What is Business Process Automation (BPA)?

Your business probably contains dozens or even hundreds of individual procedures that you and your team members execute every day. BPA is the result of taking those regular internal business routines, fine-tuning them, then mechanizing them so they run on their own without intervention from you or your team.

BPA drives efficiency and enables teams to focus on moving the business forward, instead of simply managing it. It’s the foundation of creating a sustainable, scalable, sellable business.

Why is BPA Important?

Whether you run a large company or a one-person operation, BPA allows you to do more with the resources you have. Manual tasks and procedures can be time-consuming and cumbersome, leaving you with more busy work and less time to focus on growing the business. With business process automation, you can offload your repetitive, mundane tasks and count on technology to handle it efficiently and effectively every time, all while opening up time in your schedule to apply your intellect and passion where it matters to grow your business.

Benefits of BPA

Adding BPA to your company comes with several benefits, including:

Saving Time

Instead of having your team (or yourself) spend hours on repetitive administrative tasks, they can focus on more challenging problems. As a result, you’ll accomplish more without adding hours to the workday or employees to the team.

Bringing Your Mission to Life

With more open time in the day, you’ll be able to focus on your company’s mission, and begin to experience business ownership the way you likely envisioned it in the first place.

Minimizing Manual Errors

People aren’t perfect — we sometimes forget, are late or make mistakes — and automation is a way to guarantee that certain tasks will go according to plan every time.

Improving Efficiency

Automation is able to handle a high volume of tasks that you previously had to rely on employees to do. According to HRinAsia, “Cost savings of approximately 90% can be achieved when a business process performed by a full-time equivalent human is replaced by a software.” This is because automation works around the clock, can handle multiple tasks at a time, and makes fewer mistakes than people do.

The potential savings can span across more tasks than you might think. According to a McKinsey study, “About half of all the activities people are paid to do in the world’s workforce could potentially be automated.” With that 50 percent automated, your team would be able to take on double the workload, without the added cost of more employees.

Giving Customers Consistent Positive Experiences

Although business process automation handles the internal tasks that are necessary for your company to run, many of those operations still contribute to your customers’ experiences. Whether it’s an automatic reminder to a team member to pay commissions to referrers, or automation that handles customers’ requests to change their stored credit card information, business process automation ensures that your customers are getting the most consistent positive experiences possible.

Predicting, Measuring and Improving

Because automation completes your business processes exactly the way you tell it to, it creates a level of consistency that allows you to begin spotting trends and learn precisely how long things take. You can then use that information to effectively plan ahead in your business. Similarly, it allows you to identify and fix gaps in your processes that you might not have otherwise noticed.

Enforcing Accountability and Compliance

Every process your automation platform completes is tracked in a log. By design, this makes BPA a great tool for managers to have oversight on the total tasks completed, the amount of time spent on a project, or any other metric they would look at for reviews, planning vacation time or setting goals. Documented and automated processes also allow managers to keep track of which employees are top-performers, and which ones need coaching.

Is BPA Right for You?

Every business — large or small — can benefit from automating its most repetitive tasks, but if you’re on the fence, here are some of the telltale signs it’s time to take the leap:

• You find yourself doing the same things over and over, such as emailing customers similar information about their billing, sending the same internal employee messages about benefits, etc.
• As your business grows, the demand for the tasks mentioned above outgrows the capability of one person.
• Your team’s manual processes are managed using a bunch of to-do lists, spreadsheets, handwritten notes and Post-it reminders that are difficult to keep track of.
• As a result of these hard-to-manage processes, you’re noticing a lot of dropped balls and mistakes in your team’s work.
• The stress of trying to keep track of so many moving pieces is affecting your employee churn and overall morale.
• You want to run a referral program to grow your customer base, but manually reaching out to and keeping track of potential referrers one-by-one is too time consuming.
• You need more insights into your business so that you can make decisions to manage your resources and budgets.

The Goal of This Blueprint

This blueprint will walk you through the basics of what business process automation is and how it works, best practices for getting started, and more.

By the time you’ve finished reading each of the chapters, you will know how to turn all your company’s tasks into repeatable processes, how to differentiate between procedures that should be automated and those that should not, how to automate key areas of your business, and how to use automation to your advantage once it’s in place

What’s Inside This Blueprint?

Turn every task in your business into repeatable systems that can eventually be delegated — either to another employee, or to automation software.

Determine What to Automate

Before you automate a process, here are the factors you’ll want to consider.

Automating Your Internal Business Processes

Here’s how to automate key areas of each department so that you can focus on your company’s mission and moving the business forward.

After Automation

Learn how being proactive and carrying out deep-dives can prevent process breakdown and unnecessary automation from occurring in your business.

CHAPTER 1

Before you can begin automating areas of your business, it’s important to first examine all your internal tasks, then test them manually, refine them, and document each one. Sometimes when you transfer a written process into automation, things get lost in translation or you have to figure out the right settings to make it function the way you intend. In the case that something in your automation doesn’t function as planned, these written processes will act as an instruction manual and give you a reference point for checking your work.

What Is the Value of Systems?

Well-documented and established systems and processes are the core of your business — the tangible intellectual property that makes it high-functioning, scalable and ultimately sellable.

Without systems, many business owners experience a gap between how they expected it would be to run a business and the reality of it. To bridge that gap, it’s important to become skilled at creating repeatable systems that you can use to automate and streamline your entire business. This will allow you to work harder on your business — that is, focus less on doing the work and more on moving your business forward.

Why Systems?

1. Systems Are Predictable

Imagine running a bakery without a system for baking cakes. Each day, the cakes would come out a little different — sometimes good and sometimes not so much. Depending on the day a customer comes in, they may love or hate your cake. Without a system in place, you have no control over this.

The same is true in every area of your business. If you handle customer billing differently every time, then the experience you’re delivering is going to be hit-and-miss. Some clients may find you prompt and professional, while others may feel you’re dropping the ball and can’t be trusted.

To have consistency in the products or services you deliver, there must be “a way” you do it every single time — an operating system for your business. For many small businesses, this happens naturally out of habit, and “the system” is never clarified or written down — but it should be.

2. Systems Are Delegatable

Until you’ve got clear systems in place, you are doomed to one of three possibilities:

1. Doing it yourself.
2. Being frustrated that your employees don’t do it right.
3. Being hostage to an employee who does it right.

In the earliest stages of running a business, you do everything yourself — answering the phones, setting appointments, performing the services and selling the goods — but eventually you run out of time to do it all, and you decide it’s time to bring on someone else to help out.

Without documented procedures in place, onboarding new employees is unnecessarily hard. Often, learning new tasks will involve trial and error until the new employee finds a method of completing the task that works for him or her. Then, if your employee decides to leave, you’re in the same boat all over again — ready to begin an entirely new process of trial and error.

With clear systems, you go from abdicating tasks to delegating them. Training someone who has the skills required for the job becomes a simple matter of orientation because you’ve set clear expectations.

3. Systems Are Measurable

When things are done the same way each time, they become measurable in a new way. For example, if you do your employee training differently for the same role every time, then you can’t possibly know what’s working and what isn’t. Sometimes you’ll end up with brand new team members who are productive within days of starting, and sometimes you might have team members who lag or end up not working out. Some employees with similar experience levels in the same role will perform better than others, and you’ll have no idea how or why.

On the other hand, when you write down and train employees on how they’re expected to do their job, you can reasonably expect them to efficiently and effectively start working for you. Your entire business can become measurable and, by looking at those numbers, you can quickly see when everything and everyone is operating normally, when something is wrong, and when it’s time to step in and make some changes.

4. Systems Are Improvable

When you’re able to measure the details of your business, you suddenly have a whole new ability to improve things. For example, when hiring new employees, you might know that your current method retains 90% of employees for three months. Armed with this knowledge, you could try a new style of onboarding ‒ introduce them to working for your company in a new way, shorten it, or make it longer. Pretty soon, you’d be able to measure your new results and determine whether the changes you made are an improvement.

From there, you could try again and, step-by-step, experiment your way to a much more effective presentation. Or a better cake. Or better packaging or customer service or advertising. Without systems, you’re guessing at what works and what doesn’t, who’s good at their job and who’s not, and what your clients like or don’t. With systems, you have the ability to create a measurably better business over time by using the one strategy that is time-tested and proven to work in all businesses: trial and error.

5. Systems Are Scalable

When you don’t have clear systems in your business, growth can be challenging. You’ll find yourself overwhelmed trying to deal with the hit-or-miss results of delegation without a plan, or trying to keep up with everything manually but ultimately running out of time and dropping balls. Quality will suffer, and customers will notice.

Once you have systems that are predictable, measurably working, and clear enough that you can delegate them successfully, doing more becomes a simple matter of throwing more resources at it. If you want to bake more cakes, hire more bakers. If you want to manage more leads, hire another salesperson. Growth becomes a choice.

6. Systems Are Automatable

In every industry, companies are replacing high-cost systems managed by people with low-cost, high-volume systems managed by software. Salons and yoga studios are booking appointments and selling passes online. Restaurants are taking reservations online. Coffee shops are taking orders and payments online. Once tasks are organized into repeatable systems, streamlining them with automation becomes an option.

Of course, not every system is automatable, but for those that are, employing software to reliably, instantly and inexpensively run things is changing the game.

7. Systems Are Sellable

Systems create value in your business. Any prospective buyer or investor needs to know that if or when you, the owner, go away, there’s a viable business left behind. Having a couple of well-trained employees is cold comfort to a new owner who knows that any employee can leave at the drop of a hat.

To a prospective buyer, systems that are documented in enough detail that they’re easy to follow are, as much as the customer list or anything else, what matter. Systems ARE the business. So, in the truest sense, the building of systems is the actual stuff of business building.

Where to Begin Systemizing

Developing systems means documenting the exact steps involved in correctly executing a project or task. The first and most important step in developing any process is to explain the “why” behind it. What is the point of this task; why is it important, and what is it trying to solve? By explicitly stating the purpose of the procedure, any employee who takes on the project in the future will know the value of what they are doing. Follow these steps to get started with systemizing your business:

Step 1: Identify the Individual Processes That Occur in Your Business

Now that the value of systems is clear, how and where do you start systemizing your entire business? If you are like many entrepreneurs, you agree with the idea of systemization and automation but feel overwhelmed at the prospect of actually making it happen.

Systemizing your business will take a while to complete, but the first step is to list all the responsibilities of each position in your company, and then eventually have that employee write down the detailed steps involved with each of those responsibilities. For example, your accountant may be responsible for keeping track of payments, depositing checks and paying the bills; have him or her write every step he or she takes to complete each of those tasks.

Sometimes, it’s difficult for employees to put their finger on exactly what they do all day, much less break it down into process-sized chunks. In that case, here’s an effective trick: Have them grab a notepad, or use a time-tracking tool such as Toggl or WiseTime, and write down every single thing they do all day, every day, for a week or two.

Pretty soon, they’ll have a complete list of their responsibilities which can then be thoroughly documented in an operations guide.

Step 2: Document Processes With Urgent Delegation or Improvement Needs First

With so many systems in your business, where should you begin? If you’re looking to promote an employee to a new role, or an employee announces he or she is leaving the company, be sure to have them document each responsibility within their role so their replacement can quickly pick up where they left off. Similarly, before an employee delegates any task, make sure the task is well-documented.

Other important tasks to focus on are those that need improvements, especially if they impact your company’s ability to reach its major goals. For example if you’ve noticed a dip in one of your KPIs — such as fewer sales, lower customer or employee satisfaction, higher churn — you can dig in and figure out where the problem is as you document the process. Often, just the act of writing down the steps of a task can help you or your employees identify where the inefficiencies are and correct them.

Step 3: Test Your Written Processes Manually

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is jumping in and automating a brand new process without first trying it manually. Why is this important? Working through a procedure sans automation forces you to understand what it is and how it works.

Along with understanding your process, comes the ability to tweak it and cut off any extra, unnecessary steps and fill in any missing steps. If your system is flawed, you’ll most easily spot it when you’re doing it by hand, and you’ll be able to stop and fix it. With automation, it is specifically built to complete your actions exactly how it’s told, whether the process is correct or not. You want to get it right before you automate it.

Performing processes manually first also shows you how long a process originally took to complete so that you will later be able to determine the ROI of automating it.

Step 4: Store Your Processes in a Place Where Others Can Access Them

Once your procedures are written out and tested, it’s important to make sure your employees know exactly where and how to access them. This can come in handy in a variety of situations, including when an employee gets hired, promoted, or is covering for a coworker who is temporarily out of office.

Many companies put their processes in an internal wiki or knowledge base, create a Google Drive or Dropbox account, or use more complex tools such as Confluence that can link to project management software.

Step 5: Map Out Your Written Processes

Before automating written processes, many people find it helpful to visually map out each step. Creating visual representations — especially of longer, more complicated processes — can help you avoid potential challenges you’ll come across in building your automation. For example, a written process for recruiting new employees might list the different emails the recruiters would send at each stage of the hiring process, but until you actually map it out, it’s difficult to picture how each piece fits into the puzzle.

Some automation platforms, such as ONTRAPORT and Infusionsoft, have visual campaign builders that allow you to create your map and your automation at the same time. But if your platform doesn’t have this capability, you can easily create visual process maps using tools like LucidChart or Sketch.

DETERMINE WHAT TO AUTOMATE

Once you’ve identified, documented and mapped your most valuable internal business operations, you have the basic framework needed to begin automating — but that doesn’t mean you should automate every single process you have. Here are some ways to decipher whether a task is best left to employees or if you’d benefit from automating it.

Identify Potential “Automation-Friendly” Processes

Once your team has worked through the processes themselves and made any necessary adjustments, you can begin to identify some of your most automation-friendly tasks — that is, the tasks that you perform repeatedly, that are the same every time you do them, and don’t require critical thinking to complete. It is important to remember that even if they’re considered automation-friendly, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should end up automating them. They are automation-friendly if they are:

Repetitive

If this operation is completed routinely, it may be a good candidate for automation — especially if it’s done the exact same way every single time, without variation. Examples include accounting and invoicing, payroll (particularly for salaried employees), technology backup, and self-serve employee tasks such as requesting time off and managing their 401k accounts.

Delegatable

Tasks that can be done by anyone and don’t require your special skills or knowledge are good potential candidates automation. As long as you can map out a process, it should be teachable or automatable — or a little of both.

Tedious

These tasks may be straightforward, but you dread doing them everyday. They don’t require much brain effort, just a lot of your time.

Long

Tasks that, although important and somewhat complex, take up a considerable amount of time and don’t require you to do the initial research. You can easily step in when the task is nearly complete and give approval, oversight and/or direction on next steps.

Time-Sensitive

Time-sensitive tasks, or at least parts of them, should be automated when possible, ensuring you get everything done on time to keep your business running smoothly.

Not All Systems Should Be Automated

Just because you’ve deemed a task automation-friendly, doesn’t mean it should be done. According to Search CIO, automating for the sake of automating is a recipe for failure. It’s important to carefully consider which actions are best left to people, which are okay to delegate to automation, and which should be a hybrid.

With the right combination of automated and non-automated tasks, you’ll find that you and your team will be able to focus on the most important aspects of your business, without sacrificing quality. Here are some ways to spot the difference between the automation “shoulds” and “should-nots”:

Your team should handle the process if it requires:

Brain Power and Creativity

Automation can have a negative effect on quality when the tasks in question involve creativity, research or human sensibilities. These types of tasks are best done by people and can do more harm than good when automated.

A Unique Skill Set and Expertise

When a task involves using skills and knowledge that require specific training and education to complete, it’s probably not a good candidate for automation. Instead of leaving tasks like professional writing or graphic designing to automation, you should use automation tools to simply streamline the assigning and reviewing of these tasks, and use templates when appropriate.

Sensitive Information

Tasks that involve handling sensitive information, such as credit cards or social security numbers, can be both positively and negatively affected by automation. Because automation runs without questioning the process, it’s always best to keep a human eye on processes involving sensitive information. In these cases, instead of taking over 100% of a task, automation can simply assist or remind your employees of their manual tasks.

Tough Decisions

Any tasks that require high-level decision-making abilities — especially those that aren’t based on repetitive criteria — should not be automated. For example tasks typically handled by managers or executives regarding the hiring and firing of employees are handled that way for a reason: They require critical thinking and the ability to make the right call on tough decisions. Similarly, decisions regarding budgeting and employee resource planning ideally involve a team member at some stage.

In-Person Interactions

This one is a bit obvious, but it’s important when reviewing your processes prior to automation that you’re aware of which aspects of the process require in-person conversations or simply require human emotional or relational intelligence.

Combining Automation and Manual Tasks

Many processes have components that are better done by hand but still have steps that can be automated to improve efficiency. In these cases, you don’t have to pick one or the other — you can marry the two with automated tasks and notifications that seamlessly remind your team to complete their portion of the process. Let’s use customer refunds as an example. When someone returns your product or cancels your service, it would be a mistake to automatically refund everyone who requests it without an employee checking over the details by hand.

As your business grows larger, it would cost employees far too much time to manually dig through request emails and calls, gather information from spreadsheets about why this person is requesting a refund, individually reply to every request in a timely manner, and make the necessary updates in the payment system. This is where combining automation and manual tasks comes into play. You can automate the parts where the customer requests the refund and shares information about why they want it, then send an automated task to your finance department to manually check out the case. This gives you the best of both worlds, as it saves your employees time while maintaining quality.

