A customer-centric business is one that puts the customer at the center of everything they do. What many business owners don’t know is that marketing automation helps small businesses focus on their customers as they scale. Automation doesn’t have to make your marketing impersonal. In fact, it can make it way more personal.
47% of businesses focus on retention
For example, small marketing teams can automatically segment loyal customers from those that are about to churn. Automated marketing also frees up time, so you can dedicate it to other strategic tasks that require human interaction. Finally, it helps you know more about your customer base, so you can personalize your marketing and boost customer loyalty.
There are many ways small businesses can benefit from marketing automation software to be customer-centric and deliver a positive customer experience. Let me share some with you so that you delight customers, increase retention, and find new revenue opportunities.
What Does It Mean To Be Customer-centric?
Ways Marketing Automation Helps Small And Mid-size Businesses Be Customer-centric
#1 Segment Your Customer Base Automatically
Successful small businesses segment their customer base automatically. By doing so, they are able to better allocate their resources. At the same time, they can create profitable marketing campaigns. Therefore, automation helps them control costs and increase profits.
For example, a clothing retailer might segment its customer base by age, gender, and location. They can automatically do this as their customers buy online. This information would then be used to determine which products to stock in each store, and what kind of email marketing would be most effective.
By segmenting its customer base, a business can tailor its operations to better meet the needs of its customers. This leads to happier customers and a more successful business.
Marketing automation tools help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access the same techniques larger organizations use to be more competitive in the marketplace.
#2 Create Personalized Messages
Did you know that 76% of consumers get frustrated when brands don’t deliver personalized interactions? Use marketing automation to deliver tailored interactions that drive engagement. With personalized messages, you’ll grab your customer’s attention with relevancy.
Many companies use marketing automation to create personalized messages for their customers. This can be a great way to connect with customers on a more personal level and create a lasting relationship.
Personalized marketing brings huge benefits to any business. And marketing automation makes it really easy. If you are new to personalized marketing, in the following video I explain how to create a personalization strategy step by step.
For example, in real estate marketing, realtors can improve the customer experience with personalized messages. The following infographic shows how a real estate company engages with new leads when they request information.
There are different types of messages your business can personalize. For example:
- Emails
- Websites and landing pages
- Direct mail
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Documents (PDF, PowerPoint, and more)
- Audio
- Text messages
- WhatsApp messages
- Chatbot messages
Using Automated Personalized Emails
Email is the one with the wider adoption across SMBs. With email marketing automation software, you can send these emails at scale with personalized content.
Take a look, for instance, at the following image. It shows a personalized email for hotel marketing.
Now, take a look at the same image but this time I highlighted the fields with variable data.
Using Automated Videos
Similarly, video is one of the most effective types of content. With a personalized video platform, you can automate and scale its creation. Personalized video helps businesses grab the viewer’s attention.
These videos are automatically made with customer data. For example, a common use case is adding the customer’s first name in the video in an onboarding video. Marketing teams also use personalized videos to do account-based marketing and add the target company’s logo to the video.
If you are considering personalized marketing videos for your next customer-centric marketing strategy, you’ll want to see more examples, case studies, and strategies.
That’s why we created a complete guide on personalized marketing videos. To see many customer-centric video strategies, make sure to read the guide about personalized marketing videos with examples.
Businesses that want more than video views, also use interactive videos. In fact, with software for interactive videos like Pirsonal Player, you can add calls-to-action (CTA) with personalized content to any video. As a result, this helps marketers make their busy viewers take action right from the video.
#3 Increase Touchpoints With Across The Customer Lifetime
Consumers today use an average of almost six touch-points when buying an item, nearly 50% more than 15 years ago. With marketing automation, you can increase your touchpoints with customers across the customer lifetime. This allows you to reach more customers with fewer resources.
In addition, with more touchpoints, businesses can understand how customers think and their needs. As a result, you can provide them with the products and services they are looking for as their needs evolve.
Marketing automation not only helps you automate these customer interactions but also programs when you want to trigger them. This means you can save time on repetitive tasks that would otherwise be performed manually, and you can design targeted campaigns that will reach your customers at the right time.
It’s key to map the customer journey, so you can walk with your clients and anticipate their needs. By doing this, you can upsell new products and increase your revenue. It’s a crucial part of understanding your audience and providing them with what they need when they need it.
Watch the following video to learn how to use personalization across the customer journey and marketing funnel.
#4 Marketing Automation Helps Small Businesses Decrease Customer Churn
Automation can help detect when a customer is at risk of churning and then send a notification to a customer experience representative. This allows the representative to reach out to the customer and try to resolve any issues that may be causing them to consider leaving the company.
When it comes to marketing, automation can be a huge help in not only improving customer engagement and retention rates but also satisfaction levels.
