboarding process, from submitting their applications to registering for classes. With automated emails, you can keep new students informed about campus resources, upcoming events, and deadlines. This not only helps new students feel more comfortable and supported but also helps them stay on track and avoid missing important deadlines.

Personalized check-ins are also an effective way to ensure that new students feel welcome and supported during their first few weeks on campus. These check-ins can be automated as well, allowing you to easily track new students’ progress and identify any areas where they may need additional support.

Enhance your engagement with artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool in marketing automation, revolutionizing the way you can engage with students. AI-powered tools like WinstonAI can analyze vast amounts of student data and behavior to identify key moments for engagement. With predictive analytics, you can anticipate student needs and personalize your communication at the right time, thereby increasing engagement and boosting sales.

WinstonAI is a tool that can assist you with your emails. It provides grammar and spell checks, as well as generates subject lines, to ensure that your emails are professional, impactful, and free of errors. This feature saves you time and enhances your credibility and authority among your audience.

By implementing these strategies, marketing automation can empower your institution to build stronger relationships with students at every stage, ultimately leading to a thriving learning environment and a successful student body.

Elevating higher education through marketing automation

Marketing automation transforms the way higher education institutions communicate with their students. It enables institutions to personalize their communication, address student needs proactively, and focus on providing a superior educational experience. By embracing marketing automation, institutions can ensure the success of their students and position themselves for long-term growth and success.

In this blog, we’ll explore the advantages of marketing automation in the non-profit industry and provide practical strategies and programs that you can implement in your marketing plan to improve donor engagement, retention, and overall organizational success.

The advantages of marketing automation in the non-profit industry

Marketing automation helps non-profit organizations to streamline their marketing efforts and allows you to connect with your donors, supporters, and volunteers on a deeper level. Here are some of the key advantages of implementing marketing automation:

1. Time and resource management: By automating tasks such as sending emails, posting on social media, and managing contact lists, marketing automation saves time and resources. This allows your staff to focus on more important aspects of your non-profit organization, such as strategy and program development.

2. Enhanced personalization: Marketing automation tools enable you to deliver personalized, targeted content to your supporters based on their preferences, interests, and engagement history.  This targeted approach boosts engagement and increases the likelihood of donations or other desired actions.

3. Improved donor retention: With marketing automation, you can easily set up automated follow-ups, reminders, and other communications to keep donors and volunteers engaged and strengthen your relationship with them.

4. Enhanced cross-channel donor journeys: You can create captivating experiences for donors and volunteers by crafting enhanced cross-channel donor journeys. This involves automating tasks such as donor follow-ups and event registrations, which can help you fine-tune your supporters’ journey and implement cohesive cross-channel strategies that keep them engaged. The end result is unforgettable experiences that will leave a lasting impression on your donors and volunteers alike.

5. Data-driven decision-making: Dotdigital’s analytical tools provide a comprehensive overview of campaign performance, donor behavior, and other essential metrics. This helps you make data-driven decisions and optimize your non-profit marketing strategies.

Now that we understand the benefits of marketing automation in the non-profit industry, let’s dive into strategies and programs that can help you put these advantages into practice.

How to use marketing automation in the non-profit industry 

To effectively incorporate marketing automation into the non-profit industry, consider implementing the following strategies and programs in your marketing plan:

1. Crafting an unforgettable welcome program

When someone signs up for your non-profit’s mailing list, it’s crucial to make a positive first impression. The first few interactions with your organization can set the tone for their entire experience. That’s why creating a welcome email program using marketing automation is an excellent way to ensure that new subscribers feel valued, appreciated, and engaged.

Your automated welcome program should be a personalized onboarding experience that introduces your organization, shares its mission, and highlights its accomplishments. You can also use this opportunity to showcase how people can get involved, whether that be through volunteering, donating, or spreading the word.

By providing a warm and welcoming introduction to your organization, you are building trust with your new subscribers and increasing the likelihood of them becoming long-term supporters. This can have a significant impact on your organization’s success in the long run, as engaged supporters are more likely to donate, volunteer, and advocate for your cause.

2. Mastering retention and re-engagement campaigns

For non-profit organizations, donor retention is a critical aspect of their fundraising efforts, as retaining existing donors is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. So, how can you effectively engage with your donors? 

This is where marketing automation, combined with the intelligent capabilities of Dotdigital’s WinstonAI, becomes a game-changer. With WinstonAI, you can create personalized emails with compelling subject lines that showcase the impact of their donations. 

This helps to establish a personal connection between the donor and your cause. Furthermore, by expressing gratitude for their contributions, you can build a sense of community and foster a deeper sense of commitment among donors. By leveraging these powerful tools, you can develop retention and re-engagement campaigns that sustain donor interest and commitment.

3. Amplifying event promotion and follow-ups

Events are an important part of the non-profit industry, as they help in fundraising and spreading awareness. However, organizing an event can be a daunting task that requires a lot of time and effort. Thankfully, marketing automation can simplify event promotion and management by sending out targeted and timely email invitations, updates, and reminders.

Dotdigital’s Eventbrite integration makes it easy for you to connect your event registration data to your marketing efforts, effectively nurturing attendees from the moment they purchase the ticket. This integration helps you reach a wider audience and increase attendance at the event.

By creating personalized journeys that excite attendees before the event, thank them for coming, and encourage fundraising after the event, you can maintain engagement and build relationships. It’s an excellent way to show your appreciation and keep them informed about future events.

After the event, you can follow up with attendees by sending a thank-you email that highlights photos of the event and acknowledges their participation. This approach helps maintain engagement and build relationships, showing your appreciation and keeping them informed about future events. Additionally, you can also gather feedback from attendees to improve your events and make them more enjoyable and valuable for everyone involved.

4. Utilizing powerful behavioral triggers

Behavioral triggers are an essential tool in modern marketing, allowing you to track your supporters’ actions and design personalized campaigns that cater to their interests. With marketing automation software, you can easily set up triggers that respond to specific actions taken by your supporters. 

For instance, if a donor visits your organization’s volunteering page, you can automatically send an email that provides more information about volunteering opportunities and the registration process. 

With the use of behavioral triggers, you can set up similar triggers for actions like social media interactions, website browsing patterns, or donation lapses. By doing so, you can ensure that your organization stays relevant and top-of-mind with your supporters.

By using behavioral triggers, you can reach your supporters at the right time with the right message, ultimately leading to increased engagement and support for your organization.

5. Celebrating milestones to foster connections

As a non-profit organization, recognizing and celebrating the milestones of your donors and volunteers is a crucial step towards building and maintaining a strong relationship with them. These milestones can include anniversaries, donation milestones, and other accomplishments that they have achieved while supporting your mission.

Marketing automation can be a powerful tool to keep track of these milestones and send personalized emails to commemorate the occasion and thank them for their contributions. This creates a sense of appreciation and recognition, which can lead to increased engagement and continued support from your donors and volunteers.

Moreover, celebrating these milestones shows that you value and appreciate their dedication and commitment to your organization. It creates a positive impact on the supporters, and they are more likely to stick with you in the long run.