Either Way, Have a Backup Plan

Whether automated or not, there should always be a backup plan for each of your internal business processes. If you keep your documentation up-to-date, and keep your employees trained on how to find and execute processes, your business will continue to function if automation breaks or is disrupted.

AUTOMATING YOUR INTERNAL BUSINESS PROCESSES

Once you understand which business operations are best to automate, you’re almost ready to begin building them into your automation software. But before you get started, it’s important to have a basic understanding of what BPA is as a whole.

How BPA Works

Business process automation is essentially the engine that powers all the internal tasks that keep your company running. Whether set in motion by specified actions or a date-based trigger, you can set up an automatic and related reaction to take place to maintain quality in your processes, at scale.

At its core, BPA is a sophisticated form of if/then logic. When you create an automated internal process, you control what you want to happen based on all the possible scenarios, and the automation platform takes it from there. This allows you to create dynamic, unique paths that deliver the right results and remind team members to take the right actions at the right times.

Implementing BPA in Your Business

BPA is designed to streamline your entire business. Over the years entrepreneurs have come up with creative ways to simplify internal processes for virtually every department. Here is some automation inspiration for each key area of your business:

New Employee Recruiting

A recruiter’s job is to seek out right-match prospective employees, and get them in the door for interviews and eventually a job offer. Recruiters are often great with people and have a strong intuitive ability to identify prospects’ strengths in order to match them with a role that suits them — and that’s where their talents are best put to use. When recruiters are spending all their time sending repetitive follow-up emails and manually categorizing prospects based on their application information, they have less time to focus on their job match-making skills.

Here are just a few processes recruiters can streamline with automation:

• Intake, storage and organization of job applications, resumes and notes
• Email follow-up to decline applications or begin the interview process
• Scheduling and coordinating interviews
• Providing prospective employees with pre-interview information such as location and parking
• Sending job offers and tracking contract signature statuses

Automation Usecases for Recruiting

The first 40 percent of the recruiting process can be automated without losing quality. The automation starts when the prospective employee fills out an application form on the careers page. That form automatically sends information to your CRM and categorizes that prospect based on his or her job interest.

Upon submitting the form, you can arrange for prospects to automatically receive an email letting them know their application was received and is in review. Next, you might automatically send them a test that serves two purposes: Based on how quickly it’s completed, it helps to sort out active vs. passive interest, and their score gives the recruiter information on which to base next steps.

Once the applicant submits his or her test, the recruiter will receive an automated task to review it — this is the first step that requires any human interaction. The recruiter then fills out an internal form with notes about the test, application and resume. From there, the recruiter will handle the process of scheduling interviews, and ultimately hiring the best candidates.

Human Resources

After the prospective employee signs his or her contract — where your recruiters’ responsibilities end — your human resources (HR) employees’ responsibilities begin. Your HR team is in charge of caring for your active employees’ well-being from their first day on the job through the end of their employment.

When your HR team is busy manually adding chatted and emailed time off requests to the calendar and emailing every new hire repetitive onboarding information, they don’t have time to do the root of their job: ensuring each and every employee has what he or she needs.

Here are a few internal processes HR professionals can streamline with automation:

• Time off requests
• Expense reports
• Payroll
• Benefits information and enrollment
• Employee annual reviews
• Employee surveys
• Policy and handbook agreements

Automation Usecases for HR

Once new employees sign their employment contract, the automated HR onboarding emails begin. Everything from what to expect on the first day, to what to wear, to where to park their car will go out in automated emails to ease new employees’ minds before day one.

Once employees begin work, they will receive a series of other helpful emails, each containing important must-know information about working for your company. You can set up onboarding emails to periodically send to employees for their first 90 days, containing information about their benefits, reviews, and more.

You can also send automated emails to employees past their 90 days in the form of a newsletter. This newsletter could contain important details about upcoming events, new or changed rules or procedures, and other important information.

In addition to automated emails, HR can also set up automation around managing employees’ needs by giving each one access to a personal employee portal. In this portal, they may be able to complete self, peer and manager reviews, request time off, look at the employee calendar, manage their benefits and more. Making each of these tasks self-serve will free up your HR team’s time so that they can focus on improving company benefits, caring for their community and more.

Management

Whether you’re the only manager at your company or have a whole team of managers, automating menial managerial tasks is critical. Because it’s important for managers to spend their time on higher level skills, the less time they spend on administrative work, the better.

Here are a few internal processes managers can streamline with automation:

• Task review and oversight
• Reporting and metrics
• Managing communications, time and money with freelancers and contractors

Automation Usecases for Management

Many of management’s automated processes work in conjunction with HR automation — so if you already have a self-serve employee portal where people can request time off and leave reviews, you’re already halfway there.

An additional automation you can set up is a weekly round of reviews for each employee to check in with his or her manager. Along with this comes a weekly email reminder to the employee before the review is due and an email to the manager to review it once it’s submitted.

Finance

Your finance team is responsible for making sure money is properly flowing in and out of your business, so if they’re spending all their time manually emailing every client whose credit card declined or is about to expire, they’ll only be able to handle so much.

Here are a few internal processes your finance team can streamline with automation:

• Invoicing
• Billing
• Product returns and refunds
• Employee reimbursements
• Credit card recharges in case of failed payments
• Payroll

Automation Usecases for Finance

Similar to many other departments, much of the finance team’s internal process automation relies on internal forms built into your automation software that contain form fields. For example, when an employee wants to be reimbursed for a business expense, instead of sending one-off emails or trying to get verbal approval, he or she can just fill out an internal form that explains the expense, lists details of the purchase and allows them to attach a photo of the receipt. This information is then stored in your CRM and you can set up a trigger to automatically email the person on your team who is responsible for approving and completing reimbursements.

Marketing and PR

Your marketing and public relations (PR) teams are the creatives of the company. The more time they spend individually writing notes in calendar invites about partners and influencers, and manually keeping track of those relationships, the less time they’ll have to focus on creating valuable content and experiences for your brand.

Automation Usecases for Marketing and PR

You might be interested in building relationships with reporters and media outlets so that you can build up excitement about your latest product launch, event or sale on a public platform. Internal forms for building media connections might contain fields for your team to write notes about relationship progress with these reporters, record press mentions, and add new leads that may be worth exploring.

Service-based companies, such as software companies, restaurants and spas depend on reviews and would likely benefit from strengthening relationships with review sites. These internal forms’ fields might focus more on where and when a review has been posted, if any information is outdated or incorrect, and whether you’ve reached out to the media to provide software feature update information.

Many of the other practices involved in your team’s marketing are more client-facing and would be considered marketing automation. While business process automation focuses on eliminating manual administrative tasks, marketing automation focuses on automating the delivery of customer and lead experiences.

AFTER AUTOMATION

There’s more you can do after you’ve automated your business processes. Here are just a few of the ways you can improve your business post-automation:

Improving Employee Training

One of the first things you’ll notice post-automation is that training new employees is easier than ever. When your procedure documentation is kept up-to-date and automated, new employees will quickly be able to get acquainted with how your business runs and what is expected of them.

Fixing and Optimizing Processes

Because your automated system gives you oversight into all of your automated systems, you and your employees will easily be able to spot and make adjustments along the way when something breaks, changes or is learned.

For example, if you notice that your stats are declining, you can dig into your automation logs to find the root cause. It could be that a task is not firing, a wrong form is being sent out, or employees are not completing their tasks or forms. Whatever the problem may be, you’ll be able to identify it and fix it immediately.

Managing Your Team

With business process automation, management becomes less about the act of actually pulling stats on how your team is performing and more about how to support your team towards improvements.

Scaling Your Business

When systems are automated, time and resources are no longer part of the equation and you gain the ability to scale. For example, if you have automation in place for credit card recharges when customers’ cards decline, instead of having to individually reach out to every single customer (there’s obviously a cap on the number of customers you can do this with, because you only have so much time), you now have the ability to contact an unlimited number of customers without taking any time at all.

Boosting Employee Morale

As you automate more tasks, your employees will have more time to focus on their areas of expertise. As a result, you’ll have happier employees who are likely to stick around longer and perform better.

Delivering Higher Quality Experiences

When team members are responsible for an unmanageable number of repetitive manual tasks, quality goes out the door and quantity becomes the top priority. Out of necessity, corners get cut and some balls inevitably get dropped. With automation in the picture, you can begin to introduce more detail to your processes. For example where a recruiter may have only had time to respond manually to the candidates who were a strong fit for the job, automation also allows them to reach out to those who were not selected.

Lowering Your Operational Costs

Most employees have time-consuming tasks that are best handled with automation software. Instead of paying them to do those tasks manually, having automation take over those parts of their jobs allows you to replace those mindless hours of work with meaningful tasks that are more valuable to your business. It can also potentially help you to cut the cost of contracted workers such as freelancers and agencies who might pick up some of your company’s delegatable tasks.

Process Maintenance Best Practices

Keeping your automated operations in top shape doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are four simple ways to spot a process that needs attention:

1. If It Isn’t Producing the Results You Intended

There will be times where even a task that you documented in detail won’t produce the results you wanted when automated. This action worked when done manually but, for some reason, in your automation system it’s not doing what you hoped. Whether the breakdown spawns from employees not following their portion of the process or the automation being set up wrong, it’s all fixable.

When someone isn’t following your documented procedures, you can fix the problem with training that clarifies your expectations. If your process was followed and it still didn’t go as planned, it may be time to look at how to improve things so the error can be avoided in the future. This could mean going into your automation software and adjusting a trigger or adding new elements to your internal forms.

2. If There Has Been a Significant Change in the Business

When big changes happen in your business, it’s beneficial to be proactive and rework procedures before a breakdown occurs. For example, if you launch a brand new product type, payment option, or marketing campaign, or you experience significant business growth, lots of internal process changes will be needed in order to adapt and scale properly.

You’ll need to make sure people are communicating, not doing double work, and handling the flow as efficiently as possible. Other changes that may trigger a process review might be new laws or industry rules, the adoption of new technology in the business, or the decision to do some work remotely instead of in a single space.

3. If You Find a Better Way of Doing It

The more experience you and your team gain, the more likely you are to find new and better ways of doing your existing routines. Whether these new ideas come from business conferences, a new article, observing how other businesses are doing things, or even a tip from a peer or a sharp employee, these new ideas are worth testing out in your business. It’s important to note that sometimes these ideas don’t go as planned, so there will be some trial and error.

You might try a new way of advertising, a different approach to sales presentations, or a twist on your product. Some things will work better than before, and some won’t. When they do, that’s the time to update your system documentation to reflect what the organization has learned.

4. If You Spot Overdone Processes During a Deep Dive

Periodically, you and your team should set aside time to do a deep dive. This is where you look at each of your documented and automated processes on a big-picture level to ensure they all make sense. Sometimes, there can be too much of a good thing, and unnecessary steps get added to procedures in an effort to make them better. Over time, something that was simple and effective can begin to look like a daunting maze.

These systems can pile up on one another and become overwhelming. To prevent overdone processes, it’s valuable to plan an annual or quarterly deep dive where you look for opportunities to improve, streamline and simplify things. Doing so will keep your business’s improvements on track and can ultimately save you time and money.

The post The Business Process Automation Blueprint appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

What’s Inside This Landing Page Blueprint?

Getting Started With Landing Pages

Before you can dive into creating, launching and optimizing your own landing pages, it’s important to first select the right page builder for your company’s specific needs. Here’s what you need to know.

Types of Landing Pages Throughout the Customer Lifecycle

As you nurture your leads and customers through the customer lifecycle, you’ll use different types of landing pages to achieve specific goals. Here’s a breakdown of which pages work best for each stage.

Strategies for Creating High-Converting Landing Pages

Each component of your landing page plays a unique part in making a strong first impression, retaining attention, and closing the deal on your offer. To create landing pages that convert, try these copy and design strategies.

Landing Page Personalization

Now that you’ve learned the strategies for high converting pages, here’s how to develop offers and personalization that speak directly to your audience.

Optimizing Your Landing Pages Over Time

Once your landing pages launch, your job isn’t over. Continuously optimize them based on tracking data and split testing results. Here’s how.

Introduction

What Are Landing Pages?

Landing pages are stand-alone web pages designed to build your brand’s reputation and spur a specific audience to take a specific action. Unlike your website homepage — which presents the same information to everyone regardless of their interests or intent with your brand — landing pages are strategically created to attract and convert specific segments of your leads and customers. They also serve varying purposes throughout the customer lifecycle, such as capturing new lead information and encouraging purchases.

The Benefits of Landing Pages

Landing pages come with several benefits, including:

Better Targeting Your Audience

Instead of targeting all your web visitors with a single one-size-fits-all message, landing pages allow you to reach specific audiences with hyper-targeted messages. Because your product likely solves a variety of pain points and serves a variety of audiences, you can create a page with content that addresses each individually so that your intended audience can relate and quickly understand how your product will solve their problems.

Increasing Conversions

By providing leads and customers with these highly personalized experiences throughout the customer lifecycle, you’re showing them that you understand them and that your company has what they’re looking for. This ultimately can increase your chances of achieving your landing page conversion goals.

For example, in the early stages of the lifecycle, your goal might be to earn leads’ contact information by getting them to fill out a form in exchange for something valuable that you offer, such as downloadable content or a coupon code. Later on, you’ll likely be interested in selling leads on your entry level products, then your main product, then an upsell or cross-sell item. With landing pages, getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time will help you to achieve those conversion goals.

Boosting Your Marketing ROI

Landing pages are quick to create at little-to-no cost — especially if your page builder comes with a marketplace of free-to-use templates. Once published, these pages become digital sales reps that work for you 24/7 and serve leads and customers the personalized information they need to see at their particular stage of the customer lifecycle. By design, your live landing pages will quickly recover the cost of building them and begin to drastically improve your marketing ROI.

Collecting Insightful Data About Your Audience

Your landing pages are a main conduit to getting the data you need to understand your customers. This is because landing pages are typically where you place your forms, which are where you collect information. The information you gather on forms can be related to both demographics, such as gender, age, or occupation, and to the challenges your leads are facing that draw them to your products. Either way, that information goes right from the form into your contact records and becomes the source for understanding your audience segments. This enables you to then provide highly targeted and personalized communications with your leads and customers.

Are Landing Pages Right for You?

Every business with a website can benefit from creating landing pages to attract different types of customers but, if you’re on the fence, here are some telltale signs it’s time to take the leap:

• You have several target audiences who you feel are inadequately addressed on your website homepage.
• You offer multiple products or services that need their own sales pages.
• Your homepage is overwhelmed with too much information and too many offers.
• You are running ads to your site that are strategically written for specific audiences, but they all go to the same broad homepage.
• Your marketing campaigns would be better supported by a simple page that’s written specifically to meet your campaign goals.

The Goal of This Blueprint

This blueprint will walk you through the basics of what landing pages are and how to create, launch and optimize them to reach each of your company’s target audiences.

By the time you’ve finished reading each of the chapters, you will know how to get started with personalized landing pages, how to improve conversions, which types of pages you should create for different types of leads and customers, and how to improve your pages over time.

CHAPTER ONE

Getting Started With Landing Pages

Before you can dive into creating, launching and optimizing your own landing pages, it’s important to first select the right page builder for your company’s specific needs. With a wide variety of landing page builders on the market — each with different strengths and weaknesses — going into your search with a list of must-have features in mind is essential.

Why Should You Shop With a Feature Wishlist?

The time you pour into building your landing pages is an investment and, as with any investment, you want to make sure your pages hold their value as your needs expand. For example, let’s say you’re currently creating simple landing pages with an opt-in to your email list, but in the future you want the ability to make sales and process payments through your pages. You would be doing yourself a disservice if you had to switch to a new landing page builder and start from scratch to unlock these ecommerce capabilities. Instead, it’s best to carefully select a tool that’s equipped to grow with your business’s evolving needs.

Factors to Consider When Selecting Your Software

When you’re shopping for your landing page builder, picture your business in the present and future. Ask yourself the following questions to get your wheels turning about features you’ll need:

• What are you hoping to accomplish immediately with your landing pages?
• Are you looking for a quick project that you can launch same-day?
• Do you want to (and have the budget to) hire a designer or professional web developer to support your landing page creation?
• Do you want the ability to track who is visiting your pages and how well each page is performing?
• Is it important for your pages to connect with other areas of your business such as your CRM, marketing automation and internal business task automation?
• Do you want the ability to sell online through your landing pages?
• Do you want the ability to capture lead information through your landing pages?

Picture your business weeks, months and years in the future. Do your answers to the questions above change? If so, leave room for your anticipated growth when selecting your page builder.

Choose Your Must-Have Features

You know your business and its needs better than anyone so, after assessing your needs with the questions above, run through these features one by one and mark each as “not necessary,” “want in the future,” or “must-have.”

Customizable Landing Page Templates

Designing your landing pages from scratch can be time-consuming and expensive if you’re not already an experienced web developer. For many, having the option to choose from a marketplace of customizable landing page templates makes the difference between having the resources to expand their online presence and not.

When looking at page builders’ templates, the word “customizable” is key. If the templates aren’t flexible with design and format, they could end up confining your business to generic pages you don’t actually want. If you’re able to adjust various page elements, such as colors, fonts and images, you likely won’t run into roadblocks with customization.

