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"Hello Account #XYZ, thank you for clicking/calling/writing..."

Form emails and letters are a personal pet peeve for many people. The format is rote and clearly interchangeable among recipients. Even referencing a specific topic of interest would go a long way towards winning them over. But in the modern world how can a company possibly do this with so many clients and so little time? As paradoxical as it may seem, using automation to personalize services actually does make logical sense.

Online behavior is, by its very nature, a personal act. A person in search of web design services may browse a site for a while, landing on pages about design, images of your designers, previous work and client portfolios…the possibilities are endless. These destinations are telling: a marketer could infer that this person is interested in design rather than a social media campaign.

With one customer, this makes sense – but what about inferring the interests of the hundreds of leads that are potentially beating down your door? That’s where you run into trouble. Very few companies boast the time or the workforce to be able to sift through potential leads and identify the truly qualified ones, even if they land on ‘easy-to-interpret’ pages such as in the example here. Plus, even if they did, it’s doubtful that these companies could sustain such efforts, nurturing the same leads again and again until they become clients. But marketing automation can take care of that for you, tracking the movements and behaviors of practically limitless customers and then treating them in a way that you have already deemed personal to a group with their characteristics.

How does it work?

Say your sales rep collects 2 business cards at a show. When he returns to the office, he enters them both into the same form, putting in the usual identifiers as well as other unique traits such as at which show he met them, what industry they’re in, and which 2-3 services they may be interested in. He may know the latter or he may have to make an educated guess – with marketing automation, that’s okay, too.

Why? Because you can always change the information entered as you learn more about a client and a lead’s interests can help drive the process. An initial email is sent based on the entered data – “nice to meet you at Show X, here’s the information I promised on Services 1, 2, and 3.” Say the client clicks on the first two links multiple times and explores different parts of your site related to those services, but ignores the third service completely. No problem! Your next email is automatically modified to target Services 1 and 2, now disregarding the third.