By leveraging marketing automation to streamline the process, you can ensure that every milestone is recognized and celebrated in a timely and personalized way. This not only saves time and effort but also helps you to build a strong relationship with your supporters.

6. Recovering abandoned carts for event tickets and merchandise purchases

Abandoned carts can lead to significant losses for non-profit organizations, whether it’s for event tickets or merchandise purchases. However, marketing automation can help you overcome this challenge by retargeting supporters who abandon their carts with personalized reminders and incentives to complete their purchases.

With Dotdigital’s marketing automation platform, you can keep track of abandoned carts in real time and send triggered emails to supporters, urging them to finalize their ticket purchase or merchandise order. By providing additional information about the event or showcasing the positive impact of merchandise sales on your organization’s mission, you can effectively motivate them to support you.

This strategy recovers lost funds and helps build stronger supporter relationships. It demonstrates your organization’s commitment to engagement and personalization, which makes your supporters feel valued and more likely to remain loyal to your cause.

7. Automating credit card expiration reminders for monthly donors

Automating credit card expiration reminders for monthly donors can help non-profit organizations prevent missed donations and reduced funds. Surprisingly, only 23% of organizations send follow-up emails to monthly donors when their credit cards are set to expire or have expired. This oversight can negatively impact an organization’s ability to fulfill its mission.

To stop this issue, marketing automation can be used to automatically send credit card expiration reminders to monthly donors. With Dotdigital’s automation platform, timely and personalized emails can be set up to inform donors about their upcoming credit card expiration. These emails can explain the importance of keeping payment information up-to-date, supporting the cause, and providing clear instructions on how to update payment details.

Moreover, by automating follow-ups for expired credit cards, you can ensure lapses in payments are addressed promptly. This increases the likelihood of monthly donors maintaining their support, which in turn sustains the organization’s fund stream and strengthens the relationship with donors. It showcases the organization’s commitment to transparency and consistent communication.

Elevate your non-profit strategy with marketing automation

Incorporating marketing automation into your non-profit strategy can help your organization stay competitive and adaptable. With marketing automation, you can deliver personalized content, build stronger connections with your supporters, maximize your impact, and advance your mission. Don’t let your non-profit organization fall behind in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Utilize the power of marketing automation to empower you to make a lasting impact on the world.

With marketing automation, you can streamline your travel marketing strategy, maximize efficiency, and breathe new life into your campaigns. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the benefits that marketing automation brings to the travel industry and the strategies you can implement starting today

The advantages of marketing automation in the travel industry

Marketing automation has revolutionized the travel industry, allowing you to optimize your marketing efforts and engage with customers on a deeper level. Some key advantages of implementing marketing automation in the travel industry include:

1. Enhanced customer personalization: With marketing automation, you can create personalized experiences for each customer based on their travel history, preferences, and previous bookings. This level of personalization can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Improved efficiency: Marketing automation enables you to automate repetitive tasks like email marketing, social media posting, and lead nurturing. This leads to considerable time and resources saved, allowing your team to focus on more important tasks.
3. Customer experience: With a customer data platform (CXDP) you can collect, manage, and analyze customer data. This helps you make data-driven decisions for your travel marketing strategy.
4. Improved targeting: Marketing automation allows you to segment your customers based on demographics and interests, creating targeted and relevant marketing campaigns.
5. Scalability: As your travel business grows, marketing automation can scale with it, enabling you to maintain high-quality customer experiences while expanding your target audience and service offerings.
6. Stronger customer retention: Regular communication at the right time can nurture clients for stronger retention and loyalty, leading to more future bookings.

Now that we understand the benefits of marketing automation in the travel industry let’s dive into strategies and programs that can help you put these advantages into practice

How to use marketing automation in the travel industry

To effectively incorporate marketing automation into the travel industry, consider implementing the following strategies and programs in your marketing plan:

1. Customer onboarding

In the travel marketing industry, an effective customer onboarding process can make a big difference in building strong customer relationships from the start. You can start by creating automated welcome emails that will be sent to new customers, introducing them to your brand’s offerings, travel tips, and exclusive promotions. By providing valuable content and a smooth onboarding experience, you can set a positive tone for your relationship with the customer, which in turn increases the likelihood of future bookings.

In addition to welcome emails, you can also consider sending automated personalized onboarding messages that address specific customer needs, such as offering recommendations for places to visit based on their travel history or preferences. This can help to build trust with the customer and show them that you understand their needs and interests.

2. Pre-trip communication

Pre-trip communication is a crucial step in ensuring that travelers feel prepared and excited as their trip approaches. By using automated communication like emails, push notifications, and SMS messages, you can keep travelers informed about important details such as their itinerary, destination guides, weather forecasts, and other relevant travel tips easily. This not only helps to build anticipation for the trip but also ensures that travelers have everything they need to make the most out of their travel experience. 

Moreover, pre-trip communication also helps to establish a positive relationship with travelers, as they feel that their needs and preferences are being taken into account. This can lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

3. Booking confirmations

Booking confirmations play a crucial role in ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. Sending timely and relevant booking confirmations adds to the seamless customer experience and helps build trust. With AI-powered booking systems, you can instantly send confirmation emails to your customers as soon as they complete a booking. These emails can include all relevant reservation details, payment information, and next steps, providing your customers with all the information they need without any extra effort on your part. 

4. Abandoned booking recovery

Recovering abandoned bookings is a crucial aspect of your travel brand’s marketing strategy. Many times, customers may abandon their bookings halfway through the process, leading to a significant loss of revenue for your brand. However, marketing automation platforms like Dotdigital can help you recover these abandoned bookings.

By tracking when a customer abandons their cart, you can automatically send them a reminder email with a personalized offer. This can encourage your customers to complete the booking and help your brand recover lost revenue. Moreover, this approach demonstrates that your travel brand values its customers and is willing to help them make the booking process as smooth as possible, which can improve the overall customer experience.

5. Automated post-trip follow-up emails

When it comes to improving customer satisfaction and retention, regular communication is key. One effective way to achieve this is by sending automated post-trip follow-up emails. These emails can help you gather valuable feedback from customers, including reviews, suggestions, and testimonials.

By requesting feedback from your customers, you can identify areas for improvement in your services and make necessary changes. This can help you maintain a competitive edge and improve your reputation in the market. Additionally, customers appreciate when their opinions are taken into consideration, which can lead to increased loyalty and repeat business.

When creating your post-trip follow-up emails, it’s important to keep things concise and to the point. Thank the customer for choosing your service and express your desire to improve based on their feedback. Provide clear instructions on how they can leave a review or provide suggestions, and make it easy for them to do so.

6. Triggered customer loyalty programs and rewards

Customer loyalty programs and rewards are important if you want to build long-lasting relationships with your customers. By using marketing automation to track customer behavior, you can gain insights into your customers’ preferences and behavior patterns, and tailor their loyalty programs and rewards accordingly.