Mobile Responsiveness

According to research by Statista, more than half of all the world’s website traffic since 2017 is from mobile devices. To keep your company’s landing pages competitive, you’ll likely want them to be mobile responsive — that is, you’ll want your page to automatically resize down to dimensions that look good and function properly on mobile phones, tablets and any size desktop screen.

Forms

The forms you include on your landing pages are the way you capture information about your leads and customers’ behaviors and purchases, so it’s important that they integrate seamlessly with your CRM so you can capture the data. Because these forms directly impact a page’s chances of converting leads and customers,  the opportunity to customize form fields depending on each page’s unique purpose should be a priority.

There are generally two main types of forms you’ll want to look for:

•  Web forms: These are the standard forms that are embedded within the body of a page. They can be used for capturing opt-ins or, if your landing page builder has ecommerce functionalities, they can also serve as order forms.
• Pop-up forms: These attention-grabbing forms can pop up after a certain amount of time or as visitors are about to leave the page. Similar to web forms, pop-up forms can also be used for capturing opt-ins or orders.

Page Tracking

If your landing pages are live without tracking, you’re missing out on insightful data about your leads and customers’ activity with your business. Page builders with built in tracking scripts and UTM tracking capabilities will equip you with the behavioral data you need to understand how effective your pages are.

Split Testing

No matter how great your landing pages are, there’s always room for improvement. A sure way to be certain you’re always optimizing your pages over time is to have split testing built in to your landing page builder. This will allow you to test individual elements of your pages against each other to figure out which copy and design elements are most compelling for your audience.

Integrated Landing Pages

When your landing pages are connected with every other aspect of your business, you open the door to a new level of trackability. Every move leads and customers make within your business — whether it’s a click on your page, a purchase of your product, an open of your email, or a call to your team — is not only recorded but also stored in the same data bank. Ultimately, having your data all in one place means that it’s more comprehensive and accurate, leading to smarter and faster business decisions.

Without integrated landing pages, the valuable data you collect from your landing page activity will remain siloed in the page builder itself unless you manually install tracking scripts on every individual page. What you really want is for every move made within your landing pages to update leads and customers’ contact records in your CRM. This not only keeps your customer data organized, but it enables your automation to respond to contacts’ actions on your pages.

The Ability to Integrate With Other Tools

If your landing page creator isn’t natively integrated with other tools and/or has a limited feature set, it’s important to correct that. If you think you’ll need to integrate with outside software such as a CRM, automation tool or ecommerce platform, make sure that the landing page builder is able to do so.

Types of Landing Pages Throughout the Customer Lifecycle

If you’re following the customer lifecycle model for attracting leads, nurturing them into customers, and developing lasting referral relationships with them, then you have an entire customer lifecycle funnel dedicated to each of your segments.

Your landing pages play a role at each stage. The way you position your message and the type of imagery you use on your landing pages should jive with those of your other channels throughout your funnel for that segment. And the calls to action on each page should relate to the goal of the page — their purpose is to move the customer along to the next stage of the lifecycle. Your landing pages are one touch point — albeit an integral touch point — in your ongoing relationships with leads and customers.

You’ll use different types of landing pages at each stage of the lifecycle in order to achieve their specific purposes. Let’s dive into the different types of pages that reflect the customer’s lifecycle.

Attract Stage Landing Pages

This phase is all about making an initial connection with new leads by introducing them to your product or service and, ideally, gaining their email address or social media handles so you can stay in touch.

A proven way to accomplish this is by offering something of high value for free. For example, a personal trainer might offer a free trial training session. The landing pages you’ll use in this stage should facilitate the initial introduction and exchange of information.

Opt-in Pages

These pages are where you “sell” your free offer to leads in exchange for their contact information. You simply add a form to the page to capture leads’ name and email address, then when they opt in for your offer, they get added to your CRM so you can keep in touch with them in the future. For example, if you’re a trainer, you’d have one opt-in page promoting a free trial training session targeted for those interested in weight loss and one promoting the same free trial for those interested in strength training.

You’ll differentiate the two by speaking to each audience’s main pain points clearly in your headline, hero image and every other element of the page.

Thank You Pages

Once someone enters their information into the form on your opt-in page, a thank you page should automatically display. But the page shouldn’t simply say “thank you” and confirm the opt-in; it should provide even more value so the new leads are reassured in their decision to enter their information on the previous page.

The additional value you provide could come in the form of links to articles or videos on your blog that relate to each segment. For the weight loss segment, you might provide a video about at-home beginner exercises; for the strength training segment, you might provide a video about foam rolling techniques to alleviate sore muscles.

Convert Stage Landing Pages

At this stage, your leads are familiar with your company and have participated in your free trial or downloaded a free piece of valuable content from you. That means they’ve begun to realize the ways you or your products and services can be of use to them.

The goal of this stage is to sell your core product so your leads become paying customers. You might start with offering an entry-level product before proposing your core product, depending on your price points and business type. Because you’re asking people to pay and make a higher level of commitment at this stage, your landing pages should thoroughly explain the value of your offer and instill trust in you, your product and the payment security level of your page.

Sales Pages

Sales pages are the most common use of a landing page, and many of the tips in this blueprint are focused around them. Similar to your opt-in pages from the Attract stage, your sales pages should speak specifically to each audience’s pain points and address why your product or service is the solution.

Your page should thoroughly list the benefits of your product or service, explicitly share the outcomes your leads will achieve from it, and use testimonials, reviews or other third-party social proof to back up your claims. All of the content should relate back to the people in your segment — their common concerns, objections and fears as well as their main interests. It should also remain highly specific solely about the program you’re selling.

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Order Pages and Forms

When leads click on your CTA button on your sales page, they’re taken to an order page where they’ll fill in their payment information, shipping address, email address and any other required information.

These pages should remain consistent with your sales page — the name of the program, the price you stated, the shipping and return policies you noted should all be reflected here to confirm to the buyer that you’re following through on what your sales page promised.

Your order page serves one purpose: to capture the order. Therefore, like all other landing pages, it should remove all other distractions and information. The most successful order pages simply consist of a headline, order form and “purchase” button.

Fulfill Stage Landing Pages

After your new customers buy your product or service, your goal is to get them to use it and find value in it.

During this stage, you might invite your new customers to your Facebook Community so they can collaborate or gain support from others you serve. You might call or text your new customers to welcome them and learn about their specific interests related to your product or service.

There are also a variety of landing pages you might use at this stage to support and encourage your customers in using your product or service.

Training or Content Page

If you run an educational membership site or sell a more advanced product that requires onboarding or training, you might send your new customers to a tutorial page or a page to schedule a one-on-one onboarding webinar with your team.

Even if you don’t have a membership site, you might want to create a landing page for the specific purpose of providing bonus content for your new customers that will support their use of your product or service.

For example, the personal trainer might send new weight loss clients to a landing page with resources and videos about home stretches to keep them from getting too sore or to support their flexibility which, in turn, supports the benefit they get from the training sessions. The clients who are interested in strength training might be directed to a landing page dedicated to how to support their exercise regimen with a diet rich in protein; the page might include recipes or your recommendations for the best protein shakes and snacks.

Either way, your overall messaging, imagery and content should follow suit with those from the previous pages in your customer lifecycle.

Survey Page

Because the goal of the Fulfill stage is to encourage your customers’ satisfaction with your product or service, it’s common to request that they fill out a survey to share feedback. You can use their responses to follow up on any needs or dissatisfaction that is revealed as well as to further segment your audience to ensure you’re meeting their specific interests.

Typically, you’d send an email with a link to a landing page that houses your survey. The survey is essentially a form placed on a landing page. It’s important that customers understand that you’re asking these questions because you care about their satisfaction and want to improve your products and services to meet their needs in the best ways possible. Other than reiterating your “why” and your value proposition, this page should be kept simply focused on your survey form fields.

To keep your survey pages targeted to your customer segments, you might consider multiple surveys with questions relevant to each audience.

Delight Stage Landing Pages

At this stage, your customers have been using your product or service and are committed to it. They may be ready for add-ons or complementary products and services that enhance their experience or support their results even further.

During this stage, your goal is to keep your customers engaged with your brand by offering them upsell or cross-sell products or services as well as events or exclusive loyalty programs.

Your pages at this stage should focus on each specific item you’re selling and the benefits for each specific audience segment.

Upsell Sales Page and Order Page

Similar to your sales pages in the Convert stage, your sales pages in the Delight stage should fully explain the value of the upsell in terms of the outcomes the customer will achieve from it. Because upsells require an additional financial investment — and in some cases, a significantly higher investment than your core product — it’s critical that you reiterate to customers the value they’ve received from you so far and the reasons you believe the upsell product is right for them.

The page should provide a detailed list of benefits of the product or service, testimonials or other third-party backup, and answer the common questions you receive.

Returning to the personal trainer example, the upsell at this stage might be an annual personal training membership. Just like in previous stages, you’ll have a separate upsell sales page for each segment of your audience. Both will highlight the value of consistency in exercise, but one will be in the context of weight loss maintenance and the other will be positioned as strength achievement. You’ll likely show before and after photos of clients relevant to each audience, as well as testimonial quotes that each audience can identify with.

Similar to the Convert stage, you’ll have an order page for your upsell product that consists solely of the form and reiterates the basics such as the name of the product and your key policies.

Event Page

Delight stage offers often involve inviting clients to an in-person event, such as a community lecture, networking meetup, conference or a launch event for a new product.

These landing pages will be similar to your other pages but the product you’re selling is an event, so your value statements are meant to entice the customers to show up. You’ll likely include specific event details such as maps and locations, images of the event venue or city, and information on the event speakers.

The personal trainer might invite clients to a local wellness lecture: one by a nutritionist focused on healthy eating for the weight loss group and one by an orthopedist who treats athletes and talks about avoiding common injuries. Of course, your landing pages here will be unique for each topic and audience, but both will reiterate the value of this added information for their workout goals.

You also might want to segment your event pages even further based on your customers’ locations. If you’re having a meetup in both Sydney and Melbourne, you can use the address data in your customers’ contact record (which they provided when they purchased your product in the Convert stage) to set conditions to ensure you’re inviting the customers to the event near their homes. Your landing pages, likewise, will only include information for one location.

Refer Stage Landing Pages

The last stage of the customer lifecycle, the Refer stage is where you encourage your satisfied, loyal customers to spread the word about you to their friends and family.

The goal of this stage is to garner referrals, so your related pages should be focused on the benefits your customers and their referred friends will receive by referring and purchasing. The pages should also remind your customers of your value and all the progress and success they’ve achieved with you so far, making it natural for them to want to share that with their loved ones.

Referral Sales Page

Referral programs often involve providing a unique referral link to your customers via email and encouraging them to share it. That link will take the referred friend to your sales page — often the same sales page you used in your Convert stage.

If you’re using dynamic content in ONTRAPORT Pages, you can add a unique welcome message that shows up only to those who are coming to the sales page from a referral link. It could say something such as, “Welcome, friend! We’re glad [your friend] told you about us. Purchase today, and you’ll each get $10 off.”

Referral Tracking Page

If you have a partner program in place, you can also have a landing page dedicated to displaying each person’s referrals. It can show the names of the people they’ve referred who ended up purchasing as well as the bonus they’ve received for each.

This page should reiterate what your partners are getting by participating in your referral program, provide easy access to their referral code so they can keep referring others, and include resources that support them in making referrals, such as pre-made social media posts or ads they can place on their websites.

Again, the goal of this page and this stage is to gain referrals, so this page should be focused solely on that. Refrain from selling other products, seeking feedback or including other distractions.

There are many types of landing pages you can use at each stage of the customer lifecycle. What’s important is to remember the purpose of the stage and to tailor a page for each of your audience segments to increase your chances of achieving your goals.

Strategies for Creating High-Converting Landing Pages

Landing pages are your opportunity to build your brand’s reputation and move visitors to the next step of your customer lifecycle. The copy and design you include on your page elements work together to support those objectives.

Most landing pages consist of a headline and supporting subhead, an offer, benefit statements, a form, images or media, social proof and a call to action.

Each component, although working towards the same goal, plays a unique part in making a strong first impression, retaining attention, and closing the deal on your offer. To create landing pages that successfully convert visitors into leads or leads into customers, try these strategies for crafting each piece of your landing page copy and design.

Headlines

Headlines are the first thing people read when visiting your landing page, so they need to clearly summarize its value and content.

For example, let’s say you offer a program that teaches users how to speak Spanish. If visitors came across a page with the headline “Learn to Speak Spanish With a 30 Minute Lesson Every Day,” but they were looking for a website that would translate English into Spanish, they would immediately know not to click on it. The headline clearly showed that this page wasn’t what they were looking for. The goal of the headline should not be to get all visitors to click. If the headline reads “English to Spanish, Fast,” you might get a lot of clicks, but the clickbait nature of your headline will waste lots of visitors’ time and make your bounce rate skyrocket.

While the more descriptive headline might send some people away, it’s important to remember that’s what you want. In order to make sure your headline attracts only your right-match visitors, it should spell out exactly what your page is for. To put it simply, your headline should explain:

• What your offer is (lessons everyday)
• What your offer does (helps you speak Spanish)
• Why your offer is valuable (only 30 minutes)

Headline Formulas That Convert
Although headlines will need different tactics depending on your product and the page, below are a few proven headline strategies that work across industries.

1. Show your value: This headline highlights your unique approach to the problem visitors have and why your approach is valuable. Example: Rote Memorization Doesn’t Work — Learn Spanish Fast Using Interactive Lessons With Native Speakers
2. List something: This headline shows that your offer is clear and easy to use. You might list tips, tricks, strategies, or anything else that your landing page offers. Example: Try These Three Tricks to Learn Spanish Fast
3. Make a promise that you can keep: Making a promise with your headline piques readers’ interest about whether you can actually fulfill this promise, prompting them read on and begin forming their opinion. Example: Have a Conversation in Spanish in One Month With Just 30 Minutes of Practice a Day
4. Show the path: This headline outlines the path of getting from point A to point B. Example: Go From Beginner to Advanced With These Spanish Speaking Lessons
5. Use a testimonial: This headline uses your customers’ own words to share your value. Example: “In One Month I Was Ready to Have Dinner With My New Spanish Family — While Speaking Spanish!”
6. Make a comparison: This headline is used when you know you have popular competitors that your visitors might know of and/or be considering. Example: Don’t Waste Your Money on Expensive Workbooks — Try Our Proven Method to Learn Spanish Fast!
7. Highlight their pain points: This headline will expose the problem or difficulty that they’re likely encountering. Example: It’s Hard to Find Time to Learn a New Language. That’s Why We Only Ask for 30 Minutes a Day to Start Speaking Spanish In Weeks!

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Subheads

While headlines capture visitors’ initial attention, subheads keep it. Subheads are great ways to reinforce your headline and provide extra information about your offer and, because they’re typically the second thing people read, they need to both support your headline and entice your visitors to keep looking at the page.

There are a few tactics you can follow to create a good subhead but, whichever you choose, it should align well with the headline.

1. Highlight the value: Highlighting exactly how valuable your offer is can entice visitors to continue reading further down your page. One way you can do this is by including testimonials where your company’s fans rave about your value.
2. Describe what they’ll get: Using the subhead to tell visitors exactly what they’ll get will help them more quickly decide if they want to stay on your page or not. Aside from the value, this tactic might also include descriptive language about your product, how it works, or how the visitor will get it (i.e., download, email, free shipping, etc.).
3. Tell them what you want them to do: This is a great tactic for reinforcing your call to action. If your call to action is very specific or needs explaining, the subhead is a great way to introduce it. This is also a good way to drive conversions because it keeps the call to action at the forefront throughout the visitors experience on your page.

Whatever strategy you decide to go with, try following these tips to maximize the effectiveness of your headlines and subheads.

• Keep them short and sweet. Get right to the point.
• Be persuasive. You have to convince visitors they’ll benefit from what you’re offering.
• Focus on one thing, and keep it relevant to your offer.
• Be creative. A unique headline and subhead will help your landing page stand out and gain attention. 

Body Content

The body of your landing page should start and support the conversation that you want your clients to have about your product. In order to write conversion-driving copy, you need to know exactly what you want your clients to feel, think and do when on your page. Ask yourself the following questions before writing your page’s body copy:

1. How do you want your readers to feel when visiting your page?
2. What do you want them to think about?
3. What actions do you want them to take on your landing page?

The body copy of your landing page needs to provide details and benefits of your offer, direct visitors to your page’s call to action, and ultimately convince them to convert. Once you begin focusing your copy around your customers’ specific needs, copywriting will become much easier.

Why Your Audience Should Care

There’s a reason you created your product or service — tell your visitors what that is. Your reason most likely relates to your desire to solve a problem, relieve a common pain point, or fulfill a need. People can relate to that; in fact, they probably came to your page because they’re looking for it. Be clear about how your product or service will serve your visitors and what their life will be like after they use it.

Sharing the benefits of your product or service speaks directly to your visitors and hints at the mission and purpose of your business; it shows that there’s a human behind the screen, not just a money-seeking company. That’s what people relate to, and that’s what builds trust and lasting relationships.

