The Ultimate Beginner's Guide To Automation
Written by: Amber Barry, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Your goal is business growth, and that usually goes one of two ways:
As your business grows, the more you work, and the more chaotic things get.
Or you can’t quite figure out how to grow and get busy!
Either way, automation can come to the rescue! They can help you streamline everything from your customer experience to your marketing campaigns, grow and nurture your audience and build your brand visibility.
80% of companies leveraging marketing automation solutions achieved lead-generation growth
77% saw an increase in their conversion rates
91% of businesses questioned considered marketing automation to be “very important” to their online marketing success
Building out your automations is an investment of your time, energy, and money (at least for the software you're using and for setup and management if you're not planning on doing it yourself), but it often pays off big time in the long run. To use automations to their fullest potential, you must be sure that you know your ideal clients inside and out. I talk about this a lot, but it's truly one of those foundational elements of your business that you're not going to escape! You must know how to attract your people, and even more importantly, how to earn their trust and secure their loyalty.
If you're just getting started, this can feel pretty challenging. I totally get it, which is why I built the Go-Getters Couch to $5K! This 12-week program is designed to help you move forward one step at a time WITHOUT overwhelm, confusion, or analysis paralysis. I also get that you might not be fully ready to jump into a 3-month training program, but you do have to start somewhere! If you haven't been able to gain the clarity you need to start or the momentum you need to move forward, then take a deep breath. Let’s start from the beginning. How do you (or how can you) create an exceptional customer experience for your new leads or clients? It all begins with deeply knowing and understanding your audience. Once you know that, you can start to create and deliver the best possible experience for them. When you use a platform like Ontraport, they're looking it makes it easy to create streamlined systems that automatically help your audience get to know you and your offers. It also helps you gather data so you can deliver exactly what they're looking for so you can make smart marketing decisions as you move forward.
Your marketing automation platform can track:
Every click of every ad on every ad platform
Clicks on your website and landing pages, or on your membership site
What emails are opened and clicked, including which specific links are clicked
Information gathered from online forms, questionnaires, and surveys
Everything your customers purchase from you and anything they return
All of the feedback they share with you, your sales reps, or the service team
Every referral they make
And so much more!
All of this gives you so much information, which can help you determine exactly what your potential clients need help with and what kind of solutions they're looking for—and when you know that you can deliver personalized communications. This could include tailored emails or text messages to your subscribers or specific tasks and reminders for you or your sales team to follow up with. Each piece of communication you create can be specifically designed for each client you are dealing with!
Some people think that automations are impersonal or annoying, but think about it this way— your computer is personalized to your needs, right? The more you use it, the more it "knows" you. These personalizations are designed to make your user experience better and your life easier.
The same way your computer gathers information about you, your marketing automation platform can gather information about your audience. It's all learning, designed to help you deliver the exceptional customer experience that your potential customers are looking for.
Choosing the right platform will help you:
Gather and store information about each new subscriber
Segment your new leads into groups based on that information
Deliver the correct communication to each group at exactly the right time
Here’s a simple example:
You have two new subscribers. One signs for a freebie and opens your delivery email immediately. Another signed up but hasn't opened it after a day or two. You don't want to send a reminder to the person who already opened theirs because that gets annoying! But you can send a friendly reminder to the other person, so they get the value from the freebie that they're looking for.
Choosing a marketing platform that's right for you and your business is important. My best advice is to choose one that you can grow into overtime. This saves you time, energy, and sanity in the long run because it’s a huge drain to keep platform hopping.
No matter which platform you choose, plan to start at the beginning, focus on one thing at a time and learn how to do the basics. You do NOT need to know everything right away, but the more you know, the more you’ll be able to streamline.
A great first step is to create a basic lead generation and follow-up campaign. This generally consists of two landing pages (an opt-in page and a thank you page) along with one automated email campaign.
Interested, but still a bit intimidated? Download the Go-Getters Toolkit and get started for just $27. It includes landing page and campaign templates, video tutorials to get you started, an automation checklist, and a whole lot more!
Automations are my nerdy little wonderland. Do you use them yet for your business?
Amber Barry, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Amber Barry is a U.S.based business strategist and consultant specializing in digital marketing, automations, and social media advertising for small businesses and startups. She is passionate about deconstructing the process of establishing and growing a business and aims to make it less overwhelming and easier to navigate for new business owners. She is the founder of Amber Barry | Digital, a digital marketing and advertising agency, and creator of The Go-Getters Club, where she offers online courses and coaching to women in business to help them maximize their marketing efforts and turn their small steps into big wins and massive momentum. She is a Registered Nurse and a Certified Health Coach by training and draws from her 12+ years of experience in health and wellness and 20+ years as an endurance athlete to help people transform their journey as business owners into an enjoyable, successful, fulfilling experience.