For instance, you could offer triggered discounts or exclusive experiences to repeat customers. This not only incentivizes future bookings but also fosters brand loyalty. These rewards can be customized based on the customer’s past behavior, such as their preferred destinations, activities, or travel styles. This approach makes customers feel valued and appreciated and encourages them to book with you again in the future.

7. Cross-selling and upselling opportunities

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can help you identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities. With the help of AI-based algorithms, you can easily analyze customer data and recommend relevant products or services based on their preferences and purchasing history. By doing so, you can increase your revenue and enhance the customer experience.

Cross-selling and upselling are two important strategies that can help increase customer lifetime value (CLV). Cross-selling is the process of selling products or services that are related to the customer’s original purchase, while upselling involves offering a more expensive version of the same product or service. By using marketing automation, you can easily identify these opportunities and offer personalized recommendations to your customers.

For example, if a customer has booked a flight to a particular destination, you can use marketing automation to recommend hotels, car rentals, and other activities in that destination. By doing so, you’ll increase your revenue and enhance the customer experience by providing personalized recommendations based on the customer’s preferences.

8. Real-time updates

An important aspect of providing a positive travel experience for customers is ensuring that they have access to accurate and up-to-date information about their trips. In today’s fast-paced world, travelers expect real-time updates that keep them informed of any changes or adjustments to their itinerary. 

Thankfully with cross-channel marketing automation at your fingertips, you can deliver essential updates seamlessly and efficiently across various communication platforms. Keep travelers informed through instant push notifications, SMS alerts, and other targeted messaging about last-minute flight changes, itinerary adjustments, or crucial announcements. This helps travelers stay informed and avoid any inconvenience resulting from not having timely information.

Providing accurate and timely information not only strengthens trust between you and your customers but also enhances the overall travel experience. When travelers have confidence in the information they receive, they are more likely to feel comfortable and relaxed throughout their journey. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately benefiting you as well. 

9. Behavioral triggers

Behavioral triggers are a powerful way to segment your customers and provide them with more personalized experiences. By analyzing specific customer behaviors, such as their browsing history or purchase patterns, you can gain valuable insights into their preferences and interests. With this information, you can then send targeted and automated recommendations or promotions that are more likely to resonate with them.

For example, if a customer frequently browses luxury accommodations on your website, you could send them recommendations for trip upgrades that match their preferences. Or, if a customer has shown a strong interest in outdoor activities in a particular destination, you could suggest destination-specific activities that are tailored to their interests.

By using behavioral triggers, you can not only improve the relevance of your marketing messages but also enhance the overall customer experience. By providing customers with personalized recommendations and promotions, you can build trust and loyalty, which can ultimately lead to increased sales and revenue for your business.

10. Automated nurturing campaigns

Automated nurturing campaigns can be an effective tool in the travel industry. Customers often require a lot of information before they decide to book a trip. By creating a series of automated emails, you can lead your customers through the sales funnel and provide them with the necessary information at different stages of their journey.

For example, when a customer signs up for your newsletter, you can send them a welcome email with helpful tips on planning a trip. As customers continue to engage with your brand, you can send them personalized emails with recommendations based on their travel preferences, such as adventure travel, romantic getaways, or family vacations.

Moreover, you can use an automated re-engagement campaign to bring back previous customers. This will remind them of your brand and encourage them to consider booking with you again.

Elevate your travel strategy with marketing automation

In conclusion, implementing marketing automation in your travel strategy can help you streamline your communication, increase customer engagement, and ultimately drive more bookings. By leveraging the power of marketing automation tools like Dotdigital, you can create personalized and relevant experiences for your customers that will keep them coming back for more. 

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explain what digital marketing automation is, how it works, and the benefits it can offer to your marketing efforts. Whether you are just starting or looking to improve your current marketing strategies, this guide will provide you with valuable insights and practical tips to make the most of marketing automation.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the practice of using software to automate repetitive marketing tasks. This powerful tool can help you streamline your marketing workflows, collect valuable insights, and deliver personalized content that effectively speaks to your target audience. Not only does marketing automation optimize your marketing efforts, but it also improves overall efficiency and generates better results.

How does marketing automation work?

Marketing automation works by using data and insights from customer interactions to inform marketing efforts. However, keeping track of all of these interactions manually is not practical. 

That’s where the marketing automation platforms come in. It allows you to collect and use this data across different channels to gain a better understanding of customer needs and preferences. By doing so, you can deliver the most relevant content to your customers at the right time, making for a more personalized and enjoyable customer experience.

The benefits of marketing automation

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, marketing automation has emerged as a game-changer for marketers. By leveraging advanced technology and data-driven strategies, marketing automation offers many benefits that can significantly impact your marketing strategy. Here are some key advantages of implementing marketing automation:

1. Time and resource savings

Marketing automation is a helpful tool that can save time and resources by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as email marketing and social media management. These programs can efficiently analyze data, make decisions, and take action on a scale that is impossible for humans to manage, without the risk of human error.

By using marketing automation, you can reduce your day-to-day workload, giving you more time to focus on the strategic and creative aspects of your marketing campaigns. This increased efficiency ultimately leads to a higher return on investment (ROI) in your marketing efforts.

2. Improved customer targeting and smarter segmentation

Marketing automation tools offer a powerful way to improve your customer targeting and segmentation. One of the key benefits of using these tools is the ability to create highly granular segments based on a wide range of parameters, including demographics, behavior, and preferences.

For example, by using eRFM modeling, you can segment your customers based on their recency (how recently they made a purchase), frequency (how often they make purchases), and monetary value (how much they spend). This approach can help you identify your most valuable customers and tailor your marketing messages to their specific needs and interests.

With marketing automation, you can utilize machine learning algorithms such as predictive analytics to analyze customer behavior and patterns. By having access to a single customer view and all relevant customer data, you can use this information to strategize your future marketing efforts.

3. Personalized and relevant content

Personalization is a crucial aspect of building a strong relationship with your audience. Automating your marketing strategy can help you create a more personalized experience for your customers. By using dynamic and website personalization, you can deliver targeted content that resonates with your customers.

By using marketing automation, you can deliver personalized content to the right person at the right time, which can help you stand out from the competition, foster customer loyalty, and improve retention rates.

4. Data-driven decision making

Data-driven decision-making is a crucial aspect of marketing. With the help of marketing automation, you can easily access real-time data and analytics that provide valuable insights into your marketing strategy and campaigns. These insights enable you to identify trends and patterns, allowing you to make informed decisions that optimize your marketing efforts.

Leveraging the power of data, you can tailor your approach to target specific demographics or customer segments. Additionally, marketing automation enables you to monitor the performance of your marketing initiatives and make adjustments as needed to achieve better results. This approach eliminates guesswork and allows you to base your decisions on concrete evidence rather than intuition alone.

5. Streamlined customer journey

Marketing automation can help you respond to your customer’s actions and behaviors in a timely and personalized manner, thereby guiding them toward a successful conversion. This increased responsiveness can make the customer journey more streamlined and effective.

