Digitalisation is challenging old truths and forcing marketers to work in new ways. Marketing Automation Platforms create huge benefits for organisations that dare to improve and challenge the way they work.
Having a robust CMS and E-commerce system that can scale with the business is extremely important, but what will really make the difference is what business supports are used to create efficiency in the organisation. For a marketing department, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems and MAP (Marketing Automation Platform) systems are essential. A MAP system enables personalisation in a way that was previously not possible without escalating costs.
The development of these systems is moving at lightning speed. New players are constantly emerging and competition is fierce. Making a decision about your platform can therefore be quite a task, as the MAP market may look completely different in just a few years. The most important thing is therefore that priorities around marketing objectives, resources and business goals are set. Different organisations have different priorities such as how easy the system is to integrate, the price, what features are available and what you already know internally, etc.
Marketing Automation automates marketing processes
With a Marketing Automation Platform, we get a tool from which you collect information about those who interact with your organisation in one way or another. The Marketing Automation Platform gives you the opportunity to collect information all the way from start to finish, and with the help of intelligent choices you help the customer make that purchase decision you want them to make. Often the road there is quite long, and you focus a lot on everything that happens before you get into the actual sales flow, but even there is work going on.
The elements of Marketing Automation
The first step is often Lead Capturing. This means that when a visitor enters your organisation’s website, he/she is assigned a cookie. This visitor then fills in a form to receive, for example, an interesting e-book or something else that seems attractive and often free of charge. When the person enters their email address, a social media lookup is often made and the visitor is then matched with a potential person profile, if available.
Automatically, a Lead Scoring is done. This means that the visitor’s activities on the website are scored. For example, downloading an e-book can score one point. Here, your organisation has set up different scores for different interactions that can show whether the customer is likely to be ready for a purchase. Using Lead Nurturing, you process this potential customer so that they are ready to be brought into the first step of the sales process. The sales process can then have elements of the same strategy.
After the initial sales process is over, it is instead about getting the customer to come back and buy more, become loyal to your brand and eventually an ambassador for you.
The whole process means that the customer is slowly educated and taken from an inexperienced customer to a more experienced and returning customer. Eventually, the customer may even become an ambassador for you.
In this way, from the fairly anonymous group of visitors to the website, you have created a very large value at minimal cost to your own organisation.
Customer Lifecycle Marketing
When working with Marketing Automation, it is important to look at the customer lifecycle from start to finish. By doing this, you can quickly start to find ideas for smart automations and improve sales and loyalty.
Meeting customer needs requires three elements; Insight, Relevance and Timing. If we can deliver on all three, we create great customer journeys and help solve our customers’ problems.
- Insight is about gathering and cross-referencing data from different sources to visualise the customer and their preferences and identify where they are in their buying journey.
- Relevance is about determining which signals will guide customers through the next stage of their buying journey.
- Timing is about delivering signals at the right time to get customers to actually take the next step in the buying journey.
Of course, delivering on these points is easier said than done. What we need to do is to have this as a kind of value base when we visualise the customer’s buying journey and what we can do to make it better. A good way to visualise a journey is to think in terms of Attract, Sell & Impress.
- Attract customers. Get them to go from being unaware that they have a problem. This can often mean advertising, trade shows etc.
- Selling is the whole sales funnel from customers being aware that they have a problem that needs solving to them being aware of how you can add value to them.
- Impress those who are customers and get them to buy more and become advocates for you.
These three steps can be applied to sketch out a first version of the customer lifecycle and information on how to get to the next stage. A lifecycle could look something like this:
- Visitors
These are anonymous visitors to your website.- OBJECTIVE: Get them to leave their email to us.
- Prospects
These are the people who have given you their email addresses to access an article or newsletter, but have not yet made a purchase.- OBJECTIVE: Educate them about the services until they make their first purchase.
- Active customer
Those who have made one or more purchases from you.- Segment: One-time buyers – those who have made one purchase and are not yet at risk of being lost as a customer.
- Segment: Repeat buyers – those who have made multiple purchases and are repeat buyers.
- OBJECTIVE: To turn one-time buyers into repeat buyers and make repeat buyers more loyal.
