Introduction to Marketing Automation

Capturing someone’s email address is only the first step in any lead magnet strategy.

Once you have the email address your goal is to build a relationship with that subscriber so they will trust you enough to buy your premium products or services.

Relationships

Business relationships are just like personal ones. They don’t happen overnight and they require constant attention in order to thrive.

The difficult thing about business relationships is that you are trying to manage dozens, hundreds or even thousands of relationships at once. Which is of course impossible… unless you have a cloning machine lying around OR you know a few marketing automation tricks.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation might sound like some complicated technology that you need a PHD to figure out but the truth is that it’s pretty simple.

Basically, marketing automation is just a way of saying “if this happens, then do this.“

For example:

If This Happens

Someone downloads my lead magnet

Then Do This

Send them a welcome email

It really is that simple. Because the action happens automatically you can set this on auto-pilot so you don’t need to send every email manually (that’s the automation part).

If you wanted to get fancy about it you could combine multiple actions together:

If This Happens

Someone downloads my lead magnet

Then Do This

Send them a welcome email

Then Do This

Wait one day

Then Do This

Send another email

You may have heard this series of emails referred to as a "drip sequence" or a "nurture campaign". Basically this is just a series of emails written to help achieve a goal - like buying a product or service.

But how?

In order to get started with Marketing Automation you’ll need some special software.

Pretty much all email marketing software (Mailchimp, AWeber etc) now includes marketing automation features. This is because most automated actions take the form of emails so email marketing providers are in a good position to handle the automated sending of these messages.

To trigger automations you need to connect one piece of software to another.

For example:

If This Happens

Someone downloads my lead magnet

Then Do This

Send them a welcome email

Getting Personal

The more you learn about your subscribers, the better chance you have of building a genuine relationship with them.

So how do you learn more about subscribers?

Well, every action they take tells you a little bit about themselves.

In this way you can start to paint a picture of who your audience is, what motivates them and what they like. When you have this information you can recommend the products or services that are most likely to fit their needs. When you make accurate recommendations people are more likely to buy.

The more opportunities you give people to interact with you, the better chance you have of learning about the details that will help you to paint an accurate picture.

This is why we recommend creating multiple lead magnets. By offering several different lead magnets you will find that your audience will ‘self segment’.

That is, when a reader downloads a lead magnet about a certain subject - for example, ‘a beginner’s guide to healthy eating’ then they have told you that they are at the beginning of their journey - they have segmented themselves as a beginner.

On the other hand, if someone downloads a lead magnet about ‘optimising macro nutrients while standing on your head’ that then you shouldn’t waste their time with beginner content because they have segmented themselves as being at an advanced stage.

When you send only relevant content an individual is more likely to engage with, trust and eventually buy from you.

Why Is Marketing Automation So Important?

The ability to build relationships with customers is vitally important to any business.

The ability to automatically build unique relationships at scale is how you can grow your business without having to hire a big team.

In short, marketing automation helps you to simultaneously build multiple relationships on a large scale.