A Guide to Creating Unforgettable Customer Experiences with Automated Marketing

In last month’s article we covered seven key steps and strategies enabled by modern marketing platforms. These strategies can be used by community institutions to elevate your marketing to the same level as other industries.

• • Measurement – Use scorecards to measure both your starting point and your progress.
  • Segmentation – Use segmentation models to understand your customers and direct your automated programs.
  • Intelligent Targeting – Utilize machine learning to target the right cross-sell offers to the right customers during onboarding and nurturing.
  • Automation – Automate your customer experience programs to ensure consistency and to free up your time for strategic initiatives.
  • Personalization – Leverage your advantages as a community institution by personalizing communications.
  • Onboarding – Use each of these strategies to provide consistent experiences for new customers.
  • Nurturing – Don’t stop communicating with your customers when their onboarding journey is complete.

This month we want to show you how you can use each of these strategies in a practical way to create unforgettable experiences. As a community institution, you have the upper hand when it comes to building customer relationships. We will show you how marketing automation can take you to the next level.

Onboarding

As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a good first impression – that one chance starts with onboarding. Onboarding starts the customer’s journey with your institution. The building of trusted and long-lasting relationships begins here.

Planning

Many institutions use simple onboarding strategies (i.e., 2 days – 2 weeks – 2 months) because that is all they can do with their existing technology. Since many of the stages in these strategies are manual, execution of the onboarding strategy is difficult to achieve. Modern marketing automation allows you go beyond these simple approaches to create better experiences for your customers.

Before you start implementing onboarding strategies, build a comprehensive plan. We encourage you to think big when you plan and start small when you implement. Your plan should begin with the messages that you want to deliver, the segment of customers that you want to deliver them to and when you want them delivered.

Most onboarding strategies utilize email automation to deliver messages. You will need to consider what you want to do if the customer does not have a valid email address. This is more likely with existing customers than new customers. Modern marketing automation platforms can validate existing addresses before you begin sending emails so you can know where your gaps are.