- Customers at risk of being lost
Customers who have made a one-off purchase but have not returned to make any more purchases within the normal time that repeat buyers make their next purchase.- OBJECTIVE: Reactivate the customer before the customer is lost.
- Dropped customers
A customer who has gone very far beyond the expected repurchase time. Defining a time range here can be tricky as it may not be very far back.- OBJECTIVE: Reactivate the customer to become an active customer.
It is of course possible to add more steps, but the steps presented above can for many be used as a starting point for the customer lifecycle. This lifecycle and the actions that can be taken within it are often the foundation of digital marketing and the strategy used to implement a Marketing Automation Platform.
How do I get Marketing Automation for WooCommerce?
There are really two ways to go about getting a Marketing Automation platform. Either you approach the problem from a scaled-down perspective and keep it as simple as possible, or you choose to invest in a complete Marketing Automation system. What you choose depends entirely on the requirements and priorities of your organisation.
Scaled-down Marketing Automation
When starting out with Marketing Automation or limited by time or finances, a scaled-down approach can be useful. Hubspot, one of the world’s best-known MAPs, says on their blog that it is entirely possible to create a MAP using free or very cheap components for WordPress and WooCommerce.
What you should keep in mind is that if you use scaled-down solutions, you cannot expect to get the full value that a Marketing Automation system has the capacity to deliver. Without a unified tool, it is difficult to capture information such as knowing which articles the same person is reading and then being able to rate this interaction. However, most basic functions can be implemented with simple means.
Useful extensions for WooCommerce
An extension that provides the ability to schedule mailings to WooCommerce is Follow up Emails. With this mailing, one can do things like:
- Schedule messages for subscribers at certain set intervals, such as:
- When their subscription has expired.
- When their subscription is about to expire.
- When they haven’t logged in for a while.
- Schedule mailings for customers at certain set intervals or events, such as:
- Send a welcome message on first purchase
- Send out a discount voucher for the next purchase after the first purchase or after the customer reaches a certain lifetime value
- Send suggestions for products when they haven’t shopped for a while
- Create personalised discount coupons to win back lost customers
- Create reminder emails when they put things in their basket and then didn’t go through with the order.
If you don’t want to work with this add-on, you can use an external tool such as MailChimp. MailChimp also has a lot of ready-made templates for mailings that can be useful.
Another way is to work with WooCommerce Wishlists. With this extension, customers can choose to add a wishlist list. This list is then a perfect starting point to create emails around, for example, if you run a promotion where you discount a certain product that is on their wishlist.
To increase engagement around the products and get customers to leave reviews, Review for discount can be a useful addition. Other ways to keep customers coming back could be to look at different forms of loyalty programmes and points systems, but you should carefully consider which route you take. Different types of products can work differently well in different industries.
Marketing Automation Systems
If your organisation is ready and you’ve already seen the results of many of these automations, it might be time to look at a marketing automation system. With these systems, unlike putting it together yourself, you get all the benefits you want such as early lead capture and lead scoring.
For service companies with WordPress
One of the biggest systems on the market is Hubspot. Hubspot has a very well-developed system, and a full CMS concept. If you are using WordPress and WooCommerce today, you probably have a good concept for creating landing pages and therefore Hubspot can easily have a little more features than you really need.
Another very capable system is Marketo. This system focuses primarily on predicting what customers want and when they want it in order to deliver your content and product suggestions primarily via email to your customers.
For those who primarily need to automate various email mailings (which is enough for most people), Dotmailer and MailChimp are great tools for doing just that. Of these, dotmailer is the slightly more advanced tool for emailing as the programme has the capacity to build process flows in a simple way.
For E-retailers with WooCommerce
One system with a ready-made integration for WooCommerce is Metrilo. This application is considerably more scaled down than, for example, Marketo and Hubspot, but for an e-retailer it is still a very complete product that does most of what you want to be able to do. Metrilo is the product that most of our customers use and that we have the most knowledge of.
A Swedish upstart in Marketing Automation for WooCommerce is Mokini. Mokini, like Metrilo, is a much more scaled-down application but has the capacity to perform all the basic functions you might need. We are following this platform with great excitement and have so far been able to contribute with tips and improvements to the platform’s development.
The most important thing when choosing software is to find the best fit based on the requirements specification of the organisation, rather than looking at the price – but it definitely pays to compare!