Many marketers are struggling to provide the personal touch today’s buyers want. Given the challenge of scaling individualized communications across dozens, hundreds or even thousands of prospects, that’s understandable. Perhaps counterintuitively, the solution lies in automation. But simply automating processes won’t cut it – you have to use automation to understand buyer intent, engage in your prospects’ interests and allow them to self-move through their journey.

Depending on your needs, you can use automation to acquire, convert, grow, retain or reactivate. Simply find a business problem, begin collecting behaviors (Web, email, social and more), and use these to create a unique, personable communication experience across touch points. Here are 10 things you can automate to help invigorate your marketing programs and drive more revenue:

1. Data Enrichment

The database is the heart of a modern-day marketing program, so it’s necessary to regularly breathe new life into it by providing updated preference, demographic and behavioral information. Automation can help achieve this by facilitating the “getting to know you” process.

For starters, you could use a basic email campaign to encourage or incent prospects to update their records, leading them to a prepopulated Web form where they could update their information and provide additional preference and demographic details.

When you’re ready to get more sophisticated, you can use progressive forms, which enable marketers to pose new questions each time a contact visits their website or landing page, steadily gaining deeper insight into their interests while minimizing the form abandonment issues that often result from asking too many questions at one time. It’s as simple as prioritizing the list of questions you’d like to ask your contacts and indicating how many should be addressed during each exchange.

2. Nurture Programs

What’s your story? Nurture programs enable you to educate prospects who aren’t yet ready to engage a sales resource and gently guide these buyers through the purchase process by delivering relevant content such as white papers, articles, and event and Webinar invitations.

With marketing automation technology, you can set up programs that gradually help you collect data (see No. 1), build the relationship and are responsive to prospect interests and behaviors. Using a visual campaign builder, it’s easy to build nurture campaigns that route prospects down numerous different paths based on whether they opened your email, downloaded your content and/or shared it with their social networks.

As an added bonus, robust automation platforms offer integrations that enhance sales and marketing alignment. These systems give sales visibility into a lead’s behaviors (site visits, downloads, link clicks, form submissions, video plays, etc.), which salespeople can use to have more effective conversations with prospects, and enable sales to drop contacts into a nurture program.

3. Abandoned Forms, Web Visits, Media Plays

How do you handle the frustrating scenario in which a known contact clicks through to your service trial sign-up, demo video or white paper form but fails to complete the desired action? Step one is using some combination of Web analytics providers, home-grown systems and third-party tracking to create an integrated system that enables you to harness the power of Web tracking and use your marketing platform to automatically send an email based on actions your prospect took – or, in this case, didn’t take.

Depending on the scenario and the reasons for abandonment, a triggered form abandonment message may be an effective way to strengthen engagement and continue moving that prospect through the funnel. The key is to be personal, use a service tone and offer up ways that you can help. For example, if someone abandons a white paper sign-up, you might send a message offering related pieces of content or offer the content served up in different formats (e.g., a video or slideshow).

4. Welcome Programs and Activation

Sending a personalized, automated welcome email is an excellent way to quickly engage prospects by educating them about your value proposition, asking them to tell you more about themselves, and providing resources and helpful information personalized to their point of entry or interests. Depending on the business, many savvy marketers are even moving beyond welcome messages to activation or onboarding programs that guide the prospect or new customer through the process of getting the most out of your free trial or online services.

For example, let’s say you offer a free 30-day product trial. Inevitably, some prospects will sign up but then not return to log in. In this scenario, you might set up an automated email, triggered after “X” days without login, that features a serviceoriented message such as, “Hey, we noticed you haven’t done these three things yet. Here are the reasons you should try this out, here’s a Slideshare tutorial to help, and here’s a link if you want someone to call you for assistance.”

5. Product / Service Reviews and Testimonials

Asking for reviews of your products and services can provide you with valuable content you can use to nurture prospects and entice them to take the desired course of action. Where applicable, follow a purchase, download or event with an automated message asking for a review.

