In our article 5 Email Marketing Automation Best Practices with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we explained how your brand can get great results by automating your Salesforce-led email marketing program. From audience segmentation and identity-based marketing, to Salesforce templates and email triggers – the article is a jargon-free guide to making the most of SFMC’s email automation capabilities.
But what if you need more help with email marketing automation? Hire a Salesforce automation specialist!
Here are 5 ways hiring a Salesforce automation specialist can work wonders for your brand’s email marketing program – and its ROI!
#1. Streamline and simplify day-to-day email marketing tasks
Email automation is more than just installing an automated system and letting it do all the heavy lifting for you. The system also needs to be set up properly, maintained, and managed. You need to identify your audience, create compelling content, and conduct A/B testing on each campaign. In short, crafting a successful automated email program with SFMC is not just about the system, but about the people who manage and optimize it. This is one of the most important reasons you need a reliable Salesforce automation specialist.
This professional (or group of professionals) can help you streamline and simplify the most time-consuming responsibilities of your email marketing program, including:
- Automating the lead qualification process
- Identifying your audience and creating audience segments
- Creating new campaigns
- Designing the right content and visuals
- Automatically triggering specific actions based on customer behavior, actions, schedules, etc.
The Salesforce email automation specialist can help you successfully implement a tailored email marketing strategy with the minimal amount of manual work for each campaign, customer, or email. Even better, with outsourcing, you can hire such specialists on an hourly, weekly or monthly basis. There are no long-term contracts, so if you need someone to take care of day-to-day tasks for only a short period – you can.
#2. Optimize process efficiency and speed
To start with, a Salesforce automation specialist can set up your SFMC instance in the least time possible. This allows you to set up and deploy email campaigns fast. Salesforce-certified email specialists will also customize your SFMC setup, so it perfectly matches your brand’s needs, and can scale alongside your business.
If you’re using CRM software (Salesforce or something else), the specialist will know how to integrate your SFMC email marketing tools with the CRM so you can better leverage data about your audience to build a more complete picture about them. Integration will help improve cut communication and collaboration within your team, and between your team and external teams (e.g. Sales or Customer Support).
Furthermore, email marketing automation helps optimize both people and processes. The automation specialist will identify all the quick actions, templates and sub-flows that can be created once and reused multiple times. In addition, when/if anything needs to be adjusted, they can do so on-the-fly without the need for rework and without delaying campaigns.
#3. Build customer journeys
The SFMC automation specialist can help you automatically build holistic, multi-channel journeys for each of your prospects, leads and customers. They can also set up automated, triggered email communications to these leads based on dates, durations, the information you have about the audience, how they have engaged with your brand in the past, etc. Setting up, tracking and managing such journeys is critical if you’re aiming to deliver personalized, on-brand experiences to each customer in order to earn their long-term loyalty and brand advocacy.
SFMC Journey Builder provides numerous capabilities to create seamless journeys through every touchpoint and tailor every interaction with your brand. But to do this, you must:
- Research the customer
- Collect customer data with qualitative (anecdotal) and quantitative (analytical) data
- Create multiple personas
- Create the journey map with timelines, stories, touchpoints, etc.
The automation specialist can bring in a lot of value at each of these steps, so you can:
- Glean valuable, actionable insights about customers and tell the story of their experiences
- Get a unified view about them across every touchpoint
- Understand their specific needs, challenges, or pain points
- Engage with them consistently and continuously at various stages across their journey
- Welcome
This simple welcome email from Oberlo provides all the important information that a new user might need to start using Oberlo’s drop-shipping services.
- Event/purchase follow-up
Requesting feedback on an event or purchase is a great way to keep customers engaged with your brand, and Target achieves this perfectly.
- Engagement/Re-engagement
Customers are busy. Their inboxes are even busier. To stay top-of-mind, it’s important to engage with them regularly. It’s also vital to make an effort to re-engage with customers who are still onboard but ‘quieter’ than you would like them to be. A simple email like this from AirBnB works!
- Abandoned Cart
Set up automated abandoned cart emails like Pacsun and you will see a big difference in your conversion numbers.
- Create relevant, personalized email experiences to satisfy their needs at each stage, from initial contact and purchase, to post-purchase engagement and advocacy.
They will also set, manage and optimize your workflows, no matter which stage of the customer journey your emails are designed for.
#5. Automate Lead Scoring
The lead generation to customer conversion process requires setting up a model that can accurately “score” inbound leads. Lead scoring is the process of assigning numerical values to leads to determine which of them can be qualified in order to move them down the sales funnel towards conversion and sale.
SFMC provides numerous capabilities to simplify lead scoring, and make them more pursuit-worthy, and thus drive your future sales and marketing interactions. These include:
- Marketing Cloud Connect and Process Builder to score email opens and clicks, and classify leads
- SFMC Journey Builder to initiate journeys and implement custom lead scoring
- SFMC Email Studio to create data extensions and Automation Studio to schedule queries (to to find the leads that open and click on your emails) and automate them
If all of this sounds too complicated for your in-house email marketing team, a Salesforce automation specialist can definitely help you out.
#6. Other Ways SFMC Automation Specialists Can Add Value to Your Email Marketing Program
Email marketing automation is easier said than done. Although (in most cases), you need to set up automation only once, it still requires a lot of planning and strategizing, not to mention top-notch execution, consistent management, and a whole lot more. Here are some more ways, bringing automation experts can improve the ROI of your email marketing program:
- Define email goals and align them with business goals
- Collaborate with other teams, and get their inputs and buy-in for different campaigns
- Create detailed diagrams, visualizations and deliverables of the automation workflow/process
- Segment audience data so you can engage with them with the right message at the right time
- Build a content library, customize templates, create content blocks
- Plan and execute the rollout schedule and frequency
- Identify campaign metrics and key performance indicators to optimize email workflows and get the best results
- Create clear, visual-based reports, identify strengths and weaknesses, and adapt campaigns accordingly
Wrap up
By automating your email program, you’ll find that you can easily manage every task, from simple email sends to complex campaigns. And adding an external SFMC email automation specialist like Email Uplers to your program can be the best investment you’ll ever make for your brand – so make sure you get the right one!
To know more about the automation specialists at Email Uplers, contact us today.