Anytime you do something twice, step back and ask, “Can this be automated?”
Even if the task is small, that process is taking your time and that time adds up. Not only do manual processes eat up valuable time, they leave more room for errors and missed opportunities, ultimately lowering your team’s productivity and the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Quickly consider the cost of not using automation in your marketing strategy. Manual processes aren’t just inefficient, they’re a liability.
It’s time to embrace automation and transform your strategy.
Imagine the time you could get back by simply automating some of the repetitive tasks in your daily routine. If your team is manually handing leads to sales, segmenting lists, and marketing taking action on prospect activity, you’re missing out on the real power of Account Engagement.
Understanding the tools
Completion Actions
Completion actions allow you to automate pre-designated actions for specific prospect activity. From autoresponder emails to notifying your sales team, completion actions will play a massive role in your marketing strategy. Completion actions make your marketing efforts scalable, ensuring every interaction is followed by a predetermined response, automating critical repetitive tasks, and removing room for error. Completion actions are one of the most robust automation tools and can be used on a variety of your team’s marketing assets:
1. Forms: Apply completion actions when a prospect submits a form.
2. Form Handlers: Use completion actions with form handlers to capture data from external forms and trigger specific actions.
3. Files: Trigger completion actions when a prospect accesses a file hosted in Account Engagement.
4. Custom Redirects: Set completion actions to occur when a prospect clicks on a custom redirect link.
5. Emails: Apply completion actions to email links to trigger specific actions when a prospect clicks on a link in an email.
6. Landing Pages: Use completion actions on landing pages to automate actions when a prospect submits a form on the landing page.
7. Page Actions: Apply completion actions to specific pages on your website to trigger actions when a prospect visits those pages.
Look, completion actions are a game-changer. They automate your responses and tasks, streamline your efficiency. No more missed opportunities, no more lagging behind.
This allows you to scale.
Segmentation Rules
Effective segmentation is the backbone of email marketing. Account Engagement’s segmentation rules let you automatically group prospects based on specific criteria—whether it’s demographics, behavior, or engagement history. This means you’re hitting the right people with the right message, every single time. That’s how you drive results.
You are helping your team send marketing messages that are highly relevant and personalized, driving higher engagement and conversion rates.
Segmentation rules are similar to automation rules but are for one-time use only. They can be reused, but the critical thing to remember is that they run once, in contrast to automation rules constantly running in your instance’s background.
One last difference between segmentation rules and automation is that segmentation rules have a shorter list of actions. Segmentation rules can be used to:
- Add to CRM campaign
- Apply tags
- Add prospects to a list
- Add/create a list
- Remove prospects from a list
- Remove tags
As you can see, the segmentation rules are more specifically designed to help your team segment your audience, apply data changes, and route prospects to sales in a single action rather than an ongoing background operation. This automation type comes in handy when segmenting data from a past event.
Automation Rules
Account Engagement Automation rules allow you to create dynamic workflows based on prospect behavior and rule criteria. You can automatically update prospect fields, apply tags, adjust scores, and assign prospects to specific lists or campaigns.
Automation rules ensure that your leads are continuously nurtured and managed according to their unique interests and stage in the journey. Once again, Automation rules are similar to segmentation rules in that they both work on a criteria-matching logic, but automation rules will continue to act on the criteria forever until they are turned off.
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
Automation rules are one of the most vital features within Account Engagement and need to be approached with planning and precision.
For most businesses, routing leads from marketing to sales is the most important automation rule use case. By establishing a threshold for MQLs, your automation rules can push qualified prospects to sales without any help from the marketing team.
Automation rules typically follow a set-it-and-forget-it framework and, for that reason, require much thought and consideration when developed.
Automation rules can also move prospects from one marketing funnel stage to another. For example, once a prospect reaches a specific score, your automation rules must add them to a list of engaged prospects, add them to a nurture campaign for warm leads, and change their tag from warm to cold.
Then, some of those leads begin to lose interest. The automation rule can be set to change their profile and remove them based on their specific level of engagement and how it matches up with your previously established threshold for interested leads.
The critical takeaway from automation rules is that you can have Account Engagement Pardot constantly scanning your prospects and moving them to the right level of your marketing funnel based on their actions and the content they engage with.
These processes can be done manually with a smaller audience, but this must become automated when dealing with thousands and hundreds of thousands of prospects.
Engagement Studio
The Engagement Studio is Account Engagement’s most powerful tool. This is where you design and execute complex, multi-step marketing campaigns. With Engagement Studio, you can create automated nurturing programs that guide your prospects through personalized journeys based on their interactions with your marketing materials. It’s like having a 24/7 marketing machine working for you.
The Engagement Studio is the most powerful of the Account Engagement automations and can be leveraged for a wide variety of applications:
1. Automated Lead Nurturing: Design and automate sophisticated nurture campaigns that take prospects from that first form fill all the way to becoming a customer. You do this through personalized interactions based on their behavior, interests, and engagement level. It’s like having a custom-tailored sales journey for each prospect. This is how you turn leads into loyal customers, efficiently and effectively.
2. Behavior-Based Triggers: Trigger actions and communications based on prospect behavior, like email opens, link clicks, form submissions, website visits, or other custom events tracked within Account Engagement.
3. Personalized Communication Flows: Build complex, multi-step workflows that deliver tailored content and messages at the right time, nurturing prospects through the buyer’s journey.
4. Drip Campaigns: Schedule and automate email campaigns, allowing for consistent prospect engagement without manual intervention.
5. Segmentation and Targeting: Segment prospects dynamically within Engagement Studio based on predefined criteria, ensuring that each prospect receives tailored content.
6. Lead Scoring and Grading: Incorporate lead scoring and grading into your engagement studio to prioritize and qualify prospects as they progress through the engagement journey.
7. Sales Alignment: Integrate with Salesforce to sync prospect data and activities, enabling seamless handoffs between marketing and sales teams based on prospect engagement levels.
8. Campaign Optimization: Monitor and analyze campaign performance with built-in reporting and analytics, allowing for continuous optimization and improvement of engagement strategies.
9. Event-Based Campaigns: Set up campaigns triggered by specific events or milestones in a prospect’s lifecycle, ensuring timely and relevant interactions.
Benefits of Account Engagement Automations:
Increase Efficiency
Automate repetitive tasks to free up your team’s time for strategic initiatives, ensuring more efficient resource use and higher productivity.
Enhance Personalization
Deliver highly personalized experiences at scale, driving deeper customer engagement and loyalty through tailored content and interactions.
Improve ROI
Streamline lead management and campaign execution to optimize your marketing spend, ensuring a higher return on investment through more effective and targeted efforts.
Removing room for error
Automating your team’s repetitive marketing tasks ensures they’re done exactly the same every time. This not only removes room for error, but also results in far more accurate reporting.
By automating repetitive tasks, personalizing interactions at scale, and orchestrating complex customer journeys, Account Engagement automation enhances efficiency and drives deeper, more meaningful connections with prospects and customers.
Whether you’re streamlining lead management, optimizing campaign execution, or implementing targeted nurture strategies, Account Engagement’s automation capabilities enable marketing teams to focus on strategic initiatives that propel business growth. Embrace Account Engagement automation tools today and elevate your marketing efforts and stay ahead in the competitive digital marketing landscape.
I’ll see you next Tuesday.
-Vincent
