How can you optimise marketing activities to better support the business and drive new leads? For many organisations, the answer is marketing automation.

Adopting a marketing automation solution benefits the business by providing the ability to schedule marketing campaigns in advance, creating unique client groups for targeted messaging as well as consistency within email blasts or social media campaigns. These solutions can also improve reporting, which helps to further refine marketing efforts to increase effectiveness.

But before you can realise these benefits, you must first introduce an appropriate solution. So how do you get there? Here are six best practices for getting started with marketing automation:

1) ALIGN SALES PROCESSES WITH CRM

If your CRM system is not designed to support your sales process, marketing and sales will not be able to use the solution to target customers. Nor will they be able to take advantage of marketing automation to tailour the most appropriate message to the right audience. Nothing is worse than not knowing your customers and delivering the wrong message.

2) START SLOWLY

It’s important to start slow and use smaller campaigns to work out any flaws in the process before tackling much more complex drip marketing style campaigns. Keep it simple.

3) USE CONTENT TO CREATE KILLER CAMPAIGNS

Being able to deliver the right content is key. Clients want to be able to read white papers or summaries about why your products and services are great. Content is important and needs to be more than just a link to a website. Tailour blocks of creative and dynamic content in your tool to hit the mark.

4) TEST, TEST AND THEN TEST AGAIN

Ensure that the right client data is available, that the right content is being sent and which subject lines will be most effective. On non-date dependent campaigns, run A/B subject line testing to ensure that your emails are not the ones that get deleted without being opened. There are only so many chances to wow a customer in the sales process.

5) KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

Use campaigns to figure out why certain segments of populations are not apt to sign up for your services or to find out at what point in the sales cycle clients are becoming disinterested. By reviewing the outputs of campaigns, you can use this type of trending to iterate on the types of campaigns being used and continue to build out client profile information.

6) CONTINUOUSLY MONITOR AUTOMATED CAMPAIGNS

Did IT change where the contact us email is routed? Has a product been retired? It’s important to make sure that campaigns are monitored to avoid forms, email addresses or content being incorrect. Inspect what you expect.

Post originally appeared on CloudSherpas.com