Auditing Your Senior Living Marketing Automation Strategy
Auditing Your Senior Living Marketing Automation Strategy
How satisfied are you with the current marketing automation strategy for your senior living community? What’s your ROI?
According to Invespro, businesses that use marketing automation can see an 80% increase in lead generation and a 77% increase in conversions. If you’re not seeing any benefits from automating your marketing systems, you may want to consider an audit.
Auditing your marketing automation strategy is about more than numbers, it’s about finding all of the important touchpoints in your customer journey and using automation to your advantage in each of them.
Table of Contents:
What Are the Moments That Matter?
Before you begin your marketing automation audit it’s essential to identify important touchpoints in your customer journey. Then, pinpointing which of those moments needs to be either automated or optimized.
The ultimate goal for a senior living community is to increase occupancies. To spot the moments that matter, reverse engineer that goal to see where and how prospective residents interact with your community before coming to that decision.
Pre-brand awareness those moments may look like:
- Finding your community website after an internet search
- Coming across your posts on social media
- Interacting with your paid ads and opting in on your landing page
After opting in, potential touchpoints could be:
- Being added to an email nurturing campaign
- Learning more about your community through company blogs
- Targeted remarketing ads for re-engagement
Finally, after receiving an inquiry, important moments can be
- Signing them up for an onboarding email campaign
- Being proactive with customer service
- Asking for reviews, testimonials, and feedback
Each of the examples above is a vital part of the customer experience. And marketing automation can be used in each and every one of them.
Audit Your Marketing Automation Strategy
Once you identify the moments that matter in your customer journey, the next step is to begin auditing your current campaigns. This includes understanding which metrics to track so you can measure how and where your marketing automation is helping move prospects to becoming a buyer.
What automation metrics should you track?
Before you define new goals for your automation strategy, you have to track your existing ones. When it comes to marketing automation metrics there are three areas to be aware of, email metrics, website metrics, and efficiency metrics.
Email Metrics
- Open Rate: The percentage of subscribers who open a specific email
- CTR: Click-through rate, the number of times a subscriber clicks on a link in your email.
- Goal Conversions: The rate at which subscribers who opened your email take a specific action (i.e. download or landing page visit).
- Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of subscribers who choose to opt-out after receiving an email message from your community.
Website Metrics
- Site Traffic: The amount of traffic you receive to your website in a given time period.
- Traffic Sources: Where website traffic comes from (i.e. email, social media, paid ads, etc.)
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who take a specific action on your website.
- Lead Interactions: The number of times visitors interact with your lead (i.e. ebook downloads, webinar listens, etc.).
Efficiency Metrics
- MQLs & SQLs: Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads. Prospects who pass certain criteria for both marketing and sales respectively.
- Close Rate: The percentage of leads that convert and become customers.
- Cost Per Customer: The cost to acquire a new customer (or fill an occupancy).
- ROI vs Revenue Generated: The return on your investment vs how much you’ve made in revenue
Understanding and analyzing these metrics can help you assess your marketing goals and manage expectations for the results of your automation efforts.
Define Your Automation Goals
After outlining your automation metrics, the next step is to define your goals. Take a good, hard look at your data and ask yourself the following questions:
- What automation tactics are working RIGHT NOW?
(HINT: Are your onboarding email campaigns helping to increase your inquiry-to-tour ratio?) - What areas can you improve?
(HINT: What emails are having a low open rate? Can you test new subject lines?) - Where do you see new opportunities for automation?
(HINT: Where in the customer’s journey can you automate communications that will help the sales team?)
The answer to those questions, along with the data you’ve collected, can help you create a strategy that plays to the strengths of your current strategy while adding in new tactics for optimization.
Ideas to Uplevel Your Automation
There are several automation tools and tactics you can use to uplevel your strategy. Of course, these will vary from community to community but here are a few ideas to help inspire you.
Switch your Systems
Depending on what your goals are, investing in a new automation system can help supercharge your strategy. Your MarTech stack should reflect where you want to be, regardless of where you are. Consider the following when assessing your systems:
- List Size: Most email marketing platforms charge by the number of subscribers. If you have a large database, it may be worth it to find a solution that can accommodate it.
- Integrations: Assuming your strategy extends beyond email, your system still needs to integrate with what you already have — website, social platforms, and your CRM, they all need to blend seamlessly with your automation system.
- Needed Extras: If you’re interested in blending your online and offline marketing efforts, it’s important to invest in a system that can help. Whether it’s call tracking or appointment scheduling, explore systems that have features that work both ways.
Optimize Business Automation
Automation isn’t just about marketing. By automating other parts of your business you can save even more time and money with relevant business automation workflows. A few items you can optimize if you haven’t already are:
- Customer Onboarding
- Employee Onboarding
- Accounting
- Chatbots
- Social Media Management
- Sales Funnel Automation
- and more!
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to automation. When it comes to your senior living community, ultimately, this audit can help you determine what can be done to help you further utilize automation in your business.
Advance Your Automation With Smart Girl Digital
Marketing automation for your senior living community doesn’t have to be a struggle. If you’re not seeing results or returns on your current investment, give us a call.
At Smart Girl Digital, we can review your existing marketing automation strategy and craft a smart solution to advance your marketing automation tactics. Click below to book a FREE Digital Discovery Call today!