Build Trust

Message Match

Your landing page visitors clicked on an ad or email because they were interested in the promise it made. When that click lands them on your landing page, it should show them what they expect to see with similar images and a familiar tone throughout the copy. This is called message matching.

Matching your messaging across all channels, particularly those that connect, such as an ad and a landing page, confirms for the visitor that they’ve reached the right page, and it shows them that you fulfill your promises. It reiterates that you are neither tricking them with click-bait headlines nor out to squeeze them into buying something they don’t want.

Continuity and Congruence

Your design and copy should be congruent. They should tell a story in tandem. When everything relates, your visitors can more quickly understand your point and comprehend your business as an authority on the topic — which builds their trust in you. If your copy and images don’t play off one another and are going off on tangents, your reader gets lost and confused — which makes them think your brand and product must be imperfect, too.

Testimonials and Social Proof

Including testimonials and social proof within the body of your landing pages is also a great way to build trust with your visitors; people trust other people more than they trust a company or salesperson. Showing third party testimonials about your company’s products and services validates the claims you make on your page.

Testimonials are powerful endorsements when they appear on landing pages. Visitors want to see how other people like them succeeded — they want to be able to really relate to these people and think, “That guy was just like me and now he’s a success. I can do that too!”

Tips for using social proof on landing pages:

• Include a short yet convincing testimonial that showcases your company’s value.
• Choose customer testimonials that will appeal to the audience you’re targeting. If a specific landing page is meant for younger people, then use a young person as your testimonial.
• If you work with any recognizable companies, include their logos. It builds trust by association and increases conversions.
• If your company has helped or serves a large number of people, consider putting that number on your landing page.
• Use badges or certifications to represent awards you’ve won.
• Show the five-star reviews your company has gotten from Yelp, Google or other popular review sites.

FAQ

Even after reading your whole page, your visitors might still have some lingering questions or might still be on the fence about following through on your call to action. An FAQ section serves to answer the questions you expect them to ask at this point. This shows them that you’re looking out for them, want to help them, and you’re not hiding anything. It also resolves any unknowns that would inhibit the visitor from taking action. All of these things provide assurance to your visitors that they’re making the right choice to purchase from you.

When creating your FAQ, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what they would want to know. They may be wondering:

• Is this product/service really right for me?
• Is this really high-quality?
• What is the return policy if I’m not satisfied?
• Is there a guarantee?
• What is the shipping process and cost?
• Is there a customer support team I can call if needed?

Guarantee

Similar to your FAQ, a guarantee serves to quell your visitors’ fears or concerns about purchasing. By simply stating that you’ll make it right if they don’t feel you fulfilled your promise, you’re expressing your confidence in your product. This subtly alludes to the mission-oriented content you featured earlier on the page and reiterates that you’re here to support them, not trick them or merely make money off of them.

The guarantee also serves to assure visitors that their decision isn’t going to be regrettable. That knowledge alone is often enough to encourage someone to purchase.

Your guarantee is also a good opportunity to explain your refund and cancellation policy.

Sales Elements on Landing Pages

Call to Action

The call to action, or CTA, is where your visitors convert — the most important job of a landing page. All the elements on your landing page must be strategically aimed at sending visitors to your CTA, which you’ll describe in copy but also typically portray in a button that you want the visitor to click. Your CTA will likely differ depending on what type of landing page you’re using. Generally, sales landing pages will include a CTA button to link users to the next page where they can make a purchase. A lead generation landing page will likely feature a form where visitors enter their contact information.

Whatever your CTA is, you want to make sure it’s simple, clear and friendly. A good example of a friendly CTA for a sales page would be, “Give us a try now!” This CTA isn’t forcing them to buy from you or telling them why they’re making a mistake if they don’t. It’s just prompting them to act on all of the information they’ve already been given. For an event page, you might say, “Join us” or “Grab your tickets here” to slightly nudge them to buy their tickets. Here are some tips for writing CTAs for your sales and opt-in pages:

Tips for enticing CTA buttons for sales landing pages:

• Make them big and easy to find. Above all, you want people’s eyes to land on the headline and the CTA.
• Place them above the fold — the whole point of your page is to get people to click your CTA, so don’t make them hunt for it.
• If your landing page is longer (it depends on the context of your product or service), make sure you include multiple CTAs so the visitor can convert from anywhere on the page. If you do this, make sure the CTAs are all the same.
• While there’s no one color that’s proven to be best, choose a color for your CTA that is distinctively different than the color scheme of your page. For example, if your landing page features a lot of blue, then choose a contrasting color such as orange or red for your button.

Tips for enticing CTA forms for lead generation landing pages:

• Include as few fields as possible. If you only need your visitors’ name and email address, don’t include mandatory fields asking for their website or company name — you risk scaring them off.
• Make sure your forms are mobile-responsive so people can view and fill them out from their phones.
• Place the form on the right side of your landing page — it converts much better there than on the left side of the page.
• Don’t use boring text on your CTA buttons. Try replacing weak verbs such as “Submit” with an actionable phrase like “Send me my free PDF!”

Secure Payment

Buying online is commonplace these days, but that doesn’t mean everyone feels comfortable entering their credit card information on just any site. By the time your visitor has reached your order page or form, you’ve hopefully impressed your trustworthiness upon them enough to encourage them to follow through, but you should provide further assurance by displaying trust seals and security certifications.

This shows your customers that you’re watching out for their best interests regarding their payment. It verifies to customers that your site is legitimate, and their data will be protected.

The most-trusted seals are Norton Secured, McAfee Secure, Verisign and Paypal Verified. You may also want to include your SSL certificate logo to reiterate to customers that their credit card information will be safely encrypted and transmitted to eliminate security risks.

Keep in mind, if you’re using ONTRAPORT Pages to build your order page, your order form is already secure so you won’t need to worry about finding an SSL certificate provider. To improve conversions, try using the seal associated with your payment gateway provider or a custom seal that you create to reflect your money-back or satisfaction guarantee.

Checkout

Your visitors are already slightly insecure about entering their credit card info, so don’t make it harder on them by making the checkout process cumbersome or confusing. One misstep and the trust you’ve built could be gone — and your customer will be quick to close the tab and move on.

Your order page or form should be very simple and clean; don’t clutter it with unnecessary copy or outbound links that can distract buyers and deter them from completing the purchase. Keep your number of form fields to a minimum so as not to deter them from filling them out or make them question why you would need so much information from them — which can raise red flags in the trust department.

Similarly, the level of clarity within the descriptors for your form fields matters. For example, if you’re accepting payments in U.S. dollars, make sure it clearly says that in the price field. If you’re offering a subscription service, clearly explain whether the payment amount is per month or per year.

Be sure you don’t introduce any surprises at this stage. There’s nothing like getting to an order page and then finding out shipping isn’t really free or that the cost of the product is different than what you displayed on your sales page. Make sure you maintain continuity during the order process as you did on the pages leading up to it.

Visual Elements on Landing Pages

Clean Above-the-Fold Design

If visitors come to your page and feel overwhelmed by too many colors, images or content that’s not aligned or sized appropriately, they’ll bail. It’s important that your content, especially above the fold — the content that’s shown within the parameters of the screen upon visiting, before the visitor scrolls down — is easy to grasp and easy on the eyes.

Also, keep the navigation labels at the top of your page to a minimum — or don’t use them at all. Your landing page should be focused on one product. Including navigation to explore other products or parts of your website is only a distraction that takes away from your goal. It also can cause confusion for your visitors, which leads to distrust.

Keeping your page design clean is not only important for keeping your visitors on the page, but it goes a long way toward expressing that you’re a trustworthy, professional brand.

Images

Including high-quality images on your landing pages is an excellent way to engage visitors and keep them from quickly leaving your page. A captivating image can take your landing page from good to great. Here are some basic image components you can consider including in your landing page.

Captions: Images that are used just as backgrounds might not be appropriate for caption, but testimonial images and product images are often a good place to include more information about what’s pictured and use keywords that can help improve your page’s SEO. Often, people who don’t want to read your body copy will instead scan the page to look for images and read the captions, so making sure the captions reflect the page content is imperative.

File name: If your page has images, it also has file names. Although most visitors won’t notice the file name which appears in the URL if your image is clicked, it’s still important to your site’s SEO and is an easy way to boost ranking. When uploading your image, save the file as a name that reflects what’s depicted in the image to get the most SEO optimization from your images.

Original content: Using original images and media is better than stock images because they perform better in SEO ranking. Even if you’re not a professional photographer, hiring someone to take photos of your products or investing in a few classes and tools yourself can be worth it for future landing pages.

Alt tags: Although often overlooked, alt tags are another good SEO tool that you can easily add to your images. Using associated keywords, the alt tags will increase ranking and will be used if the images on your site don’t load properly, ensuring visitors still understand what should be seen.

Including these components is a great way to maximize your images’ potential. Here are a few general tips to follow for the actual image you choose to use:

• If possible, show your product being used by real people, in real situations.
• Make your images eye-catching. Don’t bother adding a photo if it isn’t interesting or doesn’t add significant value to your landing page.
• Don’t use stock photos. They make your page look tacky and unprofessional — visitors will immediately leave your page.
• If you don’t have the resources to hire a professional photographer to take photos of your product, use a standard smartphone to capture the images you need.
• Include a product hero image that shows the visitors everything they’re getting or what they can expect.

Video

If used correctly, an interesting video can be more impactful than any other element on your landing page. Engaging videos are smart to incorporate on landing pages because they immediately capture your visitors’ attention and take very little effort to consume. When combining both text and video options on your landing page, you offer visitors their choice of content medium, which is appealing to more visitors than if you chose just text or just video. Plus, according to research, 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and of those marketers that do use video, 78% say video gives them a good ROI.

Landing Page Personalization

Personalized marketing entails using data about customers’ actions — past purchases, clicks on landing pages, and more — to create tailored experiences for each individual. While landing pages by their nature are singularly focused and segmented for each specific audience, personalizing them takes it a step further by speaking to each visitor.

Personalizing Your Landing Pages

If you’ve ever purchased anything on Amazon, you’re used to this type of personalized experience. Every time you return to Amazon you can expect to see images of recommended products front and center, all based on your past purchases. Likewise, if you’re a member of a retailer’s loyalty program, you’ve likely seen ads for exclusive members-only sales or discounts when you sign in to shop.

You can do this on your landing pages as well. For example, you can welcome back repeat customers and promote another product they might be interested in based on their last purchase. For those who visited your page before but never purchased, you might provide the final push to buy with a special discount on their first purchase. If you know your page visitor is from Houston and you’ve got an upcoming event there, you can invite him or her to the event.

This type of personalization also shows your customers that you’re listening and anticipating their needs. In the same way you show your friends and family that they matter to you by remembering their favorite foods and calling them on their birthday, storing and leveraging data so you can remember your customers’ preferences also shows them that you care. This type of genuine outreach is increasingly important as face-to-face sales and customer service is replaced by online experiences. Ultimately, it leads to a better chance of making a sale and earning repeat sales and referrals.

The ability to personalize landing pages relies on two things:

• The information you already have about your customer in your contact database
• The information you can assume about your customers based on knowledge of their behavior that you gather through tracking

That means the CRM system you use to store and capture contact data, the system you use for tracking, and the system you use for landing pages need to be synced. Having seamless and automated communication between these systems is what enables dynamic landing page experiences.

If you’re an ONTRAPORT user, you’ve got all this built in and can readily create these personalized landing pages. The conditional blocks feature enables you to show certain content to certain visitors based on conditions you set when you build the page. That allows for things like showing a repeat customer an offer for an upsell while showing a first-time visitor a discount for a first-time purchase — all while keeping the rest of the page the same for both audiences.

There are dozens of ways you can create personalized experiences with your landing pages. Here are just six example usecases you could apply to your business.

1. Showcase upsell and cross-sell products to past purchasers.

Just as Amazon shows recommendations based on someone’s previous purchases, you can show products or services your customers might be interested in based on their past purchases.

Say you sell locally grown coffee, and you have a block on your landing page with an image of your coffee bag and its price. You might also sell the coffee in packs of three and offer that only to customers who’ve already bought a single pack. You can set the block for the package of three to only show to those who have already purchased at least one single pack.

If you use a landing page tool that offers conditional content and is integrated with your CRM, the system will use stored tracking information to recognize when a page visitor has previously purchased from you and will show that visitor the block selling the three-pack instead of the single pack. You can do the same thing with any cross-sell, upsell or related offer you’d like.

2. Offer a members-only perk or upgrade.

When your members come to your site to access their login page, rather than showing them the same information you’d show to a nonmember, you can showcase specific information relevant to them.

For example, if you have an upcoming members-only sale or event, you can specifically promote it. Or, if you’ve added new content to the site or there’s a hot topic with a lot of engagement in your community forum, you can encourage members to check it out. Perhaps one of the most common uses for those with membership products is to showcase an offer for the next level of membership to your members based on which level they’re currently subscribed to.

If your landing page builder comes with member management capabilities or integrates with a membership tool, you can set the product or membership level you want the block to be shown to, and the rest will run from there.

3. Offer a first-time purchase discount.

Sometimes, a customer just needs an extra discount to feel ready to make a purchase.

Say you have a customer who’s opted in for your email list but hasn’t quite purchased from you yet, or you have a customer who’s bought one of your products and has been visiting the page for another one of your products. You can promote 20% off the first purchase of that product and set it to only show to such visitors.

To do this, you’ll target customers who have never purchased your product, but are already in your contact database.

4. Promote a referral program to long-time customers.

Your customers who’ve been using your products or services for a long time are much more likely to refer others to you than your newer customers who haven’t yet fully realized their value.

You can promote your referral bonus program only to longtime customers by creating a “Refer a Friend” program and showing it only to customers who have met specific criteria. Perhaps you’d like to only offer it to customers who’ve been with you since you started your business or to those who’ve been with you for one year or more. Your connected CRM can automatically select the right people to show your referral offer to.

5. Offer based on where the visitor came from.

Similar to the Barack Obama page for Redditors, you can highlight messages based on where your page visitors come from.

This is a great way to highlight your partners or referral companies. For example, if you sell essential oils and a well-known wellness coach included a link to your products in his or her monthly email newsletter, you could include a message such as “Welcome, X readers! Here’s your $10 discount code.”

Likewise, you could welcome those coming from your Twitter or Instagram ad or even from your podcast or an external blog article.

To set this up, use the “lead source” from your UTM variables to show the block only to visitors from your source of choice.

6. Invite customers to a local meetup or location-specific promotions.

People tend to be drawn to anything mentioning their name; the same often applies to anything mentioning their hometown. If you host customer events or meetups in various locations, you can be sure to inform the customers in those locations about them on your landing pages.

You likely have your customers’ address information either based on their payment information from their purchase or if your landing page builder tracks contacts’ geolocation. If your pages are integrated with your CRM, you can set conditional blocks to only show up if a contact’s home city is the same city as your event.

Similarly, you can use location data to offer location-specific information or promotions. For example, say you’re able to provide free shipping in California only; you can show a free shipping block only to customers who reside in California.

Optimizing Your Landing Pages Over Time

With so many creative options for page copy and design, it’s a best practice for marketers to go through constant rounds of trial and error by testing and optimizing. Every business has a unique audience that relates to different content and techniques. What works for one brand might not work well for another, so it’s important to be continuously analyzing your landing page data to see what’s working and what isn’t. The better you optimize, the higher your chances of converting leads and customers on your pages.

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The Importance of Optimization

Launching your landing pages shouldn’t be the end of your journey. Instead, you’ll launch your page, track the data, analyze what could be better, tweak and repeat. Whether it’s your headlines, images or the color of your CTA button, little changes can make a significant difference for your page performance.

Marketers who test different versions of their landing page components often see huge conversion rate increases from one version to the next. Neil Patel, an expert in landing page optimization and improving conversion rates, found examples from several companies that proved the importance of testing your pages. WallMonkey, a wall art company, saw a 27% increase in conversions by changing the main image on their page, while Humana, an insurance carrier, saw a 192% increase after changing just the CTA.

You can optimize your pages by asking for feedback, checking load times, and keeping your content up to date, but one of the most conclusive way to optimize is through testing.

Split Testing

Once you have all of the copy and design ready on your landing page, you can start split testing which elements on your page convert and which don’t.

Split testing is the process of running experiments on two or more pages simultaneously and then comparing them to see which prompts more engagement with your CTA. To run an effective split test, you need a “control” page that doesn’t change and a “variant” page that does change. Once your pages are set up and you’ve chosen something to test, you can start by sending 50% of visitors to Page A and 50% of visitors to Page B. After a set period of time, you can measure which version is more successful at converting, and choose to continue using that one only.

You’ll be working towards optimizing each component of your landing page, leading to a fully optimized page that drives conversions. Testing and tinkering with the copy and design components will help you determine what works — and what doesn’t — so that you can be sure you’re putting your marketing efforts and budget to their best use. Before, during and after tests, pay attention to key stats for measuring page effectiveness, including page visits, conversions and time on page.

You can test any element of your page including headlines, content, CTAs, forms, offers, design, colors and testimonials.

Finding Statistical Significance

After you’ve launched your split tests, wait until you have statistical significance before making any changes. Statistical significance tells you how certain you can be that your results will hold true for the long-term. You need a large enough audience with enough variance in your data in order to have statistically significant results. That is, one page has to outperform another by a large margin. Many studies suggest six months for one test is a good amount of time to see real, untainted results from your split test. However, many people don’t want to wait that long. A couple of weeks or months is a good place to start.

