How well is your marketing working? That’s the million dollar question that marketers have wanted answered for decades. No matter how much they research, advertisers will never truly know if that $5 million Super Bowl spot was worth it.

Marketing automation changed that. The behaviors driven by automated marketing collateral are easily measured, and that makes it simple for marketers to know what is working and what isn’t. The ease of obtaining accurate behavioral analytics from marketing messages is the core of what makes marketing automation so effective.

Getting the most out of your marketing automation efforts relies on measuring results and correcting course when necessary. It’s the ultimate form of market research that brings you into closer touch with customers and helps you provide the products and service they desire most.

Here’s how to get the most out of the metrics marketing automation can provide.

Don’t limit measurement to email engagement. Any marketing automation platform can measure things like how many people opened an email and how long they spent reading it. That’s great, and it can help optimize the content of future emails; but reading an email is really just the first step in the conversion process. What did the customer do then? Integrated marketing automation ties into your retail management system so that measurement isn’t limited to the confines of email.

Which customers clicked through to your website from a link contained in the email? How much time did they spend navigating the site after that? How many of them made a purchase? These are the important metrics that provide deep insights and provide context to email metrics. Without viewing the entire cycle, it would be easy to assume an email that the average customer only spent 30 seconds reading was a failure — but if you knew that 50% of the consumers who clicked through after that time made a purchase, then you can see the message was actually a huge success.

Optimize outreach in real-time. Aggregating click-through data over time and trying to make sense of it is helpful, but it takes too long. By the time you figure out what could have worked better, you’ve already lost customers. Instead, channel your inner Einstein and realize that every action yields an equal reaction. Identify the customer behaviors that should generate a response and set-up feedback loops where further action generates appropriate reactions.

Imagine a customer clicks a link in an email to a product page but doesn’t convert. You can set a follow-up message to reach that interested customer at an appropriate time that reminds her the product is still on sale, or even sweeten the deal with a coupon code. Once she converts, send her a message letting her know when the product ships. When you see that she received it, ask her how she likes it and invite her to submit a review. If at any time in the process the messaging does not generate the desired result, adjust the messaging before interest the customer is lost.  

Blend the science with art. Marketing automation is great at providing insight into how well your marketing efforts are working, giving you the necessary data to know where changes should be made. One thing it can’t do for you is generate the messaging itself. Study which messages were most effective and then take the time to ask yourself why one campaign worked better than another. Over time, you will build a toolbox of knowledge that gives you a detailed understanding of exactly who your customers are and the best ways to reach them. That becomes a solid foundation for every campaign moving forward, which will yield its own results and strengthen your knowledge even further.

Integrated marketing automation can be used to measure customer responses and actions, giving you ample opportunity to hone the most effective messaging to drive the behaviors that you want. Make sure not to limit measurement to emails and regularly analyze what all of your marketing automation metrics are telling you.

Contact Celerant Technology today for a walkthrough of exactly how to do it.

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