5 Ideas for Better Marketing Productivity and Engagement

1. Organize what you know about your audience

A marketing customer relationship management (CRM) system connects all your contact data from different channels and touchpoints. These tools keep your contact data organized and in one centralized location which saves time over manual processes such as managing multiple spreadsheets or tools. They also make it possible to more easily spot patterns in your contact data and segment your audience accordingly. Mailchimp’s marketing CRM presents that information in an audience dashboard, so that you can see who your customers are and how they interact with your brand at a glance. That way, you can send people the marketing campaigns that are most relevant to them.

“When you have all your contact data in one place, you can begin organizing people based on their interests and previous behavior with your brand,” notes Michelle. “You’ll start to see patterns, and you’ll be able to target your customers with marketing more relevant to their needs and wants, increasing your results."

Someone who runs a pet products website can see who buys only for dogs, for instance, and then know to send them only canine-related offers. If someone exclusively purchases a specific brand of dog food, the business owner could send them discount coupons for that particular brand. Or, if they want to encourage them to broaden Spot’s culinary horizons, they might send an email offering a free sample of a new brand.

By organizing what you know about your audience using your marketing platform’s CRM, you can market better in less time.

2. Apply what you know about your audience’s behavior

Smart marketing platforms help you see how your customers interact with your brand so you can personalize how you talk to them. A smart marketing platform can take that even further with more advanced features that save you the time of mining for data insights yourself or hiring someone to help.

For example, by looking at the purchase history trends in their audience data, a boutique hair care brand could identify a segment that purchases a permanent hair color kit in the same shade every 6 weeks. These people would be a good audience for an auto-renew subscription plan. Another segment that purchased a vibrant rainbow color might be a perfect target for a discount on another bright shade.

A smart marketing platform lets you predict future purchase behavior and value by looking at past purchase history and trends. With this information, you can easily segment your campaigns, create hyper-relevant special offers, and ensure you’re spending your time where it reaps the most benefits. If someone is highly likely to purchase again, for instance, you might reward them with a VIP offer. Or, if a person is on the fence about making another purchase, you can give them an incentive to buy again.

“Knowing someone’s likelihood to purchase can help you be more direct with your marketing, and that will save time, increase your productivity and return on investment,” says Michelle.

3. Create attractive, on-brand content

A website is your brand’s home online and the hub of your marketing. When you build your website in Mailchimp, you can maintain a seamless look and feel everywhere you meet your customer, from digital ads and emails to print postcards.

Creative Assistant, Mailchimp’s new design tool, saves time and makes this process much easier. It uses AI to take your existing brand assets like logos, images, fonts, and colors, and instantly reimagines them into beautiful, branded designs. These designs can be resized in seconds to use in emails, social media, or on your landing pages.

“This is a tremendous time saver,” says Jon Holbrook, Product Marketing Manager at Mailchimp. “Creative Assistant will get to know your brand and instantly create design options for you to choose from.”

To further save time and simplify your email content creation, product recommendations use each customer's data to create personalized recommendations unique to them, based on their purchase history and purchase patterns of similar customers.

A music service, for example, could design multichannel campaigns targeting listeners who enjoy a variety of genres. Areas of the website dedicated to country, rap, punk, or jazz could be customized with images to reflect the unique audiences, and these designs can be carried through to emails, social media ads, and other marketing. And users could be emailed suggestions for new artists they might enjoy based on their listening habits.

These tools make it easier to create compelling marketing that captures the essence of your brand, and they can be used in tandem to keep your audience engaged across channels. Customers get on-brand content that is relevant to them, increasing the chance that they will engage or purchase from your brand, all while you save time.

4. Reach a bigger audience

One of the best ways to find more people interested in what you offer is to identify people similar to your current contacts. Mailchimp’s lookalike audience finder combines your audience data with the data available in its customer network to find people who are likely to interact with your brand but who haven’t yet.

For example, if a photographer knows that parents are among their most vital clients, they could use a lookalike audience finder to identify other parents in the area and send them a postcard promoting a special on holiday photos.

“Instead of ‘knocking on random doors,’ you can use a lookalike feature to save time finding people similar to your best customers and communicate with them via postcard mailings,” says Michelle.

5. Know how to improve marketing performance

Your campaigns will only get results if people engage with them and feel compelled to act. Mailchimp’s smart Marketing Platform provides intelligent suggestions that improve the make-or-break details of your marketing as you create it. The result is effective marketing, created quickly, so you can move on to the other tasks on your list.

Timing is critical in marketing—you need to reach the right person at the right time to succeed. But instead of investing your own time into testing when your contacts are most likely to open an email, send time optimization does the work for you. This impactful feature of Mailchimp’s Marketing Platform looks at the engagement data collected by the platform to show you when each of your contacts is most likely to engage with your marketing campaign, maximizing your open rates.

But it’s not just when you send, it’s what you send. Ensuring your subject lines follow best practices is also critical to making the best use of your time. That’s why Mailchimp’s subject line helper gives you feedback on what works and what doesn’t, in real time, as you’re writing. It can give you guidance on word and character count, and what types of punctuation or emojis to use.

To sustain your momentum and build on initial engagement success, Mailchimp also provides recommendations on the next best action to take. Plus, you can see how each new tool you use impacts your progress in Mailchimp’s easy-to-digest reports.

These features become even more powerful, efficient and time-saving when combined.

A software company, for example, could use Mailchimp’s smart Marketing Platform to make sure they’re doing the right thing at the right moment, ultimately saving themselves time. Perhaps they need to communicate with their users around the globe. Send time optimization not only determines what time of day is most effective, but also adjusts for time zones automatically. And with the use of subject line helper, they can feel confident about writing subject lines that their audience is more likely to click. Once they’re sending the right subject line at an ideal moment, they can use saved time to take the next best action, such as creating a welcome series to introduce new users to all the features of their software product.

Make the most of your marketing platform

Taking advantage of a marketing platform’s many time-saving features can help you quickly and efficiently create on-brand marketing content that resonates with your target audience. Doing everything yourself is not a necessary hardship of being a small business owner—if you take advantage of everything it offers, your marketing platform can become your most trusted partner.

“Between easy-to-understand reports, audience insights, and the comprehensive data-backed features, an all-in-one marketing platform is a must for growing businesses,” says Michelle. “You can discover the best actions to take, optimize your time and effort, and create the most effective campaigns possible.”