You can determine your statistical significance easily by entering your audience and conversion numbers into online calculators, such as this one from Kissmetrics. While the industry standard level of statistical significance to aim for is 90-95%, if you’re a small business without a ton of traffic, it’s probably safe to make a call once you reach 80-85%.

Implementing Your Results

Once your results are deemed statistically significant, you can choose to turn off the version of your page that isn’t converting and optimize the page that is. If you just tested your CTA, you might next create a new campaign that keeps the winning CTA the same and tests two different headlines. Just as launching your pages isn’t the end, split testing just one thing and finding an increased conversion rate shouldn’t be your stopping point.

Instead, continue introducing new options for your landing page components and keep in mind your goals when analyzing your results. As you run test after test, you will gain valuable objective data, and your predictions about what might work better on your pages should improve over time, making your tests perform even better.

Page Maintenance for SEO

Maintaining Current Content

On top of continuously split testing your page components to keep up with your visitors’ interests, you should also be maintaining your landing pages’ SEO rankings.

As Yoast SEO puts it, “If you want to get in front of your audience, you first have to prove to the search engines that your content is worth it.”

Unlike a blog or your regular website, landing pages are standalone web pages, so frequently adding new pages with new content and external sources is not an effective strategy for keeping your search ranking high.

Instead you’ll need to rely on an equally useful tactic — keeping your content fresh. This tactic goes hand-in-hand with your split-testing efforts. As you split test different messaging, tones and style of your copy, images, and more, you’ll find what works with your audience and update your page accordingly.

You can also add a business maintenance task to your teams’ weekly or monthly to-do list that involves updating your testimonials to your most recent reviews, updating your content to include new features in your offer, and updating your headlines to reflect new marketing tactics or promotions.

Updating Your Code and Security

Your landing pages’ code and security should also be maintained with frequent updates. By consistently fixing bugs or adjusting code, updating your security, and making sure your website’s content tagging system is working properly, you’re showing search engines that you care about your websites health and are attentive to its needs.

Creating an Intuitive Site Structure

Your landing pages’ structure should be easy to navigate and create a friendly and simple experience for your page visitors as they poke around your content and images, deciding whether your offer is right for them.

Neil Patel believes that the better your site structure is, the better your chance of higher ranking in the search engines is. A disorganized jumble of information is hard for visitors to interpret and will probably lead to immediate back clicks, so it’s in your best interest to create a seamless user experience to improve visitor retention and SEO.

Google’s algorithm uses information from searchers to rank your site, such as click-through rate and dwell time. These terms refer to how many visitors see your page as a Google result and click on it and how much time they spend looking at your page, respectively.

To build a landing page structure that keeps visitors’ attention and keeps Google satisfied with your page, plan out your page before developing it, and stick to the natural flow of information that users look for when searching web pages for solutions to their problem. This would generally include a headline and subhead at the top, body content and images in the middle, and FAQs and testimonials at the bottom.

Use a 503 Status Code During Maintenance

With all of these updates and changes to your landing page, there are bound to be times when your website is down for maintenance. A 404 HTTP status code will usually appear when your site is down. This code tells both visitors and search engines that your site cannot be found for one reason or another, but it doesn’t tell either that it will be back soon.

When Google stumbles across a 404 code, it will typically acknowledge that the site isn’t up right now and will reconsider it when searching next time. If the site is back up, it will be included in the rankings. If it’s not, it will again be missed. After the site has been skipped over because a 404 code too many times, though, Google might eventually disclude the site from all searches, regardless of whether it’s back up.

To avoid this potentially longer loss of rankings, have your site return a 503 status code instead of a 404 status code when you’re working on it. This tells the search engine and the visitor that the site is just down temporarily and will often show a “Retry After” header which tells Google and your visitors how long the site will be down, if that information is known. You can alter your status codes and add a “Retry After” header using WordPress settings or by having your technical team edit your sites’ settings.  

Overall, maintaining a search engine optimized landing page is different than doing so for a full webpage. Your options for adding new content and organizing your web pages accordingly are more limited. You can and should, however, still be able to monitor the ranking of your page by ensuring everything you do is morally sound and doesn’t involve any tricks or gimmicks to increase your ranking. While those efforts might show improved ranking results in the short-term, it will lead to repercussions for your landing page, and possibly your whole brand, in the future.

Setting Up Your Landing Pages for Success With Proper Tracking

Without proper tracking on your landing pages, you’ll have no way of knowing which pages are performing and which aren’t. Even if you’re not ready to analyze the data yet, it’s still important to start tracking as early as possible so that the data is available when you’re ready. If you want the data to be useful and relevant, it needs to be monitored over a long period of time — ideally from the second you launch your pages. To learn how to set up effective marketing tracking for your landing pages, check out The Marketing Analytics Blueprint.

The post The Landing Pages Blueprint appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

What’s inside this Business Process Automation Blueprint?

Preparing for Business Process Automation

Turn every task in your business into repeatable systems that can eventually be delegated — either to another employee, or to automation software.

Determine What to Automate

Before you automate a process, here are the factors you’ll want to consider.

Automating Your Internal Business Processes

Here’s how to automate key areas of each department so that you can focus on your company’s mission and moving the business forward.

After Automation

Learn how being proactive and carrying out deep-dives can prevent process breakdown and unnecessary automation from occurring in your business.

INTRODUCTION

What is Business Process Automation (BPA)?

Your business probably contains dozens or even hundreds of individual procedures that you and your team members execute every day. BPA is the result of taking those regular internal business routines, fine-tuning them, then mechanizing them so they run on their own without intervention from you or your team.

BPA drives efficiency and enables teams to focus on moving the business forward, instead of simply managing it. It’s the foundation of creating a sustainable, scalable, sellable business.

Why is BPA Important?

Whether you run a large company or a one-person operation, BPA allows you to do more with the resources you have. Manual tasks and procedures can be time-consuming and cumbersome, leaving you with more busy work and less time to focus on growing the business. With business process automation, you can offload your repetitive, mundane tasks and count on technology to handle it efficiently and effectively every time, all while opening up time in your schedule to apply your intellect and passion where it matters to grow your business.

Benefits of BPA

Adding BPA to your company comes with several benefits, including:

Saving Time

Instead of having your team (or yourself) spend hours on repetitive administrative tasks, they can focus on more challenging problems. As a result, you’ll accomplish more without adding hours to the workday or employees to the team.

Bringing Your Mission to Life

With more open time in the day, you’ll be able to focus on your company’s mission, and begin to experience business ownership the way you likely envisioned it in the first place.

Minimizing Manual Errors

People aren’t perfect — we sometimes forget, are late or make mistakes — and automation is a way to guarantee that certain tasks will go according to plan every time.

Improving Efficiency

Automation is able to handle a high volume of tasks that you previously had to rely on employees to do. According to HRinAsia, “Cost savings of approximately 90% can be achieved when a business process performed by a full-time equivalent human is replaced by a software.” This is because automation works around the clock, can handle multiple tasks at a time, and makes fewer mistakes than people do.

The potential savings can span across more tasks than you might think. According to a McKinsey study, “About half of all the activities people are paid to do in the world’s workforce could potentially be automated.” With that 50 percent automated, your team would be able to take on double the workload, without the added cost of more employees.

Giving Customers Consistent Positive Experiences

Although business process automation handles the internal tasks that are necessary for your company to run, many of those operations still contribute to your customers’ experiences. Whether it’s an automatic reminder to a team member to pay commissions to referrers, or automation that handles customers’ requests to change their stored credit card information, business process automation ensures that your customers are getting the most consistent positive experiences possible.

Predicting, Measuring and Improving

Because automation completes your business processes exactly the way you tell it to, it creates a level of consistency that allows you to begin spotting trends and learn precisely how long things take. You can then use that information to effectively plan ahead in your business. Similarly, it allows you to identify and fix gaps in your processes that you might not have otherwise noticed.

Enforcing Accountability and Compliance

Every process your automation platform completes is tracked in a log. By design, this makes BPA a great tool for managers to have oversight on the total tasks completed, the amount of time spent on a project, or any other metric they would look at for reviews, planning vacation time or setting goals. Documented and automated processes also allow managers to keep track of which employees are top-performers, and which ones need coaching.

Is BPA Right for You?

Every business — large or small — can benefit from automating its most repetitive tasks, but if you’re on the fence, here are some of the telltale signs it’s time to take the leap:

• You find yourself doing the same things over and over, such as emailing customers similar information about their billing, sending the same internal employee messages about benefits, etc.
• As your business grows, the demand for the tasks mentioned above outgrows the capability of one person.
• Your team’s manual processes are managed using a bunch of to-do lists, spreadsheets, handwritten notes and Post-it reminders that are difficult to keep track of.
• As a result of these hard-to-manage processes, you’re noticing a lot of dropped balls and mistakes in your team’s work.
• The stress of trying to keep track of so many moving pieces is affecting your employee churn and overall morale.
• You want to run a referral program to grow your customer base, but manually reaching out to and keeping track of potential referrers one-by-one is too time consuming.
• You need more insights into your business so that you can make decisions to manage your resources and budgets.

The Goal of This Blueprint

This blueprint will walk you through the basics of what business process automation is and how it works, best practices for getting started, and more.

By the time you’ve finished reading each of the chapters, you will know how to turn all your company’s tasks into repeatable processes, how to differentiate between procedures that should be automated and those that should not, how to automate key areas of your business, and how to use automation to your advantage once it’s in place.

Preparing For Business Process Automation

Before you can begin automating areas of your business, it’s important to first examine all your internal tasks, then test them manually, refine them, and document each one. Sometimes when you transfer a written process into automation, things get lost in translation or you have to figure out the right settings to make it function the way you intend. In the case that something in your automation doesn’t function as planned, these written processes will act as an instruction manual and give you a reference point for checking your work.

What Is the Value of Systems?

Well-documented and established systems and processes are the core of your business — the tangible intellectual property that makes it high-functioning, scalable and ultimately sellable.

Without systems, many business owners experience a gap between how they expected it would be to run a business and the reality of it. To bridge that gap, it’s important to become skilled at creating repeatable systems that you can use to automate and streamline your entire business. This will allow you to work harder on your business — that is, focus less on doing the work and more on moving your business forward.
 

Remove the Chaos From Your Business With Documented Internal Processes

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Why Systems?

Systems Are Predictable

Imagine running a bakery without a system for baking cakes. Each day, the cakes would come out a little different — sometimes good and sometimes not so much. Depending on the day a customer comes in, they may love or hate your cake. Without a system in place, you have no control over this.

The same is true in every area of your business. If you handle customer billing differently every time, then the experience you’re delivering is going to be hit-and-miss. Some clients may find you prompt and professional, while others may feel you’re dropping the ball and can’t be trusted.

To have consistency in the products or services you deliver, there must be “a way” you do it every single time — an operating system for your business. For many small businesses, this happens naturally out of habit, and “the system” is never clarified or written down — but it should be.

Systems Are Delegatable

Until you’ve got clear systems in place, you are doomed to one of three possibilities:

1. Doing it yourself.
2. Being frustrated that your employees don’t do it right.
3. Being hostage to an employee who does it right.

In the earliest stages of running a business, you do everything yourself — answering the phones, setting appointments, performing the services and selling the goods — but eventually you run out of time to do it all, and you decide it’s time to bring on someone else to help out.

Without documented procedures in place, onboarding new employees is unnecessarily hard. Often, learning new tasks will involve trial and error until the new employee finds a method of completing the task that works for him or her. Then, if your employee decides to leave, you’re in the same boat all over again — ready to begin an entirely new process of trial and error.

With clear systems, you go from abdicating tasks to delegating them. Training someone who has the skills required for the job becomes a simple matter of orientation because you’ve set clear expectations.

Systems Are Measurable

When things are done the same way each time, they become measurable in a new way. For example, if you do your employee training differently for the same role every time, then you can’t possibly know what’s working and what isn’t. Sometimes you’ll end up with brand new team members who are productive within days of starting, and sometimes you might have team members who lag or end up not working out. Some employees with similar experience levels in the same role will perform better than others, and you’ll have no idea how or why.

On the other hand, when you write down and train employees on how they’re expected to do their job, you can reasonably expect them to efficiently and effectively start working for you. Your entire business can become measurable and, by looking at those numbers, you can quickly see when everything and everyone is operating normally, when something is wrong, and when it’s time to step in and make some changes.

Systems Are Improvable

When you’re able to measure the details of your business, you suddenly have a whole new ability to improve things. For example, when hiring new employees, you might know that your current method retains 90% of employees for three months. Armed with this knowledge, you could try a new style of onboarding ‒ introduce them to working for your company in a new way, shorten it, or make it longer. Pretty soon, you’d be able to measure your new results and determine whether the changes you made are an improvement.

From there, you could try again and, step-by-step, experiment your way to a much more effective presentation. Or a better cake. Or better packaging or customer service or advertising. Without systems, you’re guessing at what works and what doesn’t, who’s good at their job and who’s not, and what your clients like or don’t. With systems, you have the ability to create a measurably better business over time by using the one strategy that is time-tested and proven to work in all businesses: trial and error.

Systems Are Scalable

When you don’t have clear systems in your business, growth can be challenging. You’ll find yourself overwhelmed trying to deal with the hit-or-miss results of delegation without a plan, or trying to keep up with everything manually but ultimately running out of time and dropping balls. Quality will suffer, and customers will notice.

Once you have systems that are predictable, measurably working, and clear enough that you can delegate them successfully, doing more becomes a simple matter of throwing more resources at it. If you want to bake more cakes, hire more bakers. If you want to manage more leads, hire another salesperson. Growth becomes a choice.

Systems Are Automatable

In every industry, companies are replacing high-cost systems managed by people with low-cost, high-volume systems managed by software. Salons and yoga studios are booking appointments and selling passes online. Restaurants are taking reservations online. Coffee shops are taking orders and payments online. Once tasks are organized into repeatable systems, streamlining them with automation becomes an option.

Of course, not every system is automatable, but for those that are, employing software to reliably, instantly and inexpensively run things is changing the game.

Systems Are Sellable

Systems create value in your business. Any prospective buyer or investor needs to know that if or when you, the owner, go away, there’s a viable business left behind. Having a couple of well-trained employees is cold comfort to a new owner who knows that any employee can leave at the drop of a hat.

To a prospective buyer, systems that are documented in enough detail that they’re easy to follow are, as much as the customer list or anything else, what matter. Systems ARE the business. So, in the truest sense, the building of systems is the actual stuff of business building.

Where to Begin Systemizing

Developing systems means documenting the exact steps involved in correctly executing a project or task. The first and most important step in developing any process is to explain the “why” behind it. What is the point of this task; why is it important, and what is it trying to solve? By explicitly stating the purpose of the procedure, any employee who takes on the project in the future will know the value of what they are doing. Follow these steps to get started with systemizing your business:

Step 1: Identify the Individual Processes That Occur in Your Business

Now that the value of systems is clear, how and where do you start systemizing your entire business? If you are like many entrepreneurs, you agree with the idea of systemization and automation but feel overwhelmed at the prospect of actually making it happen.

Systemizing your business will take a while to complete, but the first step is to list all the responsibilities of each position in your company, and then eventually have that employee write down the detailed steps involved with each of those responsibilities. For example, your accountant may be responsible for keeping track of payments, depositing checks and paying the bills; have him or her write every step he or she takes to complete each of those tasks.

Sometimes, it’s difficult for employees to put their finger on exactly what they do all day, much less break it down into process-sized chunks. In that case, here’s an effective trick: Have them grab a notepad, or use a time-tracking tool such as Toggl or WiseTime, and write down every single thing they do all day, every day, for a week or two.

Pretty soon, they’ll have a complete list of their responsibilities which can then be thoroughly documented in an operations guide.

Step 2: Document Processes With Urgent Delegation or Improvement Needs First

With so many systems in your business, where should you begin? If you’re looking to promote an employee to a new role, or an employee announces he or she is leaving the company, be sure to have them document each responsibility within their role so their replacement can quickly pick up where they left off. Similarly, before an employee delegates any task, make sure the task is well-documented.

Other important tasks to focus on are those that need improvements, especially if they impact your company’s ability to reach its major goals. For example if you’ve noticed a dip in one of your KPIs — such as fewer sales, lower customer or employee satisfaction, higher churn — you can dig in and figure out where the problem is as you document the process. Often, just the act of writing down the steps of a task can help you or your employees identify where the inefficiencies are and correct them.

Step 3: Test Your Written Processes Manually

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is jumping in and automating a brand new process without first trying it manually. Why is this important? Working through a procedure sans automation forces you to understand what it is and how it works.

Along with understanding your process, comes the ability to tweak it and cut off any extra, unnecessary steps and fill in any missing steps. If your system is flawed, you’ll most easily spot it when you’re doing it by hand, and you’ll be able to stop and fix it. With automation, it is specifically built to complete your actions exactly how it’s told, whether the process is correct or not. You want to get it right before you automate it.

Performing processes manually first also shows you how long a process originally took to complete so that you will later be able to determine the ROI of automating it.

