How To Use Marketing Automation For Non-Programmers

So, last week we discussed why your startup should turn to Marketing Automation. Today we’ll show you, how you can implement automation without being a programmer or hiring one.

Here’s what you might think:

Well, Romeo, we need a programmer to do all this automation and they are never available for such things.

I am not a programmer either, so don’t worry, the tools I might mention are for non-programmers.

#1 Make Use Of The Right Tools

First things first: start using IFTTT and Zapier. I would go into detail what these are, but simply put they connect apps that you might use to build simple automation workflows. To learn more about these two tools I recommend these resources:

15 Best IFTTT Recipes for Productive Business Automation

What is Zapier? How to Automate Your Business Tasks Better

There are so many tools out there for your marketing team, all working separately. Many times this is overwhelming, so it’s great to know which ones you should be using.

#2 Start Segmenting Your Customers Base

As a startup, you should definitely have an email marketing tool so that you can collect users and keep them informed.

Now, if you want to start segmenting using simple tools like Mailchimp, you are very limited as you need to export it to Excel and start sorting data there because all your users are in a single list or multiple lists (which take a lot of time to create). This might sound simple, but with time your data can be a huge mess if you don’t start segmenting your customers right away.

Imagine that you want to segment simple things like the location of your customers. In basic email marketing tools, you will need to create separate lists, which will take up a lot of your time. With tools like SalesManago, Hubspot, Active Campaign or InfusionSoft you can start doing that automatically, by adding tags based on the customer’s country of origin.

You might say, oh this is simple. It is, and it should be.

And if you can tag a customer’s location you can do other things too. Segment based on what parts of your website they visit the most, for example.

Let’s say you’re a SaaS company, and you want to know when a lead is visiting your pricing page. You want to find out when they visit it and how they engage with your content (engagement = clicks, shares, stays more than 2 minutes on the page). If you are tracking them because they opted-in for a trial you’ll be able to add a tag like “shows interest” and also add a score to the contact. If they start looking around and read our FAQs or Terms and Conditions we can start scoring them for those actions too.

As soon as we have a score we target, we can send an automatic alert to the sales team so they reach out to the potential customer personally and close the sales. Using this approach we only reach out to the right people at the right time.

#3 Start Tracking & Collecting Data At The Beginning Of Your Startup Journey

I hear this way too many times:

I don’t gather data, or
I don’t do any marketing automation because I don’t have enough data.

You don’t have this data because you don’t track it, of course. Many people are skeptical to collect this data and automate that information. So, should you start tracking collecting data when you are still a startup?

I asked Cosmin Ochisor, who is an Investment Manager at Hub:raum, the accelerator of Deutsche Telekom, if startups should collect data at the beginning of their stage or later after they got some investment. Here is what he had to say:

“I believe that the beauty of any digital product is the fact that everything is measurable. As much as you can take decisions on the numbers, do it. I mean this is what the most successful companies in the world do; this is what they do at Google. Try to avoid things like ‘I think that if I implement this button in my app, it will be good’. This ‘I think’ should be based on numbers. This is one of the first things – most startups don’t measure data from the beginning on.

We helped a couple of our startups to do that and measure, gather the data. Just to implement an excellent analytics tool helps to measure absolutely everything.

Any user interaction is necessary. Data can give you an indication of what is working well and what has to be improved.”

Conclusion

To implement marketing automation early in your business and to eliminate admin work, start using free tools like IFTTT (free) and Zapier (paid) even if you’re not a developer. As soon as you have some data I urge you to start segmenting – you’ll get a bunch of benefits down the line as you will know what content is relevant for each audience and when you should communicate with them.

Start tracking all your user’s behavior, so you know what to improve on your website or app and segment your customers in groups for a better demographic understanding and to be able to analyze the correlation between highly engaged users, prospects, clients, and conversions.

For more, check out the guide I wrote on Marketing Automation for small businesses.

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