You can also send triggered messages tailored to the specific actions of your customers, such as abandoned cart reminders or post-purchase follow-ups. This personalized approach can increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Ultimately, a streamlined customer journey can lead to higher satisfaction, lower churn, and increased revenue. By providing a seamless experience from the first interaction to the final purchase, you can establish trust and loyalty among your customers, driving long-term success for your business.

6. Creating unforgettable customer experiences

Marketing automation plays a pivotal role in crafting unforgettable customer experiences that leave a lasting impact. By leveraging automation tools, you can create meaningful and engaging interactions at every touchpoint of the customer journey. From the initial point of contact to post-purchase follow-ups, automation allows you to deliver personalized messages and offers that resonate with your customers.

Imagine a scenario where a potential customer visits your website and expresses interest in a particular product. With marketing automation, you can automatically send them targeted emails that showcase similar products or offer exclusive discounts. This not only enhances their shopping experience but also increases the likelihood of conversion.

How to get started with marketing automation

Now that you have understood what marketing automation is and its benefits, it’s time to learn how to get started with marketing automation. Here are seven essential steps to help you get started with a successful marketing automation plan:

1. Utilize a marketing automation platform

To begin your marketing automation journey, the first and most important step is to select an appropriate marketing automation platform. With Dotdigital, you can effectively manage and improve customer interactions across channels, consolidate marketing data in a single view, and create targeted, personalized campaigns that engage your audience.

A dependable marketing automation platform simplifies your marketing efforts, saves valuable time, and provides insights into customer behavior and preferences. This information is important in creating relevant campaigns that effectively reach the right people, ultimately leading to better results and enhancing the overall customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives

Before implementing marketing automation, it’s important to have clear and measurable objectives that align with your overall marketing goals. Whether you aim to improve customer engagement, generate more leads, or boost sales, clearly defining your goals will guide your marketing automation strategy and help you monitor its effectiveness.

3. Segment your audience

Segmentation is the key to delivering targeted and personalized marketing messages. Utilize data collected from various customer touchpoints to create meaningful segments based on demographics, behavior, preferences, and more. This will enable you to craft tailored content, enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing automation initiatives.

4. Map out customer journeys

When it comes to marketing, it’s important to understand the journey that your customers take. By mapping out the various stages of their experience, such as when they become aware of your product or service when they start considering it, and when they finally make a purchase, you can create an effective marketing strategy that guides them through each step.

Marketing automation is a great way to make this happen. By using a marketing automation platform to automatically send out personalized messages to potential customers at the right time, you can help guide them through the sales funnel and increase conversions. You can even create targeted campaigns for customers who are showing high intent to purchase.

For example, if a customer puts items in their online shopping cart but then abandons it, you can use an abandoned cart automation. This will send them an email with a special discount code to encourage them to complete their purchase.

5. Create relevant and engaging content

With your audience segmented and customer journeys mapped out, it’s time to develop powerful content designed to resonate with users. Effective content will captivate your audience, meet their needs and preferences, and drive them to take action. Test different messaging and visuals to optimize content for each segment and campaign.

6. Test and optimize your automation

After launching your marketing automation campaigns, it’s essential to continually test and optimize them to maximize their impact. Conduct A/B testing to analyze the performance of your automation and make data-driven adjustments to improve its effectiveness. Remember that ongoing testing and optimization are vital to the success of your automation campaigns.

7. Monitor results and iterate

Continuously monitor the progress of your marketing automation initiatives alongside your primary objectives. Assess key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click-through rates, open rates, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI). By identifying patterns and areas for improvement, you can make informed adjustments to refine your marketing automation strategy over time.

Types of marketing automation programs

If you’re looking to integrate automation into your marketing strategies, you can start by implementing different automation programs. Marketing automation programs allow you to catch and nurture customers at any point in your customer journey. Here are some programs you can implement today.

1. Customer engagement programs

Welcome

Create a strong and lasting first impression with an automated welcome email series that triggers when a new subscriber joins your email marketing list. This sets the stage for a positive relationship between your brand and your audience.

Loyalty

Encourage repeat customers and strengthen brand loyalty by implementing a rewards-based loyalty program. Incentivize your customers to keep choosing your brand through various offers, discounts, or personalized perks.

Marketing preference collection

Maximize customer satisfaction and engagement by collecting marketing preferences, ensuring that your audience receives content tailored specifically to their interests and needs. This also helps you reduce unsubscribes and enhances the relevance of your campaigns.

Birthday

Delight your customers by sending personalized birthday wishes and exclusive discounts or special offers they can enjoy on their special day. This gesture not only reinforces your brand’s goodwill but also helps forge a deeper connection with your audience.

Anniversary

Demonstrate your commitment to customer relationships by celebrating significant milestones or anniversaries through specially tailored programs. Whether it’s the first anniversary of a customer’s first purchase or a long-standing partnership, acknowledging these landmarks strengthens the bond and highlights your brand’s attention to its customers’ milestones.

2. Ecommerce programs

Abandoned cart

Reduce cart abandonment rates and drive sales by implementing a triggered campaign that sends a reminder or offers an incentive when a shopper leaves your site with items still in their shopping cart. This nudges potential customers to complete their purchase and enhances revenue.

Post-purchase

Boost customer engagement and satisfaction by sending automated follow-up emails after a purchase is made. Request reviews, gather feedback, or provide useful tips and advice related to the purchased product. This not only improves the customer experience but also helps build trust and loyalty.

Upsell

Leverage past purchase data to create targeted follow-up campaigns that showcase relevant product recommendations for your customers. By presenting complementary or upgraded products, you can drive additional sales and increase the average order value, while also meeting your customers’ needs.

3. Sales enablement programs

Follow-up

Automate the process of reaching out to new prospects through follow-up campaigns triggered by various actions, such as post-event, content downloads, or new subscriptions. This helps busy sales teams maintain consistent communication and cultivate relationships with potential customers.

Lead nurturing

Enhance the chances of conversion by guiding prospects through a personalized, multi-stage journey that addresses their needs and builds trust. Marketing automation streamlines this process by optimizing content delivery based on user interactions and preferences.

Abandoned browse

Identify prospects who show high intent by visiting pages like pricing or demo requests and send triggered campaigns to reengage them before they lose interest. This proactive approach can help keep potential customers within your sales funnel.

4. Re-engagement programs

Win-back

Reconnect with customers who haven’t engaged or shopped with you recently by delivering personalized content designed to win them back. Tailored incentives and offers can help reignite their interest and rekindle their relationship with your brand.

Lapsed lead

When a prospect disengages from your marketing efforts, implement targeted lapsed lead programs to drive them back to your business. These campaigns provide fresh content or incentives that can recapture their attention and stimulate renewed interest.

Renewal reminder

Automate timely reminders for customers to renew their subscriptions or memberships, ensuring consistent revenue and maintaining ongoing relationships with them.

Marketing preference update

When customers become disengaged with your emails, encourage them to update their marketing preferences as a way to reestablish their interest and deliver content that better meets their needs.

Retargeting

Expand beyond email and engage customers across the internet and various social channels through personalized display ads. Retargeting campaigns can recapture the attention of users who have interacted with your brand but haven’t converted.

