1: So,
really what we're trying to do is we're trying to create efficiencies and we're
trying to create opportunities to utilize marketing automation.
So that will free up your time to make you look like a marketing superhero,
doing all kinds of other stuff.
So thinking through the beginning of that funnel,
when you're trying to get new leads,
you want notifications set up.
You want your sales team to know when somebody has submitted a form or you want
lead scoring set up and you want your sales team to know once there's a
marketing qualified lead that's being handed off so they can engage right away.
So really important to think about marketing automation,
not only what it can do for your communication externally,
but what it can do for communications and alerts internally as well.
Then we get into nurtures. So once somebody has sort of raised their hand,
then traditionally they go into a nurture program. So these are "always on"
types of programs. I do think that it's important to note here, again,
as a customer marketer, that nurtures are great for your customers too.
It's not just about that top of funnel,
it's about getting customers into that upsell, cross-sell motion,
making sure that they're adopting your product or new features,
anything like that as well.
And then we get into transactional communications.
And I think that this is something that's really interesting, right?
Because transactional is something that we're now all accustomed to.
We all get everything like the moment that it happens on our phones.
But transactions is a big part of marketing automation.
I'm sure that today you got a reminder saying, Hey,
this webinar is starting soon.
You probably got one yesterday maybe as a reminder that it was happening today.
And you're going to get a follow up to say, Hey,
here's the webinar recording whether you attended or not attended.
But these can be different.
It could be a form fill alert to somebody internally if somebody fills out a
form or it's a response as soon as somebody has filled out a form that, hey,
they get that e-book or they get the recording to an on-demand webinar right
away, because that's what we've all been sort of trained to expect.
So make sure that you have those set up.
And then getting into more of that keep/grow
motion of the funnel when you have your customers,
then you're thinking about onboarding sequences.
How can I onboard this customer to make sure that they have a really great
experience as soon as they become a customer?
And then ongoing product communications.
So thinking about maybe little nurtures that you're setting up through your
automation system around maybe end of life notifications or a beta program
or onboarding for a new product, feature or tool that they're using.
So there's a lot of opportunity here to think about automation at each stage of
the lifecycle.