GSD 180: Implementing Marketing Automation Campaigns In Your Sales Funnel

We’re going to just start with the basics today. You’re welcome, just reach out if you have any questions about it. But basically, marketing automation is this idea that your customers should always be in some sort of a funnel, some sort of automation, that they’re getting emails, they’re getting SMSs, they’re getting calls, calls even. Calls are manual, but… They’re getting postcards, they’re getting letters, they’re going to blog posts.

There’s always being dripped a piece of content. So no matter where they are in the system, they’re moving through a customer acquisition process with you. And that’s the most important thing. ‘Cause at the end of the day, you want them moving towards doing business with you. That’s what automation’s all about.

There are lots of different pieces of software where you can set up marketing automation. There is Infusionsoft, which is a bear. It’s a good piece of software, but it’s kind of chaotic to set up. There’s ActiveCampaign, there’s Ontraport, there’s GoHighLevel, there’s, to some degree, MailChimp. There are just so many of them. Maropost. There are so many different marketing automation platforms, and sometimes you got to pull two or three of them together.

It just largely depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for sales workflow stuff, you’re probably not going to choose something like ActiveCampaign primarily. ActiveCampaign is a significant marketing automation software that has some workflow stuff, but it just depends on what level you want to use it. And that’s really where the article comes in. What it is and what it isn’t: marketing automation, fuels the efficiency of your marketing. And it also helps you increase sales. It’s good stuff, right? The problem is sometimes it’s a bear to set up.

So basically there are lots of different ways, but you want to start with a plan. You want to know exactly what marketing automation is doing for you and how it’s going to cut time. So when we start building a sales funnel, we’re always… Your sales funnel is one thing. Your pages are one thing. But then all of the action steps that happen, the emails that go out, text messages that go out, everything that goes out as a result of somebody going through the sales funnel and moving them, dripping them along that sales funnel, all of that stuff needs to be scripted and planned out from the start.

We know that when we set up a lead magnet, we’re going to need to have… A lead magnet in an automated webinar funnel… We write usually 15 to 22 emails depending on what we’re promoting on the backside. So that’s all pre-written. We start with a funnel. We’re like, “We need these five pages, we need these 17 emails. These 17 emails are going to go to the pages. We need this kind of collateral.” The point is, you can’t leave this stuff to chance because if you leave it the chance, you’re going to forget about it. You’re going to get busy, somebody’s going to opt-in for your report, and you’re going to have one email in there, maybe for a webinar or to promote a blog post. And then you’re going to say, “You know what? I’m too busy to do this right now. I’m just not going to. I’ll come back.” And then that never happens. And you come back two months, three months, four months, or five months later and haven’t given your prospects the experience that they need, which is four emails promoting the webinar and six emails after the webinar replay.

So that’s all stuff that we plan out from the start. And we write the copy, and we build the pages and all of that stuff. So we already start with the plan. And the plan is just something that we’ve executed hundreds of times.

Mistake number two is not having a sound inbound marketing strategy. So if your business is the type that relies on haphazard referrals or SEO traffic, or is outbound, BDRs, and people banging the phone, it’s going to be rough to get marketing automation to work because everything is so sporadic. Do you know what I mean? So if your BDR… Yeah, you might be able to enter a person in the email, or you might be able to enter a person into a marketing automation workflow, but you’re calling that person back, so it becomes pretty chaotic. Whereas in sales funnels, we are running Facebook ads, Google ads, and Instagram ads into your sales funnel, and everything is inbound. So they’re all dripping out the marketing automation as sales, as customers, as sales calls.

Another mistake: aggressively selling. You don’t need to aggressively sell. Most anything that you do is going to be a consultative sales process. Something where you’re interviewing your client and you’re arriving at the offer, which they should become a member or buy. That’s a consultative sales process. Don’t be aggressive with this. Don’t be aggressive with the inbound sign. Don’t be aggressive with marketing automation. Marketing automation is going to pick up all the pieces and pull those folks back to you. You don’t need to be aggressive on the front side.

Another mistake: not segmenting your audience. Know who your leads are, where your leads came from, what platform they came from, and what ads they came from even. We set it up with UTM variables so we can see all that stuff and run reports against it. But also, who are your buyers? What did they buy? Making sure that you take your buyers out of your prospect list. This is all one-on-one level stuff, but it’s really important from a marketing automation standpoint that you do it once. Because you do it once, and then it’s usually good forever.

And don’t forget you’re not a robot. You’re not a robot. Make sure that all of your content has a call to action. So every email needs to link somewhere, and have a button somewhere. Make sure you run your tests so you’re testing out the automation sequences and seeing how it’s all going to flow. Especially on some of the more complicated automation, it gets a little problematic because certain things have to happen for other things… Do you know what I mean? So certain rules and triggers might counteract each other. I’ve had that happen before. I’ve been outside mowing the lawn, and I’m like, “Oh, shit.” I set a trigger up two days ago that counteracted another trigger in a marketing automation platform, and then it sent out two emails rather than one. But it wasn’t until I had some processing time, to go through and think about it, that I was able to figure it out.

And that’s it. There are lots and lots and lots of things you can be wrong with marketing automation. This is going to help you avoid some of the most common mistakes. But we’re always here to help, so go to doneforyou.com/start. Go ahead and fill out the little form because I’m on my calendar, and I’m happy to help you look at the marketing automation for your sales funnels or traffic or whatever. So let me know, and I’ll jump on a call with you.