Many small businesses struggle to provide excellent customer service due to a lack of resources. Automation can help bridge the gap by providing tools and processes to help small teams deliver faster, more consistent responses.
Implementing automation can be a challenge, but the benefits can be significant for small businesses that want to remain competitive.
#5 Scale Sales With Automation Tools
With marketing automation, you can take a lot of the menial, time-consuming marketing tasks off of your sales team’s hands. This way they can focus on more important things – like quality research.
With automation, you can set up systems to do things like sending out automatic emails and follow-ups, posting to social media, and tracking customer interactions. Hence, your sales team can spend their time on things that will actually bring in new business, rather than getting bogged down with busy work.
SMBs can use automation tools to do account-based marketing more effectively. This is because account-based marketing is a data-driven approach that relies on having accurate and up-to-date information about your target accounts.
Automation tools can help you keep track of this information and make sure that your account-based marketing campaigns are targeted and relevant to your ideal customers. Additionally, automation can help you scale your account-based marketing efforts so that you can reach more accounts and potential customers with personalized messages.
Watch the following video to learn creative small business marketing automation ideas to increase sales.
#6 Use AI To Build Buyer Personas
When used in marketing and sales, artificial intelligence (AI) can help uncover new buyer personas and opportunities for your business. A buyer persona is a research-based profile of a person who buys or has the potential to buy a product or service. It includes information about their demographics, behavior, needs, motivations, and challenges.
Buyer personas help businesses create content and products that appeal to their target customers. By automating the process of gathering data and analyzing it, AI can provide insights that you may have otherwise missed. This can help you generate new revenue streams and business models, expanding your reach and increasing your bottom line.
Automating your marketing with AI can help you create relevant content that is relevant to niche audiences for coherent inbound marketing. Because not every customer is the same.
This can be done by using AI to understand what content is most popular with certain audiences and then using this information to create new content that appeals to them.
With AI or simply with creativity, businesses can also create augmented buyer personas. An augmented buyer persona is the mix of a buyer persona with the real customer data gathered throughout the customer lifecycle.
#7 Technology Helps Business Owners Supervise Marketing Performance
Examples Of Businesses That Use Marketing Automation To Be Customer-centric
Flight Centre Uses Personalized Videos To Engage With Leads
Flight Centre Travel Group increases lead engagement with personalized video marketing powered by Pirsonal. Here is an example of a personalized video by this travel agency:
When a lead requests information, the online travel agency (OTA) automatically creates a personalized video and dynamic landing page based on the information the lead provides such as name, a reason to travel, or destination, which makes these videos and emails totally relevant to each individual.
With these marketing automation strategies with video, they move leads to buy more and faster. Every personalized video is then instantly sent by email, which increases customer engagement and builds stronger relationships that translate into more revenue also in the mid and long term.
BMW Financial Services Welcomes New Customers With Video
With a portfolio of more than four million lease and credit financing contracts, it’s essential that each customer clearly understands the financial and practical terms that are specific to each person’s contract.
To decrease the overall after-sales support and increase the retention rates, this company has made customer experience a priority.
Pirsonal’s client now automatically creates a personalized video for each new customer where the financial contract terms are visually explained, contextualizing the information to each customer.
The following infographic shows the variable data fields in the video.
By empowering the automotive brand with a customer-centric marketing strategy and video personalization uniquely, their customers have a full understanding of their contracts and next steps:
- Monthly payment amount
- Max. mileage
- Vehicle value at the end of the contract
- And more.
Go! Running Tours Uses Automation To Improve The Customer Experience
Go! Running Tours uses automation to fuel the welcome flows. Founder Lena Anderssen takes great care to ensure the messaging in the automation emails reflects the DNA of Go! Running Tours.
This way, she ensures people are happy and healthy when they travel, as well as helping them to understand and connect with a culture and the local people in the cities that they run. To do this, she uses the marketing automation platform ActiveCampaign.
Final Thoughts
Marketing automation helps small businesses build customer-centricity across every digital interaction. Every decision made by customer-centric companies is based on what will benefit the customer most.
Customer-centric approaches to marketing allow brands to be more responsive across the customer lifecycle. This lifecycle is becoming more and more complex. This is why small businesses need to rely on technology to be more effective, faster, and scalable.
From creating new products to developing marketing campaigns, everything revolves around the customer-centric culture. Thanks to technology and the right mindset, customer-centric brands always strive to exceed customer expectations and provide customers with a positive experience that is second to none.
You can start delivering customer-centric messages to your audience today. Use personalized videos to onboard new customers, explain complex information, or increase engagement. Request a free trial of Pirsonal today or request a free consultation so that we can understand your needs and help you make your audience take action.