Step 4: Store Your Processes in a Place Where Others Can Access Them

Once your procedures are written out and tested, it’s important to make sure your employees know exactly where and how to access them. This can come in handy in a variety of situations, including when an employee gets hired, promoted, or is covering for a coworker who is temporarily out of office.

Many companies put their processes in an internal wiki or knowledge base, create a Google Drive or Dropbox account, or use more complex tools such as Confluence that can link to project management software.

Step 5: Map Out Your Written Processes

Before automating written processes, many people find it helpful to visually map out each step. Creating visual representations — especially of longer, more complicated processes — can help you avoid potential challenges you’ll come across in building your automation. For example, a written process for recruiting new employees might list the different emails the recruiters would send at each stage of the hiring process, but until you actually map it out, it’s difficult to picture how each piece fits into the puzzle.
Some automation platforms, such as ONTRAPORT and Infusionsoft, have visual campaign builders that allow you to create your map and your automation at the same time. But if your platform doesn’t have this capability, you can easily create visual process maps using tools like LucidChart or Sketch.

Determine What to Automate

Once you’ve identified, documented and mapped your most valuable internal business operations, you have the basic framework needed to begin automating — but that doesn’t mean you should automate every single process you have. Here are some ways to decipher whether a task is best left to employees or if you’d benefit from automating it.

Identify Potential “Automation-Friendly” Processes

Once your team has worked through the processes themselves and made any necessary adjustments, you can begin to identify some of your most automation-friendly tasks — that is, the tasks that you perform repeatedly, that are the same every time you do them, and don’t require critical thinking to complete. It is important to remember that even if they’re considered automation-friendly, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should end up automating them. They are automation-friendly if they are:

Repetitive

If this operation is completed routinely, it may be a good candidate for automation — especially if it’s done the exact same way every single time, without variation. Examples include accounting and invoicing, payroll (particularly for salaried employees), technology backup, and self-serve employee tasks such as requesting time off and managing their 401k accounts.

Delegatable

Tasks that can be done by anyone and don’t require your special skills or knowledge are good potential candidates automation. As long as you can map out a process, it should be teachable or automatable — or a little of both.

Tedious

These tasks may be straightforward, but you dread doing them everyday. They don’t require much brain effort, just a lot of your time.

Long

Tasks that, although important and somewhat complex, take up a considerable amount of time and don’t require you to do the initial research. You can easily step in when the task is nearly complete and give approval, oversight and/or direction on next steps.
 

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Time-sensitive tasks, or at least parts of them, should be automated when possible, ensuring you get everything done on time to keep your business running smoothly.

Not All Systems Should Be Automated

Just because you’ve deemed a task automation-friendly, doesn’t mean it should be done. According to Search CIO, automating for the sake of automating is a recipe for failure. It’s important to carefully consider which actions are best left to people, which are okay to delegate to automation, and which should be a hybrid.

With the right combination of automated and non-automated tasks, you’ll find that you and your team will be able to focus on the most important aspects of your business, without sacrificing quality. Here are some ways to spot the difference between the automation “shoulds” and “should-nots”:

Your team should handle the process if it requires:

Brain Power and Creativity

Automation can have a negative effect on quality when the tasks in question involve creativity, research or human sensibilities. These types of tasks are best done by people and can do more harm than good when automated.

A Unique Skill Set and Expertise

When a task involves using skills and knowledge that require specific training and education to complete, it’s probably not a good candidate for automation. Instead of leaving tasks like professional writing or graphic designing to automation, you should use automation tools to simply streamline the assigning and reviewing of these tasks, and use templates when appropriate.

Sensitive Information

Tasks that involve handling sensitive information, such as credit cards or social security numbers, can be both positively and negatively affected by automation. Because automation runs without questioning the process, it’s always best to keep a human eye on processes involving sensitive information. In these cases, instead of taking over 100% of a task, automation can simply assist or remind your employees of their manual tasks.

Tough Decisions

Any tasks that require high-level decision-making abilities — especially those that aren’t based on repetitive criteria — should not be automated. For example tasks typically handled by managers or executives regarding the hiring and firing of employees are handled that way for a reason: They require critical thinking and the ability to make the right call on tough decisions. Similarly, decisions regarding budgeting and employee resource planning ideally involve a team member at some stage.

In-Person Interactions

This one is a bit obvious, but it’s important when reviewing your processes prior to automation that you’re aware of which aspects of the process require in-person conversations or simply require human emotional or relational intelligence.

Combining Automation and Manual Tasks

Many processes have components that are better done by hand but still have steps that can be automated to improve efficiency. In these cases, you don’t have to pick one or the other — you can marry the two with automated tasks and notifications that seamlessly remind your team to complete their portion of the process. Let’s use customer refunds as an example. When someone returns your product or cancels your service, it would be a mistake to automatically refund everyone who requests it without an employee checking over the details by hand.

As your business grows larger, it would cost employees far too much time to manually dig through request emails and calls, gather information from spreadsheets about why this person is requesting a refund, individually reply to every request in a timely manner, and make the necessary updates in the payment system. This is where combining automation and manual tasks comes into play. You can automate the parts where the customer requests the refund and shares information about why they want it, then send an automated task to your finance department to manually check out the case. This gives you the best of both worlds, as it saves your employees time while maintaining quality.

Either Way, Have a Backup Plan

Whether automated or not, there should always be a backup plan for each of your internal business processes. If you keep your documentation up-to-date, and keep your employees trained on how to find and execute processes, your business will continue to function if automation breaks or is disrupted.

Automating Your Internal Business Processes

Once you understand which business operations are best to automate, you’re almost ready to begin building them into your automation software. But before you get started, it’s important to have a basic understanding of what BPA is as a whole.

How BPA Works

Business process automation is essentially the engine that powers all the internal tasks that keep your company running. Whether set in motion by specified actions or a date-based trigger, you can set up an automatic and related reaction to take place to maintain quality in your processes, at scale.

At its core, BPA is a sophisticated form of if/then logic. When you create an automated internal process, you control what you want to happen based on all the possible scenarios, and the automation platform takes it from there. This allows you to create dynamic, unique paths that deliver the right results and remind team members to take the right actions at the right times.

Implementing BPA in Your Business

BPA is designed to streamline your entire business. Over the years entrepreneurs have come up with creative ways to simplify internal processes for virtually every department. Here is some automation inspiration for each key area of your business:

New Employee Recruiting

A recruiter’s job is to seek out right-match prospective employees, and get them in the door for interviews and eventually a job offer. Recruiters are often great with people and have a strong intuitive ability to identify prospects’ strengths in order to match them with a role that suits them — and that’s where their talents are best put to use. When recruiters are spending all their time sending repetitive follow-up emails and manually categorizing prospects based on their application information, they have less time to focus on their job match-making skills.

Here are just a few processes recruiters can streamline with automation:

• Intake, storage and organization of job applications, resumes and notes
• Email follow-up to decline applications or begin the interview process
• Scheduling and coordinating interviews
• Providing prospective employees with pre-interview information such as location and parking
• Sending job offers and tracking contract signature statuses

Automation Usecases for Recruiting

The first 40 percent of the recruiting process can be automated without losing quality. The automation starts when the prospective employee fills out an application form on the careers page. That form automatically sends information to your CRM and categorizes that prospect based on his or her job interest.

Upon submitting the form, you can arrange for prospects to automatically receive an email letting them know their application was received and is in review. Next, you might automatically send them a test that serves two purposes: Based on how quickly it’s completed, it helps to sort out active vs. passive interest, and their score gives the recruiter information on which to base next steps.

Once the applicant submits his or her test, the recruiter will receive an automated task to review it — this is the first step that requires any human interaction. The recruiter then fills out an internal form with notes about the test, application and resume. From there, the recruiter will handle the process of scheduling interviews, and ultimately hiring the best candidates.
 

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After the prospective employee signs his or her contract — where your recruiters’ responsibilities end — your human resources (HR) employees’ responsibilities begin. Your HR team is in charge of caring for your active employees’ well-being from their first day on the job through the end of their employment.

When your HR team is busy manually adding chatted and emailed time off requests to the calendar and emailing every new hire repetitive onboarding information, they don’t have time to do the root of their job: ensuring each and every employee has what he or she needs.

Here are a few internal processes HR professionals can streamline with automation:

• Time off requests
• Expense reports
• Payroll
• Benefits information and enrollment
• Employee annual reviews
• Employee surveys
• Policy and handbook agreements

Automation Usecases for HR

Once new employees sign their employment contract, the automated HR onboarding emails begin. Everything from what to expect on the first day, to what to wear, to where to park their car will go out in automated emails to ease new employees’ minds before day one.

Once employees begin work, they will receive a series of other helpful emails, each containing important must-know information about working for your company. You can set up onboarding emails to periodically send to employees for their first 90 days, containing information about their benefits, reviews, and more.

You can also send automated emails to employees past their 90 days in the form of a newsletter. This newsletter could contain important details about upcoming events, new or changed rules or procedures, and other important information.

In addition to automated emails, HR can also set up automation around managing employees’ needs by giving each one access to a personal employee portal. In this portal, they may be able to complete self, peer and manager reviews, request time off, look at the employee calendar, manage their benefits and more. Making each of these tasks self-serve will free up your HR team’s time so that they can focus on improving company benefits, caring for their community and more.

Management

Whether you’re the only manager at your company or have a whole team of managers, automating menial managerial tasks is critical. Because it’s important for managers to spend their time on higher level skills, the less time they spend on administrative work, the better.

Here are a few internal processes managers can streamline with automation:

• Task review and oversight
• Reporting and metrics
• Managing communications, time and money with freelancers and contractors

Automation Usecases for Management

Many of management’s automated processes work in conjunction with HR automation — so if you already have a self-serve employee portal where people can request time off and leave reviews, you’re already halfway there.

An additional automation you can set up is a weekly round of reviews for each employee to check in with his or her manager. Along with this comes a weekly email reminder to the employee before the review is due and an email to the manager to review it once it’s submitted.

Finance

Your finance team is responsible for making sure money is properly flowing in and out of your business, so if they’re spending all their time manually emailing every client whose credit card declined or is about to expire, they’ll only be able to handle so much.

Here are a few internal processes your finance team can streamline with automation:

• Invoicing
• Billing
• Product returns and refunds
• Employee reimbursements
• Credit card recharges in case of failed payments
• Payroll

Automation Usecases for Finance

Similar to many other departments, much of the finance team’s internal process automation relies on internal forms built into your automation software that contain form fields. For example, when an employee wants to be reimbursed for a business expense, instead of sending one-off emails or trying to get verbal approval, he or she can just fill out an internal form that explains the expense, lists details of the purchase and allows them to attach a photo of the receipt. This information is then stored in your CRM and you can set up a trigger to automatically email the person on your team who is responsible for approving and completing reimbursements.

Marketing and PR

Your marketing and public relations (PR) teams are the creatives of the company. The more time they spend individually writing notes in calendar invites about partners and influencers, and manually keeping track of those relationships, the less time they’ll have to focus on creating valuable content and experiences for your brand.

Automation Usecases for Marketing and PR

You might be interested in building relationships with reporters and media outlets so that you can build up excitement about your latest product launch, event or sale on a public platform. Internal forms for building media connections might contain fields for your team to write notes about relationship progress with these reporters, record press mentions, and add new leads that may be worth exploring.

Service-based companies, such as software companies, restaurants and spas depend on reviews and would likely benefit from strengthening relationships with review sites. These internal forms’ fields might focus more on where and when a review has been posted, if any information is outdated or incorrect, and whether you’ve reached out to the media to provide software feature update information.

Many of the other practices involved in your team’s marketing are more client-facing and would be considered marketing automation. While business process automation focuses on eliminating manual administrative tasks, marketing automation focuses on automating the delivery of customer and lead experiences.

After Automation

There’s more you can do after you’ve automated your business processes. Here are just a few of the ways you can improve your business post-automation:

Improving Employee Training

One of the first things you’ll notice post-automation is that training new employees is easier than ever. When your procedure documentation is kept up-to-date and automated, new employees will quickly be able to get acquainted with how your business runs and what is expected of them.

Fixing and Optimizing Processes

Because your automated system gives you oversight into all of your automated systems, you and your employees will easily be able to spot and make adjustments along the way when something breaks, changes or is learned.

For example, if you notice that your stats are declining, you can dig into your automation logs to find the root cause. It could be that a task is not firing, a wrong form is being sent out, or employees are not completing their tasks or forms. Whatever the problem may be, you’ll be able to identify it and fix it immediately.

Managing Your Team

With business process automation, management becomes less about the act of actually pulling stats on how your team is performing and more about how to support your team towards improvements.

Scaling Your Business

When systems are automated, time and resources are no longer part of the equation and you gain the ability to scale. For example, if you have automation in place for credit card recharges when customers’ cards decline, instead of having to individually reach out to every single customer (there’s obviously a cap on the number of customers you can do this with, because you only have so much time), you now have the ability to contact an unlimited number of customers without taking any time at all.
 

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As you automate more tasks, your employees will have more time to focus on their areas of expertise. As a result, you’ll have happier employees who are likely to stick around longer and perform better.

Delivering Higher Quality Experiences

When team members are responsible for an unmanageable number of repetitive manual tasks, quality goes out the door and quantity becomes the top priority. Out of necessity, corners get cut and some balls inevitably get dropped. With automation in the picture, you can begin to introduce more detail to your processes. For example where a recruiter may have only had time to respond manually to the candidates who were a strong fit for the job, automation also allows them to reach out to those who were not selected.

Lowering Your Operational Costs

Most employees have time-consuming tasks that are best handled with automation software. Instead of paying them to do those tasks manually, having automation take over those parts of their jobs allows you to replace those mindless hours of work with meaningful tasks that are more valuable to your business. It can also potentially help you to cut the cost of contracted workers such as freelancers and agencies who might pick up some of your company’s delegatable tasks.

Process Maintenance Best Practices

Keeping your automated operations in top shape doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are four simple ways to spot a process that needs attention:

If It Isn’t Producing the Results You Intended

There will be times where even a task that you documented in detail won’t produce the results you wanted when automated. This action worked when done manually but, for some reason, in your automation system it’s not doing what you hoped. Whether the breakdown spawns from employees not following their portion of the process or the automation being set up wrong, it’s all fixable.

When someone isn’t following your documented procedures, you can fix the problem with training that clarifies your expectations. If your process was followed and it still didn’t go as planned, it may be time to look at how to improve things so the error can be avoided in the future. This could mean going into your automation software and adjusting a trigger or adding new elements to your internal forms.

If There Has Been a Significant Change in the Business

When big changes happen in your business, it’s beneficial to be proactive and rework procedures before a breakdown occurs. For example, if you launch a brand new product type, payment option, or marketing campaign, or you experience significant business growth, lots of internal process changes will be needed in order to adapt and scale properly.

You’ll need to make sure people are communicating, not doing double work, and handling the flow as efficiently as possible. Other changes that may trigger a process review might be new laws or industry rules, the adoption of new technology in the business, or the decision to do some work remotely instead of in a single space.

If You Find a Better Way of Doing It

The more experience you and your team gain, the more likely you are to find new and better ways of doing your existing routines. Whether these new ideas come from business conferences, a new article, observing how other businesses are doing things, or even a tip from a peer or a sharp employee, these new ideas are worth testing out in your business. It’s important to note that sometimes these ideas don’t go as planned, so there will be some trial and error.

You might try a new way of advertising, a different approach to sales presentations, or a twist on your product. Some things will work better than before, and some won’t. When they do, that’s the time to update your system documentation to reflect what the organization has learned.

If You Spot Overdone Processes During a Deep Dive

Periodically, you and your team should set aside time to do a deep dive. This is where you look at each of your documented and automated processes on a big-picture level to ensure they all make sense. Sometimes, there can be too much of a good thing, and unnecessary steps get added to procedures in an effort to make them better. Over time, something that was simple and effective can begin to look like a daunting maze.

These systems can pile up on one another and become overwhelming. To prevent overdone processes, it’s valuable to plan an annual or quarterly deep dive where you look for opportunities to improve, streamline and simplify things. Doing so will keep your business’s improvements on track and can ultimately save you time and money.

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What’s inside this Marketing Analytics Blueprint?

Preparing for Tracking

Learn about the two main categories of marketing tracking, how they’re different from each other, how they work together to give you a full view of what’s happening in your marketing campaigns, and how to set them up to get the most out of your tracking.

Analyzing Your Data

There’s a lot you can do with marketing tracking, and trying to do it all at once can get overwhelming. Here’s how to use your campaign goals and the customer lifecycle to select the data you’ll analyze first.

Interpreting and Optimizing Your Results

Collecting your data is just the beginning. Now that you know how various elements of your campaigns are performing, you can use that knowledge to make adjustments and improvements through split testing.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Tracking and analyzing your marketing data can open up a whole host of opportunities. Here’s how using your marketing tracking data to make decisions can positively impact your business.

INTRODUCTION

What is Marketing Tracking?

Marketing tracking entails monitoring the actions that leads and customers take within your marketing campaigns. With data gathered from marketing tracking, you can discover which ads, landing pages, emails and other marketing assets your audience is clicking on, as well as what actions they take from there. Tracking information is gathered from unique identifiers or codes on a person’s computer or web browser that are communicated to your marketing tracking system.

Why Should I Invest in Marketing Tracking?