5. SMS programs

SMS coupon codes

Boost spontaneous sales by sending limited-time coupon codes directly to customers’ phones, tapping into their sense of urgency, and encouraging immediate purchases.

SMS order confirmation

Keep shoppers informed about their order details and enhance their overall experience with timely order confirmation messages sent via SMS.

SMS event reminder

Ensure event attendance by taking advantage of the 98% read rate within 5 minutes of sending SMS messages, providing reminders and crucial information to attendees to keep the event top-of-mind.

Is Dotdigital a marketing automation platform?

Yes. Dotdigital is a marketing automation platform that can enhance and extend your marketing strategy and campaign activations. It has advanced features and an easy-to-use interface that allows you to create, automate, manage, and analyze your cross-channel marketing campaigns with ease. 

The platform synchronizes with ecommerce and CRM platforms so marketers can segment, personalize, and target customers with highly relevant and engaging content. With Dotdigital, you can create dynamic email templates, automate your campaigns, and track campaign performance in real-time. This makes it an ideal choice if you’re searching for an all-in-one marketing automation solution.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that enhances your marketing efforts, saves time and resources, and improves customer experiences. By incorporating marketing automation into your marketing strategy, you can better understand your customers, deliver relevant and personalized content, and streamline the customer journey.

1. Supercharge brainstorming with AI

Brainstorming sessions can be made more productive by integrating generative AI tools. Dotdigital’s WinstonAI can quickly sift through data to uncover trends and insights that can spark creative thinking in your team. This can help to overcome writer’s block and lead to discussions that generate fresh ideas. Be sure to make your prompts consistent and don’t hesitate to put your tool of choice to the test by asking it to deliver more creative ideas than previously. 

2. Embrace moments-based messaging

Moments-based messaging is a highly personalized approach to customer engagement, using AI technology to identify and capitalize on real-time micro-moments throughout the customer journey. By utilizing this method, you can ensure that your marketing campaigns consistently address the demands and desires of your customers, ultimately driving conversions and brand loyalty.

Here’s how you can make the most out of moments-based messaging in 2024: 

Use smarter segmentation

One effective way to optimize your marketing strategy is to use AI-powered segmentation tactics such as eRFM. By analyzing customer engagement levels, as well as the recency and frequency of their interactions with your brand, you can group customers into distinct segments. This helps you better understand their unique characteristics and preferences, allowing you to provide seamless customer experiences that resonate with your target audience on every channel.

Anticipate micro-moments with predictive analytics

AI-powered predictive analytics can reveal key micro-moments throughout the customer journey. These analytics can be used to categorize customers based on their probability of churning or their most likely date of next purchase. With this foresight, your marketing campaigns can proactively address a potential pain point or fulfill a need before your customer even realizes it. By utilizing predictive analytics, you can make data-driven decisions and stay ahead of the curve.

Employ dynamic content

By using AI-powered dynamic content blocks, you can display catalog items that are based on your customer’s shopping and browsing behavior. This will make your emails and product pages feel extra special to the viewer. The dynamic content is generated in real-time, so the experience adapts and updates every time a customer returns to your site or email. This will help increase engagement and drive conversions.

3. Elevate your email content using generative AI

Generative AI can be a game-changer when it comes to creating email content that engages your audience. WinstonAI offers valuable insights to improve the tone of your emails, identify areas that may require additional information, and highlight opportunities to take your email campaign to the next level.

But that’s not all, WinstonAI helps you optimize your email subject lines. By analyzing data from your 25 most recent email sends, it provides three alternative subject lines that are tailored to your brand and campaign style. This personalized approach ensures that your emails stand out and increase your open rates.

4. Upgrade customer support with live chat and AI

Live chat has come a long way in recent years and its capabilities go beyond simple customer service inquiries. Now you can solve customer problems in real-time with live-chat widgets that you can add directly to your website. 

Live chat can customize responses based on customer profiles, history, preferences, and their past interactions. This not only improves the customer experience but also saves valuable time, and resources for marketers and removes the barriers to purchase. 

5. Craft timely connections with triggered messages

Using triggered messages can help you deliver a more timely, personalized, and efficient approach to engaging your audience. These messages, sent in response to specific user actions or behaviors, strengthen customer relationships by providing relevant and valuable content or offers at just the right moment.

For example, consider a customer who adds a product to their online shopping cart but leaves without completing the purchase. An automated message—triggered by cart abandonment—could be sent a few hours later, reminding the customer of their unfinished transaction, offering assistance, or even providing a limited-time discount to incentivize the purchase. This personalized approach not only enhances the customer experience but also drives conversions and fosters brand loyalty.

6. Optimize send times for maximum impact

Are you looking for ways to improve your email marketing campaigns in 2024? If so, you might want to consider send time optimization. The time you send your email could be the difference between someone reading and engaging with your email and someone ignoring it. 

Send time optimization is a strategy that can help you maximize engagement rates by automatically sending emails at the most opportune moments. This AI-powered technology analyzes your contacts’ historical click behavior and finds the best time to send your emails to ensure they are seen and opened. This means you can tailor your send times to specific segments within your contact database, ensuring that your message reaches your audience members when they are most likely to engage. 

By automating your email sends, you can save time and resources that would otherwise be spent on manual scheduling, and this will help you achieve consistently high engagement rates across your campaigns. 

Embrace AI and automation for a winning 2024 marketing strategy

As get closer to 2024, it’s more important than ever to harness the power of AI and marketing automation to stay ahead of the competition. With the help of these cutting-edge technologies, you can streamline your marketing efforts and improve engagement, leading to continued growth and success for your brand. So why wait? Start exploring the possibilities of AI and marketing automation today.

Personalization and the human touch

Even in our technology-driven age, people appreciate a personal touch in interactions – that’s why personalization remains a vital marketing tool. Human-to-human (H2H) marketing strategies focus on creating individual experiences, like personalized videos or understanding prospects’ interests through social media. These tailored approaches attract quality leads and boost conversion rates.

Why not level up your workflow by blending personalization with marketing automation? Trust us, it’s a game changer, making your marketing feel even more genuine and engaging to your audience.

How to personalize with marketing automation

When done right, marketing automation adds a human touch by catering to each contact’s unique needs and preferences. It teams up with personalization effortlessly, helping you deliver tailor-made experiences at scale. Here are four ways to achieve that:

1. Segment your audience

When it comes to reaching your audience effectively, segmentation is key. Dotdigital offers powerful tools that allow you to create segments based on various criteria, such as age, location, and RFM score. This means you can tailor your marketing efforts to specific groups within your audience.

By utilizing automation programs, Dotdigital makes it easy for you to create segments and deliver targeted messages. This not only saves you time but also ensures that your audience receives personalized content that resonates with them.

2. Use dynamic content

Dynamic content is a game-changer when it comes to email marketing. It enables you to provide personalized and targeted content to your recipients in one email. Achieving this is possible by tapping into your customer analytics and creating engaging content, which can be delivered at scale using dynamic content blocks and smart program logic.

