Modern marketing strategies are evolving past the attract and capture model to focus on delivering better brand and buying journeys that drive more interest, engagement, and value for both prospects and customers alike.
Generating demand will always be a critical component of any well-constructed marketing and sales funnel, but engaging your target audiences with immersive experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints throughout the entire lifecycle continuum is critical for both immediate and sustained business growth. As a way of turning that belief into action, Act-On has completely reimagined our automated program feature set and are proud to announce that we are releasing the new and improved Automated Journey Builder on October 19, 2020.
Keep reading to learn more about the Automated Journey Builder and how it provides users with an unprecedented ability to deliver exceptional brand experiences and buying journeys.
How to Move Beyond Lead Capture and Improve Brand Experiences
Before we delve into the features and benefits of the new Automated Journey Builder within Act-On, let’s get a feel for the current landscape. Chiefly, how and why the quality of the customer experience has overtaken the quantity of leads in terms of importance.
Historically, marketers have been tasked with driving as many leads as possible to give Sales the most potential opportunities. However, that model led to major inefficiencies as the majority of these leads simply weren’t ready to have a purchasing discussion or weren’t actually part of an organization’s target audience. As a result, salespeople continued to find themselves chasing “leads” that didn’t want to be caught. So, within the last few years, successful marketers have pulled back the throttle on lead generation and began shifting much of their focus toward fostering those leads into sales-ready prospects.
The way they’ve done that is by nurturing existing prospects (and existing customers) with automated buying journeys. And since most marketers are now placing an emphasis on nurturing throughout the customer lifecycle, the most successful brands have differentiated themselves by focusing on delivering better brand experiences.
This makes good sense, as in 2010, 36% of companies competed primarily on the basis of the customer experience. In 2019, that number had risen to 80% (1). In addition, according to Qualtrics XM Institute, “87% of customers who say they had a great experience will make another purchase from the company, compared to 18% of customers who had a very poor experience. (2)”
By leveraging data-driven marketing automation solutions, marketers can track engagement and behaviors to deliver on specific pain points and needs, exceeding customer expectations and differentiating their brand and offerings from the competition. Understanding where customers are in their journey and what they need to succeed allows marketers to provide timely and relevant messaging and content across multiple channels at key touchpoints. At Act-On, we’ve made this process even easier, more intuitive, and more effective with Automated Journey Builder.
What Is the Automated Journey Builder?
The completely reimagined and reinvented Automated Journey Builder is a highly visual automation environment that makes it easier than ever to plan, build, copy, share, and deliver myriad communications workflows. The tool is designed to nurture prospects into sales-ready leads and further engage your existing customers for better product and service adoption, retention, and advocacy.
According to one of our beta-testers, Daniel Schmieding (Director of Digital Marketing, AdvisoryCloud), “The new UX design looks great and aligns perfectly with recent changes to the user interface. It’s cleaner, more legible, and less busy. It’s much more clear than the old version, which makes it a lot more usable and user-friendly.”
An interactive and dynamic marketing automation tool, the Automated Journey Builder allows marketers to deliver against diverse journeys and customer pathways. And with built-in multi-channel capabilities, you can drive engagement along numerous potential touchpoints. Best of all, you can templatize and save workflows to increase efficiencies and maintain brand consistency across all of your automated campaigns.
How to Convert More Leads Into Customers
How the Automated Journey Builder Improves Marketing Efficiency and Outcomes
Marketers are inherently creative people who want the ability to flex those creative muscles in a fun and beautiful environment. The Automated Journey Builder allows you to do just that.
Here’s what another of our beta-testers, Cara Moretti (Creative Manager, REV Group) had to say about her experience with the Automated Journey Builder. “From a visual standpoint, the Automated Journey Builder makes it so much easier to identify where prospects are in their journey and then deliver better experiences. It’s so much easier to use and follow than the previous version of the tool.”
Whether you’re creating simple or complex (or anything in between) programs, the Automated Journey Builder allows for a more interactive and flexible design experience while expanding your ability to engage across channels and touchpoints. And with a significantly improved ability to visualize program construction thanks to new zoom and pan functionality, you can build better programs in less time with increased efficiency. Additionally, updated tracking features allows you to track engagement — empowering you to identify strengths and weaknesses within each journey and adjust accordingly for consistent and sustained improvement.
Common and Effective Automated Journey Builder Use Cases
The best part about the new Automated Journey Builder is its versatility. For years, marketers have been frustrated by limited multi-channel messaging program functionality within their marketing automation platform, but our reimagined feature allows for unparalleled campaign dynamism.
Here are just a few examples of how you can leverage the Automated Journey Builder to deliver truly exceptional brand experiences and buyer journeys.
Prospect Nurturing
By tracking entry points and engagement at multiple touchpoints, you can leverage scoring, intent, and segmentation to construct efficient and effective automated prospect nurturing campaigns. When you understand behaviors and identify patterns, you can add more relevant messaging, content, and calls-to-action to these programs for further engagement. These data-driven approaches will improve and accelerate the lead-to-conversion process. And by adding if-then logic and dynamic content, you can guide prospects along a uniquely tailored experience that will exceed expectations and leave a lasting impact.
Customer Marketing
Extending and expanding customer relationships is a critical aspect of scalable marketing for sustained growth. Once a lead becomes a customer, you can continue the conversation with prompt and thorough welcome and onboarding campaigns, product and service adoption programs to drive satisfaction and retention, and even promotional journeys designed to drive additional opportunities and sales. Lastly, you can build simple or complex campaigns that evangelize your customer base and encourage advocacy and referrals.
Lifecycle Engagement
Modern growth marketers transcend the traditional buying funnel to engage with target audiences across the entire lifecycle — regardless of channel, medium, or stage. The Automated Journey Builder allows you to deliver throughout the lifecycle with progressive and consistent messaging and content that is entertaining, educational, and engaging. Choreograph and orchestrate across numerous touchpoints based on numerous behaviors and real-time data points to nurture prospects and upsell existing customers with sneak peeks, free trials, and exclusive promotions.
Improve the Brand Experience With Act-On’s Automated Journey Builder
Whatever your organization’s goals may be, the reimagined and reconfigured Automated Journey Builder allows you to delight your target audiences at every turn — anticipating their needs and delivering value at critical points. The new interface is extremely intuitive and interactive without compromising power or functionality.
If you’d like to see the new and improved Automated Journey Builder in action, please schedule a 20-minute demo with a marketing automation expert today. If you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, you can click here to take the interactive tour of our proven and innovative platform.
Still learning about marketing automation or researching the best fit for your organization? Click here to learn how to make marketing automation a reality!