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just getting started, you’re not truly marketing to your full potential if you’re not tracking. Putting time and resources into producing, launching and advertising marketing campaigns, without setting up a way to monitor what’s working and not, makes it nearly impossible to know how you can improve.

If you’re currently running or thinking about running marketing campaigns for your business, investing in marketing tracking will give you the insight you need to understand the effectiveness of your marketing and to improve your results over time.

The Benefits of Marketing Tracking

Adding tracking to your marketing campaigns comes with several benefits, including:

Developing a Better Understanding of Your Customers

Understanding your customers’ wants and needs is essential to earning their business, and the best way to determine where their interests lie is by tracking your marketing.

According to Pronto Marketing, “When you find a particular advertisement, slogan or other marketing technique that sticks with them, build it up. You can incorporate it in promotional items, or inject it into your social media posts. Gauging your customers’ reactions helps you create a branding image that can last a lifetime.” This strategy works for anything — whether there’s a particular pain point that customers respond well to or you discover that they prefer pictures vs. illustrations.

Identifying Trends and Predicting Results

The longer you have marketing tracking running on your campaigns, the more trends will show up in your marketing data. As you begin to notice these patterns in your results, you’ll gain the powerful advantage of being able to more accurately predict your future campaign results so that you can make better decisions for your business.

For example, if you have one month to reach a campaign goal, you might go in after one week to evaluate how it’s performing. At this point, you can look at how many people have already converted, and use that information to calculate how many are likely to convert by the end of the month. This can help you understand if you’re on track or not and equip you to make adjustments accordingly.

Saving Marketing Budget

Spending money on advertising each month is difficult to justify when you’re not sure whether it’s working or not. With marketing tracking in place, you can save money by identifying your company’s top-performing (and least effective) advertising platforms and ads and adjusting your spend accordingly.

Improving Overall Marketing Strategies and Techniques

Marketing tracking will show you which marketing strategies and techniques are working and which aren’t. Over time and with the right setup, you’ll be able to learn as you go and constantly adjust your campaigns based on your tracking results.

For example, if your data shows that in nine out of 10 cases, sales pages with testimonials performed better than those without, you could safely predict that your next sales page will perform better if it includes a testimonial.

Proving the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns

Thinking your marketing efforts are going well is great, but knowing is better. Tracked marketing data is the evidence you need to prove the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of your campaigns to investors, executives and your team.

Knowing Exactly Where to Focus Your Marketing Efforts

Once you know which marketing platforms are outperforming others, you can choose to either dedicate time to optimize the underperformers, or stop spending money on them altogether in order to focus only on the platforms that are working. Then, as you begin to focus and optimize your marketing, you’ll see overall better results.

What to Consider Before Setting Up Marketing Tracking for Your Business

If you’re running marketing campaigns for your business, marketing tracking is a must; but before you get started, here are some factors to consider:

Where Your Business Currently Is

Before getting started with marketing tracking, there are a few prerequisites that every business should already have in place: a fully-developed product and business, a website/landing pages, and ideally a CRM that collects and stores data.

Your Marketing Software

Are you using several single-point solution tools (such as LeadPages, MailChimp and Shopify) or an all-in-one platform (such as ONTRAPORT or Infusionsoft)? Before you begin tracking your marketing, consider the number of data sources that you’ll be managing. The more separate marketing tools you’re using, the more steps you’ll need to take to get all that data in one database to analyze — and the more difficult it will be to ensure your data is accurately synced.

It’s also important to consider whether your marketing software has tracking features built in or if you’d need to purchase a separate tracking software.

It Requires Ongoing Maintenance and Analysis

For best results, you’ll have to actually get involved with the data. This means taking the time to look at it, analyze it, and optimize on an ongoing basis. Many businesses have a team member dedicated to results analysis. However, even if you’re not at that stage yet, you can and should still set up marketing tracking so that your efforts are being tracked — you’ll be able to access that historical data whenever you are ready.

The Goal of This Blueprint

This blueprint will walk you through the process of understanding, setting up and running marketing tracking. By the time you’ve finished reading each of the chapters, you will know best practices for using the right types of tracking at the right times and know how to optimize your campaigns based on tracking results.

Preparing For Tracking

Running your marketing campaigns without tracking in place is going into marketing blind. Even if you’re not ready to analyze the data yet, ONTRAPORT Campaigns Director Sam Flegal says, “You should still prepare because you can’t get those numbers back. If you have no tracking, it’s lost data.” If you want the data to be useful and relevant, it’s important that you monitor it over a long period of time — ideally from the second you launch your campaign.

The importance of tracking as early as possible is undeniable, yet the vast majority of marketers are still not doing so in their own campaigns. In fact, Marketing Expert and Criterion.B Founder Jon Simpson says, “74% of marketers can’t measure or report how their efforts impact their business.”

In this chapter, we’re going to outline the key players involved in marketing tracking, how they’re different from one another, and how to set them up on your own campaigns.

The Main Players

There are two main players in marketing tracking that you’ll want to introduce to each of your marketing campaigns: UTM variables and tracking scripts. They are not the same thing; however, they can (and should) be used at the same time. The main difference between tracking scripts and UTM variables is that tracking scripts show you how your audience interacts with your website, and UTMs show you how they got there.

Think of marketing tracking like a store security system. When you walk into the store, the door you walk through beeps to let the clerk know which door you walked through. This is like UTMs, which keep track of where your campaign visitors come from. Once you’re inside the store, the security cameras are rolling and monitoring you throughout your entire shopping experience. This is like tracking scripts which, once set up, monitor your campaign visitors as they make their way through your campaigns.

Here’s what you should know about each one:

Urchin Tracking Monitors (UTMS)

In any marketing campaign, you likely promote your sales page across multiple platforms, whether that is an ad you push into your prospects’ Facebook news feed, a banner ad on Google or a hyperlink in an email. Across all of these platforms, you’ll include a link to your sales page and, while the link destination is the same, if you add on an Urchin Tracking Monitor (UTM) variable, the text in each link will be different. A UTM variable is a series of tags that you attach to the end of your URLs to determine where the people who visit your pages come from. These tags are organized into five categories: campaign, lead source, medium, content and term.

Here is an example of what a typical link using UTM variables will look like:

https://ontraport.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Post&utm_campaign=Email%20Ebook
&utm_term=Nov_1&utm_content=Download_Now

This link will still direct anyone who clicks it to ontraport.com. It will also store the following information in their browser:

• Lead Source: Facebook
• Medium: Post
• Campaign: Email Marketing Ebook
• Term: Nov_1
• Content: Download_Now

If visitors provide their contact information on a form on your page, this information is also stored in their contact record in your CRM system.

How to Format Your UTM Variables

• Campaign (Required): When filling in the campaign category of a UTM, you’ll want to consider the name of the campaign you’re sending traffic to and what you want people to click on or opt in for.
• Lead Source (Required): This is where you fill in which platform or website your link will be placed on or where the leads are coming from. Some examples include Facebook, Google, email, blog, etc.
• Medium (Required): In what kind of format is the link contained? This is the medium on the platform that you used to link to. A social media post? A Facebook newsfeed ad? A blog article?
• Content (Optional): This variable should include identifying information about the specific content they clicked on. What version of an ad was it? What headline was it? What image did it have? What CTA did it have? This variable should be completely unique for each link.
• Term (Optional): This variable is generally used for search platforms and is where you would put the information about the terms you are bidding on. In Google, this can be the specific search term or keywords that a lead would use to find your Adwords campaign. You could also use it to identify the audience that you used for an ad on Facebook.

The important thing to remember is that once you’ve set up the UTM structure for a specific URL, it’s crucial that you use the variables you’ve established consistently. Keep the spelling, spacing and capitalization exactly the same each time you use a variable, otherwise they will be tracked as two different variables. For example, facebook, Facebook, _Facebook and -Facebook would all be considered different variables, even though they are the same word.

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Once you’ve decided on the best variable structure for your campaign, you can put those variables into a UTM link generator. Click here to generate one now. If you are using ONTRAPORT to run your campaigns, there is a built-in UTM link builder on each page in the Tracking tab of your account.

Putting UTMs to Use

Based on all of this information, you might be wondering exactly when you should use UTM variables, and the answer is: any time you’re sending traffic to your own content. Whether you’re including a link to your landing page in a blog article, a social media post or an ad, it’s important to use a link with UTMs so that you can determine which of those sources are responsible for your landing page traffic. That allows you to measure the results of your time and money spent promoting your business via different channels.

Tracking Scripts and Pixels

To track the leads who are visiting your landing pages, you’ll use tracking scripts, which are pieces of code that you add into the source code on each page (learn how to do this below). Tracking scripts allow you to see what’s holding your leads’ attention, what content they are responding to, how long they’re staying on your page, and how they interact with your site. Tracking scripts also allow your advertising or tracking platform to identify visitors to your site for retargeting purposes.

Where to Start: The Free Tools

Google Analytics

One of the most popular and powerful tracking tools out there, Google Analytics can display in-depth stats about your website’s traffic. You can see how many total visits your site earned, how many unique visitors, the average session length, bounce rate and much more. It integrates with Google’s AdWords platform for measuring the ROI of your paid search advertisements. You can create a free account and place your own tracking code on your website to start gathering this data.

Even if you don’t add any other scripts to your pages, Google Analytics is one you don’t want to live without. Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to generate your own Google Analytics tracking code snippet.

Google Remarketing

The Google Remarketing Tag allows you to retarget those who have visited your site with advertisements. It adds your web visitors to a remarketing list, and you can send ads to those on that list.

For detailed instructions on how to generate your Google Remarketing code, check out this article.

Facebook Tracking Pixel

If you advertise on Facebook, adding their tracking pixel to your pages is a must. Facebook’s Pixel tracks visitors to your site and ties their data to any known Facebook accounts. This makes it possible to retarget those who visit your website, reducing your ad costs and increasing your conversions.

Even if you are not yet running Facebook ads, if you think you may do so in the future, you should add this tracking pixel to your site so that it can start collecting visitor data for you to use in future advertising campaigns. You can also install event codes on your pages, which are, according to Facebook, “actions that happen on your website, either as a result of ads (paid) or not (organic).” Facebook has nine standard events that it tracks and then optimizes your ads for conversions.

For step-by-step instructions on how to generate your own Facebook Pixel, click here.

How to Add Tracking Scripts to Your Page

Adding tracking scripts to your page is straightforward — especially if you use a landing page creator on a platform like ONTRAPORT. You simply grab the code from whatever tracking tool you’re using (Facebook, Google, etc.) and paste it into either the custom header or footer code section.

Technically, you can put the tracking script in either the header or footer of your pages, but we recommend putting it in the footer. Tracking scripts in the header prevent page images from loading first, so visitors will be staring at a blank white screen for longer, and the perceived load time is longer.

A great way to help you organize the tracking scripts that you add to your pages is to label them within the code itself. This may sound confusing, but it is very simple. Before each individual snippet of code, you can insert a label that will tell you what tracking tool it is referencing. For example, enclosing the label “Google Analytics Code” with <!– –> brackets essentially tells the browser not to read that portion of the code. The final label looks like: <!– Google Analytics Code –>

This way, when you have multiple tracking scripts on one page, you can easily see which tracking script is for what.

While this sounds like a lot of work — and it can be during the initial setup — after adding them to your pages, you’re set for life. You will not need to make changes to your tracking scripts.

Pixels

Once you’ve added tracking scripts to your pages, the scripts can then pixel your audiences — that is, they can place a little bit of code on your site visitors’ browsers (as long as they aren’t browsing in a private window or using AdBlock software). This is useful, especially in cases where a prospect is browsing your site and doesn’t fill out your forms to give you their contact information.

Without tracking, a lead not filling out your site’s forms would be game over — but with it, you get a second (or third or fourth) chance at attracting potential customers back to your site without needing any contact information for them at all. As long as retargeting scripts are installed on your pages and people are accessing your site from a non-private browser, you’ll be able to target them with ads in the future with pixels.

Retracing Your Customers’ Steps with Tracking

To begin understanding the extent that marketing tracking can improve your marketing results and add transparency to what’s working and what isn’t in your campaigns, we’ll walk you through an example.

Let’s say you own a retail business called Ava’s Boutique that specializes in women’s clothing. Marina searches on Google for “spring dresses” and one of the first few search results is a blog article about five new dress trends for spring. She clicks on this link, reads through your article, then gets a pop-up asking her to fill out a form to sign up for your company’s newsletter.

At this point, Marina will either choose to opt-in for your newsletter or not. Without marketing tracking, if she chose not to fill out your form, that would be the end of the road. You wouldn’t have any further chances to reach her with offers. But with your Google Remarketing and Facebook tracking scripts set up, Marina now has a cookie on her browser from your tracking script’s pixel that allows you to retarget her on other platforms.

In this example, let’s say Marina did choose to opt in for your newsletter — and because your UTM variable tracked that she opted in after reading your article about new dress trends, an interest in new dresses has been added to her contact record. She later opens Facebook to check her news feed, when an ad for one of your newly released dresses appears.

Excited, Marina clicks on the Facebook ad and heads back to your website — you know this because your UTM lead source told you she came from Facebook. After reading a couple of positive customer reviews and choosing which color dress she likes best, she decides to buy. She immediately gets a confirmation email in her inbox with her order details and shipping information.

After receiving (and loving) her dress, Marina receives another email with the subject line “Refer and earn!” It’s a referral email from Ava’s Boutique with a personalized link for Marina to send to her friends.

She forwards the link to her friends, who are equally impressed by your brand, and they make a purchase, too. Because you provided Marina with her very own URL for referring friends that includes a UTM showing that it’s her code, you’re able to attribute those sales to her referral efforts.

Analyzing Your Data

Once your UTMs and tracking scripts are set up, they’ll begin to gather data on every action leads and customers take within your marketing campaigns. That raw data is used to calculate metrics that give you insight into the successes and failures of your campaigns.

There’s a lot you can do with marketing tracking, but trying to do it all at once can quickly become overwhelming. Before you attempt to start tracking everything under the sun, take a step back to first consider your marketing campaign goals and where they fall within the customer lifecycle.

Tracking Based on the Customer Lifecycle

Understanding marketing tracking in terms of the customer lifecycle turns analyzing your data into a step-by-step process. According to BigCommerce, “The customer lifecycle describes the various stages a customer goes through before, during and after they complete a transaction.” From a business owner’s perspective, the customer lifecycle gives you five stages to sort leads and customers into so that you know how to effectively nurture them to the next step.

Because each stage involves varying relationship strengths with your brand, you’ll want to look at different data for each one.

Here are the five main stages of the customer lifecycle, arranged in order from least committed/weakest relationship to most committed/strongest relationship, as well as which marketing tracking metrics to look at in each stage:

Stage 1: Attract

During the Attract stage, also known as the “evaluation stage,” you’re working to initiate some form of relationship by making prospects aware of your brand. Essentially, this stage is all about introducing yourself and working to earn your new prospects’ contact information so you can keep in touch.

Audience and Goals

At this point, your audiences are cold — meaning these people are nameless (not in your CRM database), and you’re trying to do two things:

1. Cookie/pixel them so that even if they don’t opt in for anything or give you their contact information, you can at least reach out to them again with retargeting ads.
2. Get them to fill out a form with their contact information so that you can begin reaching them via email and SMS.

During this stage, Facebook and Instagram ads are a good way to get your brand discovered by potential leads. To run ads on these platforms, you create targeted audiences based on interests or demographic information that matches your brand’s ideal customer, and Facebook and Instagram place your ads in people’s news feeds based on their matching criteria. You can also use search engine ads like Google to attract new leads, but these are run based on keyword searches and can get expensive depending on the keywords you choose to bid on.

Because ads are such an integral part of this stage, many of the data points you’ll review will relate to the interactions people take with your ads.

What to Track in the Attract Stage

• Click-through rate (CTR): This shows you how many ad clicks you get per impression, which gives you an idea of how interested the audience you’re targeting is. If you have a low CTR, chances are you’re either targeting the wrong audience, or you need to make updates to your ad copy or design.
• Cost per click (CPC): CPC is how much money your advertising platform gets paid everytime someone clicks on your ad. It’s a good idea to research what a high cost per click is for your industry so that you know when you’re paying too much.

• Average time on page: In Google Analytics, you can also look at what URLs and ads work better by tracking average time on page. This number is exactly what it sounds like — how long readers are staying on your pages — and a low average time on page can indicate a few things: either your ad copy is misleading and people who clicked didn’t get what they thought they would, or the page itself did not capture their attention.

• ROI and first click attribution: About three to six months down the line (once your leads have had time to move down the customer lifecycle into your Convert stage and beyond), check which ads have the highest ROI with first click attribution. The way you would do this is by looking at your existing customers and tracing back to their very first interaction with your brand — the cold ad that introduced them to your brand in the first place.

Stage 2: Convert

Once you’ve earned leads’ contact information and they’ve shown significant interest in your brand, the next step is to encourage them to buy your product or service. The Convert phase of the customer lifecycle is all about turning qualified leads into customers. ONTRAPORT Campaign Strategist Tatiana Doscher says, “This stage is for warm-to-hot leads. This is where the sales happen.”