Imagine being able to display images of local stores to recipients based on their location, making them feel like you’re right there with them. Or recommending products based on their recently viewed or purchased items, giving them that extra nudge toward making a purchase.

With dynamic content, you can create highly relevant and engaging emails that cater to each recipient’s unique preferences and behaviors. It’s like having a personal assistant who knows exactly what your customers want, delivering the right message at the right time.

3. Customer-driven journeys

Gone are the days of a one-size-fits-all approach to automation programs. In today’s customer-centric world, it’s all about giving your contacts control over their journey. Instead of bombarding your customers with generic content, why not offer multiple paths based on their actions and preferences?

But it doesn’t stop there. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different approaches like remails to find what truly resonates with your audience. Keep testing and refining your strategies until you discover what works best for each segment of your contacts.

4. Leverage behavior data

Tapping into behavioral data is the key to understanding your audience by tracking their actions and responding in a way that resonates with them. With Dotdigital, crafting automation programs that respond to your contacts’ behavior as it happens becomes a piece of cake, paving the way for timely and relevant communication.

Imagine noticing a shopper leaving items in their cart, and effortlessly sending them a gentle trigger to encourage the completion of their purchase. Or, picture welcoming a new subscriber to your newsletter by guiding them through your brand’s journey, all the while showcasing meaningful offers, using marketing automation.

By harnessing the potential of behavioral data, you’ll never miss an opportunity to connect with your audience when it matters most, leading to stronger relationships and increased satisfaction.

Combine marketing automation and personalization for maximized results

Both personalization and marketing automation have their merits, but combining the two can help you unlock your full marketing potential. With tools like Dotdigital, you can provide personalized experiences at scale, catering to each contact’s unique interests and preferences, without sacrificing the efficiency and reach of automation.

But, what is complex commerce?

Businesses that experience complex commerce usually cater to multiple markets, a variety of customer demographics, and several product lines simultaneously. As you grow and expand, so do your commerce needs, often leading to an intricately connected web of requirements and workflows.

Businesses often evolve into these scenarios when their customers’ demands and expectations diversify, or when moving into new markets requires products that cater to multiple demographics and markets around the world. However, while complexities might be challenging at times, it’s a natural indicator of growth and innovation. Just as the best songs have layers of harmonies and gourmet meals require numerous ingredients and steps, complex commerce signifies a drive to stand out so you can cater to an array of customers worldwide.

Rather than viewing complex commerce as an obstacle to marketing, it’s essential to understand that the limitations are likely due to your provider falling short in supporting your growth.

Going global without limits

Most marketing automation platforms aren’t equipped to handle complex commerce. They may lack global reach or aren’t able to support multi-store arrangements, restricting growth for businesses with multiple brands across the world. This can cause issues in a marketer’s day-to-day life which can turn drive and passion into frustration and aggravation.

Inadequate platforms can lead to the inability to manage multiple stores cohesively, creating disjointed data, poor decision-making, and time-consuming reporting procedures. These issues are frustrating and can ultimately hinder long-term growth.

To successfully scale and navigate the world of complex commerce, businesses would benefit from a customer experience and data platform (CXDP) that offers support in these five key areas. 

1. Go big, go global: multi-store and multi-brand support

Seamless engagement with customers shouldn’t have to be a challenge just because you have different brands or accounts. Your ideal marketing automation platform would be able to support this with several essential features with lots of different options that aren’t going to restrict you. 

Let’s say you have multiple regional stores on your commerce platform of choice (e.g. Shopify), and within that, you have multiple brands to manage. Unlike other marketing automation platforms, Dotdigital supports multi-store and multi-brand options with a number of our ecommerce partners. We also offer parent and child account structures which make marketing a breeze when you need to have different subscribe lists for different brands, for example. With Dotdigital, you can mix and match these features however you like so that you can be sure that your platform is a perfect fit.

Parent and child account structures will simplify management for multi-brand businesses. For those with multiple stores globally, catering to international customers is made easier with multi-currency and auto conversion features, as well as the ability to communicate using multiple languages. At Dotdigital, we help you create seamless journeys for your audience in 20+ languages, and easy reporting that supports 35+ currencies. 

There’s no doubt that siloed data across different accounts will be making your life incredibly difficult, and you’re not alone: 98% of businesses state data silos as being a problem. If you’re currently managing all your customer bases in different places, and reconciling data from multiple sources because your provider doesn’t accommodate your needs, it could be time to look for one that does.

2. Cohesive commerce: integrations, commerce modules, and APIs

If your ecommerce brand is built on a headless platform such as Shopify Hydrogen, Shopware, or Commercetools, then your customer experience platform will need to support this setup. If it doesn’t fully support it, you’ll struggle with creating a truly unique customer experience through custom programming. At Dotdigital, we support headless commerce integrations so that complex commerce businesses can customize shopper experiences with full flexibility. 

B2B expectations are rapidly evolving so we support those businesses too, integrating with tech partners like Adobe Commerce and your chosen CRM. Our Adobe Commerce modules mean that you can sync customer, order, product, and quote data to truly leverage prospect and catalog data. Whether you’re B2C or B2B, you can rest assured that we integrate with your tech stack so you’re getting the right data to scale your business.

Your platform should also boast a wide range of API capabilities so that your full tech stack feels right at home with your provider. Dotdigital API lets you do exactly that. Built with developers in mind, our open API and an extensive list of webhooks let you connect your data seamlessly so you can deliver real-time messages.

3. Powerful reporting at your fingertips

Reporting needs to be easy and accessible. No matter how fancy your reporting dashboards look with your marketing automation provider, it’ll be meaningless if your data can’t be reconciled in one place. Without the multi-store and brand capabilities mentioned above, you’ll probably just end up with a headache when tasked with cross-account reporting. With Dotdigital, your reporting will look and act the part. Our cross-account analytics works across multiple stores and our retail and commerce dashboards can be filtered by single or connected stores.

4. Support for your business anytime, anywhere

We all strive for perfection, and the easiest way to achieve that is with the help and support of real-life teams of experts. That’s especially the case if you have complex needs. A helping hand could be the difference between a faulty campaign and a record-breaking month of sales. Most marketing providers only operate 9-5 in their local time zones – and even then it can be impossible to reach a human being. If you’re a commerce business looking to scale, you’ll need to be up and running 24/7. We believe your provider’s support team should do the same. That’s why you can reach Dotdigital’s award-winning support teams anytime, anywhere.

We also have deliverability experts with over 100 years of collective experience, and specialized teams to help you onboard, train, and optimize creative campaigns. They’re even in your region, so it doesn’t matter where you are in the world.

5. The boundless tech that helps you scale

To confidently step into a bright future as a complex commerce business, your chosen platform should have tech that adapts to your needs for continued growth, which you can’t guarantee without a platform that has scalable architecture in place. At Dotdigital, we foster excellent relationships with our technology partners who have built dynamic app blocks in our platform to ensure the smoothest possible experience with your tech stack. What’s more, we’re always working with our partners to make sure we’re evolving at the pace that our customers need us to. Along with robust APIs and custom program extensions, there really are no limits to what you can do to delight your customers as you continue to grow. 

