Today, marketing automation is increasingly being used for boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty by delivering targeted and meaningful interactions across customer segments. 

By Holly Korten

Customer Experience (CX) is not just a catchphrase being used in terms of business; it is also a necessity today.  A positive customer experience not only results in making your customers happy, but it also leads to additional revenue.

CX is all about putting your customers’ needs at the center of what you do, and then ensuring along all their touchpoints. The two primary touchpoints that are responsible for creating great customer experience are people and product. A good CX is helping brands find and retain their best customers like never before. Rather than aiming only at sales, a customer experience strategy nurtures customers beyond that conversion to realize the benefits of a sustained relationship.

Today, marketing automation is increasingly being used for boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty by delivering targeted and meaningful interactions across customer segments. These positive emotional interactions ensure that you’re the chosen favorite versus other brands. According to a report by Kapow, 68% of customers leave because they feel brands are indifferent to them. Therefore, as marketing automation has become more personalized, companies with excellent customer experience are winning the loyalty of their users.

Marketing automation helps you create authentic engagements as well as improved customer experience with following steps:

Identify and support brand advocates

Marketing automation helps you track and reach brand advocates with an aim to increase loyalties for you. It enables you to gather vital insights about your customers to create highly-targeted campaigns –meaning no wasted resources. The only thing you need to do is target these influencers with relevant content and offers, and they will effectively amplify the impact of your messaging.

Identify those who regularly download, share and comment about your content. Your repeat customers are more likely to recommend your brand to others. This appreciation deepens further brand commitment. Invite vocal loyalists to join a reward of referral program to nurture their appreciation. This will simultaneously create lifelong ties and encourage repeat purchases among your customers. Marketing automation can also help you mix in online reviews to your lead nurturing efforts.

Personalize the customer engagement

Marketing automation allows you to create cross-channel campaigns that make your audience feel special at every touchpoint. For example, integrating your CRM with your automated marketing helps you deliver the right message at the right time. Thus you need to find tools that help you redefine the rules of engagement. You need to connect with your customers on an individual basis with an anticipated outcome depending on where they stand on their journey. When it comes to interacting with customers, personalized communication plays a vital role. So, marketing automation systems are using email as the main communications channel, for example, integrating messenger with email will allow companies to communicate easily with customers and other organizations.

Marketing automation helps you streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows so that operational efficiency and good revenues are achieved. It enables you to create, manage and automate marketing processes and conversations across offline and online channels. You need to direct everything toward an outcome since ultimately you are driving customers to make a purchase. However, you need to ensure they have successfully adopted your brand and use it well enough where they want to repurchase or renew.

Get customer feedback to improve relationship

In order to run a successful marketing campaign for improving customer experience, you must gather meaningful customer feedback. Incomplete or wrong feedback can negatively impact your entire marketing strategy. Make sure your feedback requests are placed in an appropriate spot with appropriate content. Are you right questions in order to get the information that will build good data?  Segment your customers into different streams, and then ask them how they feel about their current company relationship. With this approach you will figure out which areas to focus on, where to improve and how to minimize unfavorable experiences. You can perform A/B testing to find the best format for feedback. You can then compare how answers vary in response to differently presented or worded questions. Finally, influence qualification, scoring, and grading with feedback so that you can get the right leads into the hands of your sales team.

Deliver relevant content – always

Marketing automation platforms have become central elements of technology for most B2C and B2B companies. For example, Marketo and Eloqua ate powerful software tools that allow marketers to score leads and nurture databases of them through regularly scheduled email sends. The goal of automation is to engage with your existing customers with valuable content. Rather than throwing basic, impersonal content like newsletters at your customers, target them with pieces suited to their engagement history and behaviors. Providing relevant and informative content is effective lead generation marketing. Today, companies like MailChimp are helping even the smallest teams deliver smart, automated and personalized marketing emails to their audiences. So without a good content, demand generation efforts will never reach their true potential because it plays critical roles at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Create a seamless customer experience

A great customer experience is an outcome of consistent, quality attention throughout the entire life cycle. Maintain a nurturing dialog with your customers from end-to-end and give them a reason to stick around. For example, give them regular newsletters, special discounts, event invites, surveys, offers for rewards and referral programs, and exclusive content (like webinars, eBooks, etc). A seamless CX depends on the process right from effective lead capture to satisfactory conversion. Getting a marketing automation tool that has an inbuilt lead capture system can help in creating a seamless customer experience. That means your system should have landing pages, contact forms, telephony connectors and ways to import leads manually.

Many well-known brands are using marketing automation to increase customer experience through many avenues. From personalization to feedback, making the customer feel valued is a matter of sharing value, tracking behaviors and reaping reciprocal benefits. Marketing automation, therefore, is an effective way to stay connected and engaged with your audience wherever they go.

A senior VP of Business Intelligence Development, Holly Korten is a relentless net worker with several years of experience in marketing domain for Small and medium businesses. Assisting several Fortune 500 companies in revamping their marketing strategies from ground up, he seeks to achieve the entrepreneurial dream of startups to make it big in the market. A thinker, communicator, counselor and entrepreneur, he aims to spread his marketing finesse to upcoming businessmen.

Marketing stock photo by Photon photo/Shutterstock