Marketing automation helps you to grow your business. Using marketing automation, you can send the right information to the right person at the right time. With so much competition in the marketplace, it is important that your marketing strategy leaves an impact on the mind of customers, building relationship and brand trust among them.
According to a market survey, marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
Marketing automation is the new trend in the marketing industry. If you are still not using it, then you are lagging behind in your marketing efforts. But better late than never! So, we have got you covered. We have compiled together a list of marketing automation terms which you will come across in this process. The knowledge of these terminologies will help you to plan your successful marketing strategies which are relevant to your niche.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a web page or an email, to determine which version produces better results. Mostly, A/B testing is directed toward improving the conversion rates and customer engagement. So how do you do it? You send an email to two small groups, but change one aspect like the subject line or image, everything else remains the same. Test which of the two performs better.
Abandoned Shopping Cart / Shopping Cart Fetchback
When a customer places an item in their online shopping cart but does not complete the purchase process, marketers call this an abandoned shopping cart. According to a SaleCycle marketing report, 74 percent of customers abandon their online shopping carts. Targeted cart abandonment emails can help you to bring your customers back and secure a sale.
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are messages which are set to go automatically. These autoresponders help you to automate your campaigns and manage one-to-one communication with your customers. They can be sent in a sequence or at intervals. This process starts from the day a user signs up to your list. When you set up an autoresponder cycle, messages will be sent to go on a specific day of a customer’s subscription period.
Behavior-Based Marketing Automation
Behavior-based marketing automation refers to a system that triggers emails and other communication based on user activity on and off your site. It enables marketers to nurture leads and send them information only when it is most relevant to their point in the buying cycle.
Sending behavior-based emails to clients helps to increase user engagement.
Customer/Buying Lifecycle
Inquiry, research, purchase, and usage are the stages of a customer’s lifecycle. Marketers need to enrich this process by providing the data and information which the customer is looking for at the right time in order to build a trusted relationship with the customer.
CRM
CRM or customer relationship management is a system which manages all the interactions with existing and potential customers. It also manages the sales prospects and their lifecycle.
Drip Marketing
Drip marketing also is known as lead nurturing, is a series of programmed and scheduled emails that seek to qualify leads, keep them engaged, and gradually push them down the sales funnel.
Drip marketing is generally associated with email marketing which helps to send tailored content which is specific to the user’s action over a predetermined period of time so that the user takes the desired action.
Drip campaigns are designed to automatically select and send content based on buyer personas or user behavior while dealing with a large customer base.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing focuses mainly on creating awareness and attracting customers through organic and paid efforts which involve SEO, SEM, email marketing, social referrals, content marketing, etc.
Leads/Prospects
Leads are a group of people or potential customers who have provided you contact information through a signup form on your website and have become your subscriber.
It is now your responsibility as a marketer to provide them with information that they are looking for and build a trusted relationship with them so that they come back to you for more.
Lead (or Demand) Generation
Lead generation or demand generation is the process of finding potential customers who have taken interest in your company’s product or services and their contact details. This process generally starts at the beginning of the funnel and is used to plan a future follow-up and introduction to company’s products/ services by a salesperson.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and through every step of the buyer’s journey.
It mainly focuses on the marketing and communication efforts made by listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers they need.
Lead Score
A lead score is a value calculated by creating a rating system for your leads based on specific criteria or data like demographic and behavioral. The lead score is used to identify how qualified a contact is for the sales team or to determine the priority of lead.
Lifecycle Stages
It is the way to categorize your entire database of clients based on the stage that they are in the sales funnel. The stages are a subscriber, lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity, and customer.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
The leads which show more interest in your product or fulfill your scoring criteria are marketing qualified leads. The scoring criteria can be based on the number of pages visited by a user or the amount of time spent on your website, the number of emails they of opened or the number of times they have registered for your event (webinar, case-study, etc.)
Personalization
Creating and sending tailored messages to a specific group of audience with particular interests and requirements is personalization. Personalized emails have 29 percent higher open rates and 41 percent higher click rates than emails without any personalization. Once you start implementing personalization, your marketing campaigns will drive the required results. Besides building customer relationships, personalization has many benefits.
Progressive Profiling
Progressive profiling allows you to display new form fields to prospects who have visited your site and filled up the basic information like name, email id, contact number, etc.
In this way, you can collect different information about your customers over time so that you can form their profile and the customers won’t have to fill all of their information at once.
Sales Funnel
The journey which every prospect undergoes before making a final purchase. Many prospects are dropped off at different stages. Leads are nurtured at all the stages.
Sales Pipeline
The sales pipeline is a visual representation of where the prospects are in the sales process. Sales pipeline provides the data about how the sales are expected to close in a week/month/year and how close they are to reach their sales quota.
SQL
Sales qualified leads are those which have met the sales team’s specific criteria and hence these leads have earned a direct sales follow-up.
Segmentation
Segmentation is the process of separating your target audience into segments or groups with different needs and preferences.
This can be done on the basis of demographics(location, age, etc.), behavior (website visits, webinar attendance, email responses, form submissions, purchases), etc which reflect their interests. By segmenting your audience in different groups and implementing a unique marketing strategy for each group strengthens your relationship with the potential buyers.
Trigger-based Marketing
Automated emails sent to customers preceding an event or following an action such as clicking a link are primarily called trigger based emails. This activity is either one-time or is a series of emails that are triggered in response to an event. When an event occurs a customer specific marketing activity is undertaken.
Example – A welcome email is sent when a user registers on your website or discount or reminder series of emails which are triggered automatically.
Workflow/Automated Program
By setting up a workflow, you can automate your entire marketing strategy. Some of the processes that you can automate:
1. You can set up an email which triggers when someone fills out a form or visits a page.
2. A new subscriber automatically gets added to your list.
3. You can automate alerts to your sales team when someone has become an SQL.
4. You can automate the lifecycle stages and the lead nurturing process.
We hope you find our marketing automation list helpful and brings you a step closer to becoming a marketing expert. We, at Juvlon, can help you to automate your email marketing campaigns. Feel free to reach our team.