For complex commerce, the solution is simple with a CXDP

To truly prosper in complex commerce, you need to embrace it. That means choosing a robust CXDP like Dotdigital, to support your growth no matter what challenges are thrown your way. Get started with a provider that understands complex commerce to see how you could scale and reach new heights anywhere in the world.

Utilizing back in stock notifications

In the fast-paced world of ecommerce, staying ahead of customer needs and expectations can make all the difference in boosting sales and customer satisfaction. Let’s explore some examples of back in stock notifications that demonstrate their value to your ecommerce store:

1. Seasonal products: Seasonal products often face high demand and nothing disappoints a customer more than finding their favorite holiday items out of stock. Back in stock notifications allow a customer to act quickly when the item is available again, making sure it arrives just in time for any special occasion.
2. Limited editions: Offering limited edition products is an excellent way to showcase your brand’s creativity and create a sense of urgency in the market. By having back in stock notifications in place, customers are less likely to miss out and limited runs can maximize their exposure.
3. Pre-orders and product restocks: Anticipation for new launches and restocks can lead to a high volume of inquiries. Back in stock notifications will keep your customers informed about restocks and save time replying to inquiries.
4. Analyzing product demand: Back in stock notifications also provide valuable insights into the demand for specific items, allowing you to optimize your inventory management strategy.
5. Promoting slow fashion and sustainability: By analyzing product demand data from back in stock notifications, you can adopt a more sustainable approach to product development. By understanding which items are most sought after, you can create products that stand the test of time and reduce waste and overproduction. Ultimately this will contribute to your brand’s long-term profitability and positive impact on the environment. 

Why Back in stock notifications are important

Back in stock notifications are not merely a convenience for your customers; they play a crucial role in fostering a positive shopping experience. Here are some reasons why implementing these notifications in your ecommerce store is vital for your business success:

Minimize customer frustration

An out-of-stock item can be frustrating for your customers. By providing a proactive, automated way for them to receive notifications when the product is available, you help manage their expectations and avoid disappointment.

Create excitement with your customers

Studies show the brain releases more dopamine in anticipation of a reward than when receiving a reward. This means that subscribing to a notification and waiting for the product to be restocked is arguably more exciting than going and buying that same product from your competitor.

Retain customer interest

Customers won’t always remember to check your site for the return of an out-of-stock item. Back in stock notifications help you retain customer interest and capitalize on buyer intent. A well-timed alert will create urgency and increase your chances of an immediate purchase.

Decrease churn and increase loyalty

By using back in Stock notifications, you can demonstrate to your customers that you value their satisfaction. With this feature, customers can quickly return to the purchase funnel and avoid missing out on their desired products when they become available again. This fosters customer loyalty and shows them that you are committed to providing exceptional service throughout their entire journey. Ultimately, this can increase their customer lifetime value.

High-quality experiences like these not only keep customers coming back to purchase from your store but also contribute to a higher average spending and long-term engagement, ultimately resulting in a more profitable relationship with your customers.

Get started with Back in stock today

Implementing back in stock notifications in your ecommerce store will have numerous benefits, including minimizing customer churn, improving inventory analysis, and enhancing overall customer experience. 

Dotdigital offers back in stock notifications for BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, and Shopify, with more integrations arriving later soon. Don’t hesitate and start taking advantage of this valuable feature today. Get in touch with our team to kickstart your journey and give your customers a shopping experience they’ll love!

What are marketing automation programs?

Marketing automation programs are pre-set email marketing campaigns designed to streamline marketing efforts and personalize customer experiences by delivering relevant content based on specific triggers or customer behaviors. Automation programs save time and resources by sending personalized emails, segmenting contact lists, and nurturing leads.

Benefits of marketing automation programs

An automated marketing program offers the following benefits: 

Improved ROI

Automation programs carefully fine-tune crucial elements such as the frequency of your email sends, the relevance of your content, and the effectiveness of your lead nurturing process. By automating these aspects, you can significantly improve the overall performance and return on investment (ROI) of your email marketing strategy.

Enhanced customer experience

These campaigns deliver personalized, timely, and valuable content to your audience, creating a positive and engaging customer experience that cultivates long-term customer loyalty.

Scalability

Those days of individually crafting and sending emails to each subscriber are gone. Automation streamlines the process by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up time and resources. Your automation program does the heavy lifting for you as you can set up workflows, triggers, and segments based on your subscribers’ demographics, behaviors, or engagement levels. 

Programs based on engagement or ecommerce are two of the most common types to implement into the subscriber journey. Let’s look at both.

Engagement-based programs

In engagement-based programs, customers are actively engaged in a personalized and interactive way. These programs aim to build meaningful and long-lasting relationships with your target audience. 

Welcome

Welcome programs offer brands the chance to engage with their subscribers from the first interaction at the start of a customer journey. A compelling and well-crafted welcome program plays a pivotal role in setting the tone for your new subscribers and paves the way for strong, ongoing relationships. 

As part of your welcome program, it’s recommended to send engaging and personalized welcome emails. These emails should offer a warm welcome, introduce your brand story, and gather customer data and interests through preference centers. Welcome programs are a great opportunity to showcase your brand and establish a connection with your subscribers at the first point of contact, which will build long-lasting trust and loyalty.

Nurture or brand loyalty

To maintain good relationships with your customers, consider creating a nurture program. In your program, use your clients’ preferred channels, and offer personalized and relevant content. The more engaged you are with your customers, the higher the chances of generating sales. Implement a lead scoring model to gauge customer engagement and offer rewards such as exclusive content, vouchers, and promotional offers. This will strengthen your relationship and make your customers feel valued.

Event reminders

If you have an upcoming event, it’s recommended to set up an automated event reminder program. You should promote your event at each stage, before, during, and after the event. This will ensure your attendees are well-informed of the important details and your event schedule. An effective reminder program will build anticipation, drive registrations, and create a positive experience for all attendees. 

Customer service

A customer service program is an important program to implement into your marketing strategy. Customer experience (CX) is important to any brand. When customers have a positive experience, they are more likely to recommend your company to their friends and family. Every interaction with the customer impacts their perception of your brand, so each touchpoint must be considered. 

Adding live chat to your channels is an effective approach to improving your customer’s experience. While it might seem like a small addition, live chat can increase conversion rates by up to 20%. It will also prompt your customers to use it when they need it and reduce any barriers to making a purchase.

Ecommerce based programs

When using ecommerce automation programs, you can enhance customer experiences, build loyalty, and streamline your marketing campaigns.  With these programs, you can deliver targeted and personalized communication that drives customer engagement and revenue growth. 

Abandoned cart or browse

If a customer adds items to their online cart but doesn’t complete the checkout process, you can use an abandoned cart program to reach out to them. Additionally, you can also use an eRFM modeling tool to determine how engaged the customer is and target them. This can include offering a discount code or other incentives to re-engage them.