For best results, don’t just send a boring message requesting a review — show some personality and be helpful, including links to:

• Related thought capital
• Customer service info
• Owner’s manual, knowledge base or forums

Once you’ve built up an archive of reviews and/or testimonials, you can include these peer reviews in your content, which can be a powerful way to drive conversions.

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6. Anniversaries and Birthdays

It’s sometimes easy to forget, but business buyers are living, breathing people who like to celebrate special occasions. So, why not use anniversaries – of a customer purchase, trial download, event attendance or newsletter sign-up – to trigger messages that commemorate the occasion?

Personality and creativity goes a long way here. How about sending contacts celebrating a one-year anniversary a note compiling humorous news headlines from the last year and offering a free product, service trial or consultation? Have fun and use these extra touch points to complement your nurturing and retention efforts.

Likewise, sending a birthday email could be a savvy way to put a human face on a corporate email message and help you stand out. Your biggest challenge will likely be collecting birthdate data. Consider using a progressive form approach, a special request in welcome or nurture emails, or a survey to collect this information. If you do ask for birthdate, provide a short copy block explaining what subscribers will receive (e.g., a special eBook, actual gift, etc.) and consider making it an optional field.

7. Ordering

If you have a large product line, offer dozens of services and/or have a large sales team, moving to a more automated ordering process may be beneficial. In many cases, automation can enable you to free up valuable sales resources that can be reallocated to moving leads through the funnel.

For example, if you have a large enterprise sales team tasked with personally delivering new-product updates to business clients and collecting orders, you can use automation for seasonal product order reminders, product relaunches for items that were previously out of supply, refill orders and more.

Bottom line? Automation enables you to create an ongoing dialogue with business customers without creating additional work for sales representatives. And as an added bonus, automation makes it easy to send a thank you confirmation (see #8).

8. Transactional Emails

Does your business engage in transactions that require order status receipts, service request updates, and shipping notices or confirmations? In this instant-message age in which waiting days or hours to get a transactional confirmation is unacceptable, delivery is the single most important aspect of a transactional email. A robust marketing automation platform enables you to set up your system so the transaction triggers these emails immediately.

A well-branded transactional message sent within minutes is great, but don’t stop there. Go beyond the basic transaction or receipt information and provide additional content that provides value. This might include product usage tips, answers to frequently asked questions, delivery tracking information or links to community forums. This is also a good place to invite recipients to connect with you socially via LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

While transactional content should make up the bulk of these messages, you can also use these emails to cross-sell or upsell other products and services. Use dynamic content to populate these messages with info specifically related to the buyer’s purchase, industry or stated preferences.

9. Events

For many businesses, events are a critical part of the nurturing process. From initial invite to postevent message, automation enables you to easily respond to how prospects interact – or don’t interact – with your communications and events. For example, you might use your marketing automation platform to set up three messaging tracks for an event as follows:

• Invitation: Initial invite followed by messages depending on whether they opened but didn’t click (reminder), clicked but didn’t register (reminder with alternate resources) or actually registered for the event (move to confirmation track).
• Confirmation: Send event details and reminder preevent, then follow up afterwards based on whether they actually attended (thank you note, survey, related resources and/or invite to set up a call with a sales rep) or didn’t attend (route to “Did Not Attend” track).
• Did Not Attend: Send “sorry we missed you” message with option to view slides, download the recording or watch a video of the event, plus related resources and alternate calls to action.

10. Lifecycle Messages

The same foods you love to eat for dinner might not be so appealing first thing in the morning. Likewise, buyers crave different content at different times in the buying cycle. So, consider segmenting campaigns by stage of the relationship, specifically tuning different email messages and offers based on both explicit and implicit indicators of your customer’s readiness to purchase. For example, messaging might change throughout a customer lifecycle as follows:

• “Interested” Phase: Welcome messages, educational and best practices content, promotions for first purchase
• “Engaged” Phase: Reminders of upcoming events, targeted content based on website page visits, pricing and feature comparisons, testimonials
• “Lapsed” Phase: Surveys to gain a better understanding of the buyer’s needs, incentives to revisit website, promotions to encourage re-engagement

By “listening” to buyer cues and delivering the right content at the right time for each prospect, you’ll nurture more relevant dialogues and build stronger connections.