You’re working with marketing automation workflows. How can you make sure your efforts are effective?

To achieve set goals and effective campaign through automation align your marketing objectives with your overall company vision. When all goals integrate with each other at every level it's easy as this serves to remind you every step of the way of the organizational bigger picture. Determine your goals clearly and set targets you want to reach. Monitor and evaluate the marketing automation process for easy metrics measurements, and various outputs forecasts in your strategy. Lead with a planned structure to get the desired results. Review your automation formats/activities when you encounter challenges and different factors that may affect you to attain projected numbers or set goals.

Define clear goals for each workflow. Segment your audience for personalized communication. Test and optimize emails for higher engagement. Analyze data to refine targeting and messaging. Automate lead scoring to prioritize follow-up. Regularly review and update workflows based on performance.

Start by putting yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer and identify the touchpoints and interactions they would have with your company throughout the journey. Consider their pain points, needs, and preferences at each stage and create relevant and personalized content and messaging to engage and nurture them. At the same time, from the ideal company perspective, align your automation workflows with your marketing goals and objectives. Define the specific actions or behaviors that indicate a customer's readiness to move to the next stage and design your automation triggers and workflows accordingly. Mapping out the journey from both perspectives will help improve the effectiveness of your workflows and build loyalty.

Mapping customer journey is overkill for most automation workflows. Especially those that are small practical automations, like moving an inbound lead from tool A to tool B. So the rest here only applies to larger automation projects. Workflows with many steps and customer touchpoints. If you don't already have a good handle on your customer funnel, then you'll be playing catch up. But, this will pay back 5X the time you put in. I promise. Create a process map in Miro, Canva, Figma, MS Paint, Pencil, etc. Then color each of the sections a different color for each step of the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (TOFU) - Awareness Middle of Funnel (MOFU) - Consideration Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) - Decision Post-Conversion - Retention

So you built some workflows. Now what? Test, optimize, repeat. If you're not close to the action, then make sure you're talking to your teammates that are. If you're not optimizing it, your workflow is slowly decaying. "There is an inherent tendency towards entropy, towards disorder, towards randomness clustering around every piece of order. This is true in nature. It is true for machinery. And it is true for organizations and their processes." - Peter Drucker

Generally, it is recommended to conduct a comprehensive review every six to twelve months. However, certain one-off events may trigger the need for an immediate review, such as launching a new product or service, entering a new market, or making significant changes to your marketing strategy. During the review, closely analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall engagement metrics. Look for any significant changes or trends in these metrics that could indicate areas for improvement. Additionally, consider feedback from customers, sales teams, and other stakeholders to gather insights and identify any pain points or opportunities to enhance the customer journey.

As I mentioned with testing and optimizing, that is the preventative. Aka the vitamins. But all systems, workflows, processes tend slowly drift from relevance if not updated and corrected. The duct tape that often holds most companies together is often tucked away out of sight. Either that or it walked out the door when the last automation ops guy/gal quit. If you haven't kept up with your workflows you will occasionally get a 5-alarm-fire when something breaks. Unless you do this. The best way to avoid a scramble to fix a broken workflow? Just set a review on the calendar. Every month or quarter is usually fine. Jump in there. Update the process map if you already have one, remove unused tools/connections.

Million dollar workflows leave clues. Make it your mission to collect them. Reverse engineer what works for others and put your own spin on it. Pro Tip 1: Integration platforms like Zapier and Make.com are goldmines for automation inspiration, they both have a huge library of examples. Great for simple automations and perfect starting points for complex ones. Pro Tip 2: When you find a slick marketing flow from a competitor to use a tool like the Wappalyzer Chrome Extension to scan pages in their funnel and reverse engineer their tech stack.

To ensure effective marketing automation workflows: -Start with goals: Align workflows with clear goals (e.g., lead generation, nurturing, customer engagement). -Know your audience: Segment your audience and personalize content for different needs and interests. -Test and optimize: A/B test different elements (subject lines, offers) and refine based on data and performance. -Track and measure: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. -Use triggers: Leverage actions like website visits, downloads, or email opens to trigger relevant and timely messages. -Keep it concise: Avoid information overload, focusing on delivering clear, valuable content in each step.

Some key things to keep in mind with automation workflows: - Set clear goals and have a clear target audience - Personalise content where possible and where logical (over personalisation can kill authenticity). - Segment your audience and tailor messages to resonate. - Test, always test - Measure, refine and constantly tweak and adapt.