Sometimes customers may abandon their cart because the product is not quite perfect; we’ve all been there. With AI-powered product recommendations, you can provide relevant alternative options during abandoned cart campaigns.

It’s important not to think of abandoned cart programs as only applicable to B2C or ecommerce brands. Abandoned browse emails can be used in a very similar way. For a B2B brand or service, consider what your high intent-actions are. Whether it’s filling in a form or viewing a pricing page, you can create abandoned browse emails to capture any customers who drop off without completing an action.

Post-purchase

Today’s customers demand a seamless shopping experience from start to finish, including online browsing, purchasing, delivery, and after-sales support. It’s important to create a consistent brand experience across all channels and leverage customer data to connect with shoppers wherever they choose to engage.

One way to keep your customers engaged is to analyze their browsing behavior and identify products they are interested in. After that, you can send an email, SMS message, or push notification saying: “We’ve noticed you liked or viewed this.” Or why not send instructions on how to care for the product they’ve bought or how to use it? These simple interactions show that you’re available to the customer even after they’ve converted. 

Loyalty or birthday reward

If you have engaged champions, why not give them exclusive benefits or create a customer loyalty program? You can engage these customers by sending them personalized loyalty emails or SMS messages with relevant content, or updates on their reward points, achievements, and special offers.

This strengthens your brand and keeps your business at the forefront of their minds, increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases. Additionally, collecting subscribers’ birth dates and sending personalized birthday messages is an excellent way to show your customers that you value and appreciate them.

Win back

A win-back program aims to bring back customers who have stopped engaging with your business by offering them an incentive to take a specific action, like making a new purchase. Although it’s not necessary to start with an offer, it’s a good option, especially when customers are close to becoming inactive. Reach out and retarget past customers who have become inactive and encourage them to return and make a new purchase while fostering long-term loyalty.

Summary

These automation programs will transform your email marketing strategy. By leveraging the power of automation and personalized communication, you can stand out in the inbox, cultivate long-term customer loyalty, and achieve exceptional results in your email marketing campaigns.

What is customer intent?

Customer intent is often confused with buyer’s intent – i.e. the thoughts or actions directing customers to make a purchase. In basic terms, that would be the moment a shopper enters a brick-and-mortar store and heads to the jeans aisle. Their intent to buy is clear.

However, in the wide world of marketing, buyer intent doesn’t take into account the wide range of online actions customers can take before converting.

Some actions can be simple, such as an immediate click-through from your homepage to a product page. But with the extensive range of channels customers can interact with you on, there are many actions that, when added together, can express their intent.

Why is customer intent important?

Today’s customers demand fast, friction-free experiences. They want brands to understand what they’re after and help them achieve their goals in real-time.

At the same time, marketers are asked to do more with less; to make marketing budgets go further.

Identifying moments of customer intent is essential to meeting both goals. For marketers, data insights that highlight micro-moments of customer intent provide you with more opportunities to convert customers and drive revenue.

For customers, brands that use customer intent can deliver personalized messages at the right time, making them feel valued and driving them into action.

Why is customer intent more powerful than demographics?

Marketers who exclusively rely on demographic information to target customers risk missing more than 70% of potential mobile shoppers.

Demographic information and marketing preferences are great tools to help marketers build a customer profile and understand what they want from you. Unfortunately, they offer little insight into what they’re looking for in the moment.

When customers are looking for something; a product, a solution, or a service, they go to the web. More often than not, they turn to their smartphones. These intent-filled micro-moments are what brands need to target to connect with people.

How do you identify customer intent?

Marketing is no longer as simple as ushering customers down the funnel. The customer journey isn’t linear but cyclical and chaotic. We expect shoppers to visit our sites repeatedly and communicate with us on multiple channels before they’re ready to make a decision.

So now we know that we’re looking for intent-filled interactions to signify customer intent, how do we determine what these moments are?

Collect actionable data

Demographic and preference data is essential for creating personalized and engaging marketing messages. However, you need to collect more than just customer data. Actions such as category page views, product page views, registrations, on-site searches, and landing page clicks should all be measured.

These can help you identify patterns in customer behavior before they convert, such as how many times they visit a page before the point of conversion. You will then be able to target specific high-intent actions to drive customers towards completing your goal.

Spot the key customer starting points

Your homepage might be the page most frequently landed on, but it doesn’t reveal real customer intent. Instead, you need to decide where the customer journey begins. Site searches are always good indicators of customer intent. Shoppers are looking for something specific so you should act on this and make the journey to conversion as simple as possible.

Similarly, specific category pages or feature pages can clearly indicate what customers are looking for. If a customer knows what they’re after, then this is a vital place for you to track and target.

Create pre-intent content

Understanding customer intent goes hand-in-hand with understanding the pain points that have driven them to your website in the first place. By strategizing your content marketing to focus on these specific pain points, utilizing blogs and learning resource pages, you can capture customer intent before they realize yours is the solution they need.

For example, if your brand offers a kitchen fitting service you can create content targeting first-time homeowners with a checklist of things they need to consider when renovating a kitchen. This will help you pre-emptively capture customers interested in finding out more about your service. You can then guide them through your customer journey and lead them to the point of conversion.

How to use customer intent in your marketing automation?

Targeting intent-filled micro-moments increases revenue. There are several scenarios where customer intent can trigger timely, relevant, and personalized marketing messages.

Abandoned browse and cart abandonment emails

Active carts or high-intent page visits demonstrate clear intent. To turn this intent into conversions you need to build abandoned cart or abandoned browse programs. Our Global benchmark report shows that acting quickly can make a big difference – 45% of abandoned carts are recovered within 2 hours. So, it’s important to re-engage your customers quickly and guide them back to your site to boost the likelihood of securing a sale.

Repeat page hits

As part of your work identifying customer intent, you should have a clear idea about which pages on your website are essential to your customers’ journey. Using this intelligence, you can create automation programs that are triggered when a browser views the same page three times.

For example, if you’re a furniture company and have noticed customers frequently visiting your payment plans page, you can use this insight to trigger a campaign. When a shopper views the page numerous times, a friendly ‘ask us anything’ email might be just the push they need to convert.

Customer engagement

Customer modeling tools such as eRFM and lead scoring help you measure subscriber engagement. You can identify which customers are actively interacting with your brand and which have lapsed.

Customer modeling triggers campaigns when customers move between audience groups. So, when a customer stops engaging with your marketing and falls into a needs-nurturing or lapsed group, you can automatically enroll them into a win-back automation campaign.

Similarly, when an unengaged subscriber starts re-engaging, you can leverage the data you already have on them to deliver a personalized campaign that enhances their customer experience. Product recommendation blocks and dynamic content are just a couple of ways to drive newly engaged customers to convert.

Summary

Customer intent is the secret weapon for creating effective, relevant, and persuasive marketing campaigns. By examining your audience’s behavior, segmenting them based on their intent, and delivering tailored content that speaks to their individual needs, you’ll unlock unprecedented levels of customer engagement, conversion, and growth. So, tap into customer intent today, and take your marketing strategy to the next level.