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Book the right meetings faster with one-click scheduling
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Engage website visitors with automated Journeys and live chat
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Qualify, route, and schedule prospects directly from your web form
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Route records in Salesforce based on a Trigger
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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
When we look at the common challenges B2B businesses face today, we see that generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout their journey remain top of mind.
Along with these goals, businesses face an explosion of data, but struggle to put it to use.
Marketing automation can help overcome these challenges by putting data to work and streamlining our workflows.
Let’s take a look at some of the best and most practical marketing automation examples you can use in 2022.
User onboarding experiences are all the interactions a user has with your product at the beginning of their journey.
A good user onboarding experience is short and sweet, frictionless, and personalized.
The user only sees what they need to see, at the right time. Messages and experiences are perfectly geared towards their use case.
Some helpful tips include:
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure used to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm with a company.
It’s built around a single question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service?” — with 0 being not at all likely and 10 being extremely likely.
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But, instead of standalone NPS campaigns, why not integrate them into your other marketing automation flows and ask clients at key points in their journey?
For example, you can set up a trigger:
With this marketing automation example, you can minimize churn among detractors (those who respond with a 0 to 6) by triggering an email that allows them to elaborate on their discontent or turn your top promoters (7-10) into brand advocates by sending them an email to join your referral program or leave a review.
Gated content is content that you lock behind a form so that prospects need to give you something (usually their email address) before they get to see it.
Sounds like a win-win, but it has its pros and cons. We’re not big fans of gated content at Chili Piper.
As with every other type of content or marketing, a combination of strategic decisions and actions could help you get the most out of your efforts.
In reality, you’ll want to do a mix of gated and ungated content (with an emphasis on ungated).
If you want to combine the two, here are a couple of tips:
Once you understand why you want to create gated content and how it aligns with your content strategy, you have to make something worth trading an email address for.
Here are some gated content best practices I think are worth following:
I love this marketing automation example.
Let’s be honest, our lives are busy. There are no two ways about it.
Appointment reminders make it easy to remember all the important things — like scheduled doctor appointments, a visit from the cable guy, or your next call.
And no one likes to get stood up.
Reduce cancellations and no-shows by setting up automated reminder emails or text messages before your meetings and allowing customers to easily reschedule with just a few clicks.
Leverage your automation tools and platforms to do this for you on autopilot for every meeting and every attendee.
For example, one way Chili Piper helps accelerate revenue is by quickly booking meetings, and also because we end up having a lot more meetings show up and a lot more deals close.
Some of our favorite meeting reminder tips include:
Your team’s time is valuable — maximize show rates and decrease busywork by automating these routine communications so you can focus on the work only you can do.
Retargeting is a marketing tactic brands can use to show ads and messages tailored to a visitor’s behavior.
For example, if a prospect visits your site, browses around, but doesn’t convert, retargeting allows you to show them an ad directly in their Facebook feed with a friendly reminder to stay top-of-mind.
With tons of retargeting opportunities available within a host of channels — social media, mobile, email, and display, among others — it’s an awesome tactic if you:
If you want to get started with retargeting, here are a few steps to follow:
Assuming you have more than one sales rep in your company, when a lead comes in, you’re going to have to decide who gets it. This is known as lead routing — and it’s usually automated.
A lead routing process could be as simple as making an alphabetical list of all of your sales reps and assigning each new lead to whoever is next in line.
More sophisticated systems, however, depend on a variety of lead assignment rules, which are often based on territory, industry, potential deal size, or other factors.
For example, Chili Piper’s Distro helps you get sales opportunities to the right rep, every time. You’re able to create rules to ensure any lead in your CRM who meets specific criteria is automatically assigned for follow-up.
What does this mean for you?
It means no lead is lost in the system ever again. It means you can ease the strain on operations and eliminate bottlenecks.
Automated lead routing is a great way to let the software do the work for you so you can scale more efficiently.
With up to 20 customer touchpoints to optimize for your journey, automated data collection is a lifesaver.
In response, marketers are starting to invest heavily in journey mapping techniques.
One key ingredient is intent data.
Intent data provides both topical and contextual information so you can understand not only what topics your prospects are interested in, but also who that prospect is.
For example, if you’re a B2B marketing agency, you’ll likely want to understand whether visitors are business owners seeking your services, or perhaps entry-level marketers or even college students looking to learn more about the industry.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Using a combination of manual and auto-tagging, detailed UTMs allow you to track how a prospect interacts with every touchpoint in your buyer’s journey, so you can collect your own first-party data and then use it for journey mapping.
We’re not into lead scoring at Chili Piper, but if that’s your jam, you can also map those fields into your CRM for better scoring.
This has to be one of my favorite marketing automation examples, especially for B2B SaaS.
Did you know the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% while selling to a new customer is only 5-20%?
The same study also shows it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
When a customer loves your brand, it’s more likely they’ll keep coming back.
And while they may in fact love your brand, remembering to shout it from the rooftops with reviews, recommendations, and referrals can be a challenge.
Make the most out of marketing automation tools to target customers on autopilot with the right message, at the right time, to increase online and social reviews.
For example:
Retain customers and build loyalty by anticipating their needs.
Rather than casting a wide net of leads and then working to convert as many of them as possible, spend more time upfront carefully selecting specific customer profiles and businesses.
Then you can create detailed accounts of those businesses to launch hyper-targeted campaigns that oftentimes target multiple roles within that account.
A fantastic approach is to pair automation with LinkedIn advertising.
Here’s how to go about it:
The last few years have marked the rise of chatbots where they’re quickly becoming ubiquitous for B2B brands.
When used correctly, chatbots can be a massive asset to marketing automation.
In fact, research finds that the top 28% of companies use chatbots and similar forms of AI in their marketing.
One of the most practical ways to leverage the power of chatbots is to use them to answer lead questions and direct them to helpful resources on your website.
Rather than having to go through actual people, this approach allows you to give leads the information they need instantly around the clock.
Plus, chatbots are completely customizable. You can create whatever type of customer experience you’d like — all while keeping it totally automated.
If you find your team is constantly bombarded with the same questions over and over, building a chatbot is an excellent solution. And with 74% of people preferring to use chatbots to find answers to simple questions, it can have a big impact on your customer experience.
It’s no longer possible to treat B2B marketing automation as too complex to get involved in.
There are endless easy ways to implement automated funnels for organic and paid traffic, such as through NPS scores, intent data, lead capture forms, and chatbots. Brands that are slow to embrace automation will fossilize and potentially fail, but those that step up will thrive now and for the foreseeable future.
If you have more questions about how to automate your inbound conversions, talk to a rep and get a full demo of Chili Piper.
Carlos Silva is an SEO Content Manager at Chili Piper. He's passionate about the craft of writing and the power of storytelling. You might find him trail running through the mountains of Valencia, Spain, or writing in his journal at home, but you'll always find him reading something new!
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