Good stories have the potential to create a great context for relationships. Hence, storytelling can do a lot for your company’s brand. It gives you the opportunity to connect with your prospective customers and keep existing customers in the loop. This makes your marketing more humane, it makes your company more human. Everybody is creating content that already exists, so how can you stand out?
You have to think differently, you have to humanize marketing automation so that your customers can relate to what you are trying to do.
Here’s how you can humanize your marketing automation stack:
Be a Farmer Sometimes, Not Always a Hunter
A hunter hunts food by stalking and killing his prey for daily survival. They have to go out and discover new areas to hunt to survive.
On the other hand a farmer has a fixed plot of land, and he can grow his own food there, year after year and survive on that. The farmer nurtures while the hunter does not.
As a marketing automation user you need to nurture your leads, to build better customer relationships. Lead nurturing primarily involves listening to what your customers have to say and what they need.
Hunting for prospects will only gain you customers for the time being. Nurturing them will help you gain customers for life.
Empathize
To connect with a customer, you should first think like the customer. You have to be in their shoes in order to understand what the customer requires. When you do that, you will be able to connect with them on a much deeper level.
It does not matter what industry you are in or who your customers are, a good customer experience is extremely essential.
You have to deliver an empathetic service in order to gain brownie points. If you have to `deliver a good customer experience, you have to know why they want to use your product, what bottlenecks might arise while using it, how to solve these problems, etc.
Getting Personal
A good customer experience requires you to go beyond and reach out at a personal level. Creating a meaningful experience for the customer will not be possible if you just keep mining data. This is because data gives you an impersonal, limited view of your customer. It shows you what the customer did, but it does not reveal to you why he did it.
You have to gather insights about your customer by asking questions and listening to what they have to say.
Be Relational
You have to create a customer experience where the customer considers you as a real person and not as an automated system. You should use first names to relate more to your audience.
You have to establish a authentic tone that will be personal, because business-speak will not get you far.
Segmentation
If you truly want to humanize your marketing automation, you should use the most powerful tool that it offers you, segmentation. It is necessary that you segment your customers into specific small groups instead of having bigger groups because smaller groups have greater relevance. You can offer them extremely personal messages that will be relevant for them, and them only.
Engage Customers
Logically it is tempting to leave everything to marketing automation, but that does not bode very well with the customer experience process. While marketing automation does let you automate the mundane tasks, it is essential that you step inside the customers’ shoes in order to think like them.
If they do not respond to mails, you should step back and consider the buy cycle. You should figure out the points where you can ask relevant questions.
If the need arises, then question your customers regarding their journey in the buy cycle. That would answer a lot of doubts that might arise.You have to cater to your customer after the sale has been made, otherwise there is no point in humanizing your marketing automation.
Your customer’s actual experience begins after the purchase has been made, because this is the point where this customer officially becomes part of your organization.
Customer satisfaction is not an easy process and humanizing your marketing automation is just a way to go about it.
Marketing automation might automate certain marketing tasks, but do not let the humanness of your organization get lost amidst the mechanical humdrum of automation.
How do you plan to humanize marketing automation stack? Share your valuable experience with us.
Also read: Here's How the World's Best Startups are Scaling Fast with Marketing Automation