Audience and Goals

In the Convert stage, you know exactly who your leads are — they’re stored in your contact records and you’ve already begun to build a relationship with them. Your goal now is to get them to purchase from you, which you can encourage in a few different ways:

1. Email funnels that present your hot leads with offers
2. Retargeting ads that use the cookies/pixels you placed on leads’ browsers in the Attract stage to offer your product to them on Facebook or Google

What to Track in the Convert Stage

The two major KPIs:

• Conversions or sign-ups. Although it sounds obvious, what “conversions” actually means will depend on your campaign’s end goal. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a paid purchase. For example, a conversion could be a sign-up for a demo, a product sale, or even an opt-in for a free trial. Basically, this number tracks how many customers complete a desired action.
• Number of opportunities includes anyone who is within your sales funnel or considered a sales qualified lead (SQL).

The main way to gauge your conversions and opportunities is by looking at:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of web visitors who complete your desired action (signing up, purchasing, etc.)
• Number of conversions: The total number of people who completed your desired action
• Impressions: Brick Marketing says that an impression, “sometimes called a view or an ad view, is a term that refers to the point in which an ad is viewed once by a visitor or displayed once on a web page. The number of impressions of a particular advertisement is determined by the number of times the particular page is located and loaded.” If you’re paying for a high number of impressions but getting a low conversion rate, you know you’ll need to make some adjustments.
• Click-through rate (CTR): This is the same number that you tracked in the Attract stage, but this time you’re looking at it in a different way. In the Convert stage, you’re using CTR to determine opportunities — that is, the people who are interested and likely to convert.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA), according to BigCommerce, CPA “measures the aggregate cost to acquire one paying customer on a campaign or channel level.” This number is important to track because it shows you how each of your marketing campaigns are impacting your revenue.
• ROI: Find the return on investment by dividing the total dollar amount the ads brought in by the total amount spent creating and sending them.

The main way to keep track of conversions for email campaigns is by looking at:

• UTMs in Google Analytics. When you set up these UTMs, you’ll want to set the following parameters:
  • Medium: Email
  • Campaign name: Name it something relevant so you are able to find it later.
  • Source: This is where you’ll include the source of your email list or the type of email (e.g., “Hot-leads”).
  • Term: This is optional for email campaigns but can be used to identify individual links (e.g., “Offer-1”).
  • Content: This is also optional for email campaigns and can be used to track your individual leads with any field in your database (e.g., “user-id” or “user-email”).

Stage 3: Fulfill

Now that your leads have purchased, it’s time to deliver on your promises and wow your new customers in the Fulfill stage. This is where you add more value, ensure your customers’ success with your product, and instill confidence in their choice to buy from you.

Audience and Goals

This stage is where you’re delivering on the mission of your company. Your first priority for new customers should be to encourage them to use the product or service they purchased and to take advantage of any free resources and services you provide so they can get the most out of their purchase. There are a few effective ways to do this:

1. Use your tracking to work backwards and determine what your typical happy customers have in common. Do the customers who stick around longer usually come in from Facebook ads rather than Google? Do they tend to come back for more if they read all your onboarding emails or schedule a demo with your sales rep?
2. Email onboarding funnels that welcome and introduce new customers to your product or service.

What to Track in the Fulfill Stage

To figure out the best way to onboard your customers, you’ll first need to look at your existing customers’ experience with your brand. You can do this in a few ways:

• Look at the data you’ve already tracked in your database, including first-click attribution and engagement stats such as email opens and link clicks, compared to customer retention. You may find a correlation between customers who find your business on Facebook and customers who stick around for years. Or perhaps customers who engage with your emails are more likely to stick around than those who don’t?
• You can also directly ask your customers what they liked and didn’t like about your purchasing process with a customer feedback survey.

Once you’ve figured out your customers’ preferences, you can use that information to set up your onboarding process. If you choose to onboard new customers with an email funnel, here’s what you’ll want to look at to determine its success:

• Open rate: While open rates are one of the most unreliable forms of marketing tracking out there, it’s still a number to keep on your radar for one reason: comparing relative numbers. If you are used to an open rate of around 20% for product delivery emails and you suddenly drop off to 2%, this is a great indicator that there’s a problem with your funnel.

• Click-through rate: Are your new customers actually reading your onboarding content? Find out by keeping track of how many of them click on your linked resources.

• Conversion rate: As explained in the previous section, conversion rate does not have to mean a purchase — it simply means your customers took your desired action. In this case, it could mean your customers signed up for an onboarding call, took your online tutorial, or downloaded your guide to getting started with their new product or service.

• Conversion time: Knowing your conversion time, or how long it takes leads to go from opt-in to purchase, gives you an idea of how effective your marketing and sales efforts are. If you notice your conversion time speeding up, you can determine that you’re becoming more effective.

• Bounce/spam rate: If your emails aren’t getting through to customers, this could poorly affect your Fulfill stage — especially if you have a digital product that you deliver to customers via email.

Here are some additional onboarding strategies and things you can track for each:

• Product tutorials or training site: If you’re selling a more complex product that requires product tutorials or training, you can track activity on those pages with either a PURL or UTMs in tracked emails.

• One-on-one onboarding or welcome call: You can track what percentage of new customers schedule an onboarding call, how many show up, and their satisfaction with the call itself.
• Order fulfillment: If you ship physical products, you might include a printed card with a PURL that leads them to a training page. This way, even though it’s a physical product, you can track their engagement with your onboarding resources.

Stage 4: Delight

The Delight stage is where you strengthen your customer bonds into long-term relationships and prime them to refer more business to you. It’s an opportunity to share upsell and cross-sell offers with existing customers.

Audience and Goals

By the time you arrive at the Delight stage, you have already earned the customers and your new goal is to keep them around for the long run. Your upsell and cross-sell offers during this stage should be timed appropriately based on the customers’ stage of consumption and level of commitment to your product. Here’s how to find out when the time is right:

What to Track in the Delight Stage

• Usage: In order to get the timing of sending your upsell and cross-sell offers just right, you’ll want to know how much your customers are using your product and how committed they are, and also how long it takes to use it. Some ways to track this are through engagement back in the Fulfill stage, through opening emails and clicking on your email links and, of course, making more purchases.
• Upsell/cross-sell conversions: There are several numbers you should be using to track upsells and cross-sells including conversion rate, number of conversions, impressions, CTR, CPA and ROI. These are the same numbers listed in the Conversion stage, except this time it’s for an upsell/cross-sell offer rather than the core product.
• Email unsubscribes: When you send out your upsell or cross-sell emails, monitoring your unsubscribes is a great way to tell if your offer is on point or not. If you see a sudden spike in unsubscribes after sending out an upsell or cross-sell offer, chances are it’s because the product offered wasn’t a good match.

Other numbers to track:

• Repeat customer rate: Tracking how many of your customers have made more than one purchase is a great way to measure how effective your Delight stage is with your existing customers.

• Purchasing frequency: The more often your customers buy from you, the better. When you monitor frequency, you can start predicting when your existing customers are due for another purchase and even send an offer email when the estimated time comes.

• Customer satisfaction: This can be tracked with a follow-up survey.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): Tracking CLV, or the total amount of money a customer has spent on your business, is a great way to find out who your best customers are.

Stage 5: Refer

If you’ve played your cards right in each other stage of the lifecycle, you’ll reap your ultimate reward in the Refer stage. The greatest value you receive from your customers comes not from their initial purchase or even their upsell purchase, but from the new customers they refer to you.

Referrals are especially important because they recommend your products and services to right-match prospects. According to Deloitte, “Customers who were referred by loyal customers have a 37% higher retention rate.”

Audience and Goals

By the time you arrive at the Refer stage, your customers have been around for a while and already have a strong relationship with your brand. Now, your goal is to get them to recruit their friends and colleagues through word of mouth.

What to Track in the Refer Stage

• First-click attribution on affiliate links: When you include affiliate information in the “campaign medium” portion of your UTMs, you can use first-click attribution to determine where your new customers are coming from. When you find that they purchased from a referral, you can reward the referrer accordingly.

• Number of purchases from referrals: Find out who your top referrers are by keeping a tally of purchases.

• Participation rate: Keeping track of how many customers are actively referring your business from month to month is a great way to measure the success of your referral program. If your number of active referrers is steadily climbing, you’re in good shape.

• Affiliate link impressions: The more people who click on your partners’ affiliate links, the more potential customers are becoming aware of your brand. This also will give you other important insights such as the conversion rate for your individual referrers.

Interpreting and Optimizing Your Results

Once you’ve been tracking and analyzing your data for a while, you’ll begin to notice patterns in your marketing. Whether they’re good or bad, they’ll give you insight into how you can improve your campaigns and strategies in the future. Here’s how you can use the data you’ve gathered and studied to improve your marketing campaign results over time.

Interpreting UTM Data

Each of the five categories within your UTM has the potential to shed light on different areas of your marketing results, and you’ll view and interpret those insights inside your Google Analytics dashboard. Here’s what you can reveal and optimize within each one:

1. Campaign Performance

When you look at the “campaign” category within your UTM variables, you can quickly see which campaigns are earning you the most link clicks and engagement. For example, if you’re running five advertising campaigns on Facebook but only have the budget to keep spending money on four of them, you may pull up the UTMs related to those five campaigns, and cut the campaign with fewer conversions or engagements than the others.

2. Effectiveness of Your Lead Sources

If you want to see where your leads were when they entered your campaign, this is the section of your UTM variable to pay attention to. Knowing this information can help you to understand which lead sources are and aren’t worth your time, which ones may need some strategy improvements, and which have brought you your most loyal customers.

3. Which Mediums Are and Aren’t Working

The difference between the information you get from lead source and medium is mainly noticeable on platforms such Facebook and Twitter, where there are multiple categories within each one. For example, having Facebook as a “lead source” won’t tell you everything you need to know if you run both Facebook news feed ads and regular posts. Being able to check if your Facebook ads are outperforming your boosted Facebook posts is important and will allow you to make effective decisions about which mediums to stick with.

4. Content

This category allows you to figure out which types of content perform better than others. With split testing, for example, you may have named one version of your content “salespage_photograph” and the other “salespage_illustration” to track which version got better numbers. Knowing this information allows you to optimize accordingly and start testing other elements of your campaign’s content.

5. Term

This category can give you detailed information about which keywords and audiences are and aren’t working within your individual campaigns.

For example, if you’re running a Facebook ad campaign for women’s clothing containing nine variations of an ad, you can use the “term” category to narrow down your winners based on audiences. Let’s say you started out this campaign targeting three different groups of people. Your audiences are female college students, female working professionals, and stay-at-home moms. When you look at your UTMs for this campaign, the “term” category can help you decide which audiences to eliminate and which ones to keep.

Getting the Most Out of UTM Variables

Some marketing automation platforms, such as ONTRAPORT, track both first- and last-click attribution using the data gathered from UTM links.

First-Click Attribution

First-click attribution refers to the first link someone clicked on that led him or her to join your database — showing what converted the person from a prospect to a contact. This is helpful in organizing information such as affiliate commissions or if you want to know which specific lead sources are most successful in obtaining leads.

Last-Click Attribution

With last-click attribution, the last link a person clicked on before converting gets credit for the sale. This is helpful in understanding which of your assets are most convincing in driving sales, giving you insight into which assets to direct future ads and links toward.

What You Can Optimize With UTMs

Your Budget

When you’re able to focus on only the platforms, mediums, campaigns and content that perform best for you (or make improvements to the ones that weren’t working), you’ll start spending less money on things that aren’t working for you.

Your Time

If no matter what you do, your data consistently shows that one platform isn’t gaining momentum like the others, you might decide to adjust your plan, cut your losses and start focusing your time on more effective platforms. Or, if you’re finding that certain types of emails get more link clicks than others, you might be able to create a template from it that cuts your email writing and designing time in half.

Your Results

The longer you track and analyze your marketing data with UTMs, the more you’ll adjust your strategy to avoid setups that hurt your results and, in turn, you’ll end up with better marketing campaign results.

Split Testing

While UTMs and tracking scripts allow you to understand your traffic sources and actions, you can also gather information about what’s working and not working in your marketing through split testing your marketing assets.

Split testing allows you to pit another version — or multiple other versions — of a page, email or other resource against your original to see which one encourages visitors to convert at the highest rate.

Running a split test is neither as complicated and time-consuming as many business owners think nor is it something reserved for marketing gurus in search of the latest conversion-boosting trick or craze. It’s something everyone can and should be doing as much as possible.

“I’m of the opinion that you should be testing everything all the time,” said ONTRAPORT’s Campaign Director Sam Flegal. “Every minute you spend not testing something is a minute that you’re potentially taking a loss.”

Getting started with split testing can seem overwhelming, but once you understand the types of tests and determine what’s right for your business, actually implementing the automated tests in your marketing automation platform is simple.

What is Split Testing?

First, let’s get clear about what split testing is: Split testing is dispersing your traffic evenly across multiple versions of a marketing asset, such as a landing page, email or form, to measure performance side by side.

With a marketing automation system, your traffic is split automatically so that, for example, half of the people who click on your ad will go to one version of a landing page and the other half will go to the other version of the page. You can then compare which page prompts more visitors to achieve your goal — whether that is watching a webinar on the page, clicking a link, making a purchase, filling out a survey form, or any other action you designate.

There are two primary methods of split testing: A/B and multivariate. It’s important to note that A/B testing is not synonymous with split testing; A/B testing is one type of split test.

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A/B Testing

A/B testing involves changing a single element of your asset. You’ll split your traffic between two versions — your original and your new version — with one element that’s different.

For example, if you only change the color of the call-to-action (CTA) button on a form and everything else stays the same, you’re performing an A/B test.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing is changing multiple elements of your asset.

For example, if you want to test both the location and the color of the CTA button, you’ll have four versions of your asset to fairly encompass all the combinations (pink button at top, pink button at bottom, blue button at top, blue button at bottom) that could occur.

Three Fair Testing Guidelines

As with any experiment, there are a few ground rules to follow to ensure your results are accurate. If your results aren’t valid, you can’t rely on them and, therefore, the test won’t be of any benefit to you.

As with any aspect of marketing, there are always variables in split testing — you’re dealing with people, and people are affected by emotion, which is unpredictable. This is where having a control group for fair testing comes into play.

When running split tests, be sure to follow these guidelines:

• Test only one element at a time OR every combination of elements

If you are running an A/B test, it’s important to test only one variable at a time so that you can draw accurate conclusions about what is causing one version to perform better than the other.

If you’re performing multivariate testing, you’ll need to test all the possible combinations that could occur. It’s common for people to test multiple elements but perform the test like an A/B test — only running two versions — which doesn’t elicit useful data because you can’t confidently say which element change is contributing to the change in performance.

Following the multivariate example above, if you were to only run the pink button at the bottom of the page and the blue button at the top, you won’t know why the winner won. Was it the color, or was it the positioning?

• Run all versions at the exact same time

A common mistake people make is turning off their original page and introducing a new page, then comparing historical versus current data. This isn’t a valid comparison because the time of month, week or season could have an effect on results and you’d have no way of knowing whether the results were caused by timing or by the elements you were testing.

It’s possible your buyers are more active in the summer or perhaps mid-month when they receive their paychecks. Timing is a factor that should remain steady in order to accurately review your data.

• Wait until you reach statistical significance before making a call

Statistical significance tells you how certain you can be that your results will hold true for the long-term. The calculation factors in the size of your audience and the number of conversions; you need a large enough size audience with enough variance in your data — one page has to outperform another by a large margin — in order to have statistically significant results.

While the industry standard level of statistical significance to aim for is 90-95%, if you’re a small business without a ton of traffic, it’s probably safe to make a call once you reach 80-85%.

Once your results are deemed statistically significant, you can choose to turn off the version of your page that isn’t converting and optimize the page that is. You can determine your statistical significance easily by entering your audience and conversion numbers into online calculators, such as this one from Kissmetrics.

Determining Which Type of Test to Perform

Knowing what type of test to perform depends on your goals, how much time you have, and how quickly you want results. Consider these statements as you review the various factors to consider when deciding which type of testing to perform:

• With A/B testing, you’re making incremental changes over a long period of time to improve results gradually.
• With multivariate testing, you’re making larger changes over a shorter time frame to see results more quickly.

Stability and Risk Level

While split testing brings potential for vast improvement in your results, it also comes with a risk of worsening your results. Say half your traffic is going to Page A, which converts at 20%, and half your traffic is going to Page B, which converts at 10%. You’re losing out on potential conversions by sending traffic to the lower-converting page. However, you can always turn off versions that aren’t performing well and introduce new versions that could turn your results around for the better.

Traffic Size

If your marketing assets don’t receive a lot of traffic, you won’t have as much data to base decisions on, and it’ll take much longer to get statistically significant results. This is especially true if you’re running multivariate tests because you’re splitting your traffic among a higher number of pages, forms or emails. If you don’t have high traffic, stick with A/B testing so that you’re able to garner actionable results.

Time

If you’re planning to run a split test over a long period of time, A/B testing will suit you well. On the other hand, multivariate testing allows you to find the best version of your page faster, especially if you have a sufficient budget to advertise and bring in a high amount of traffic to increase conversions more quickly.

Performance Monitoring Resources

No matter what type of test you’re running, it’s important to monitor results throughout the duration of your campaign so that you can make adjustments as needed.

What to Split Test

You can test any element on your marketing assets — but focus on the ones you think will make a difference based on your audience and other marketing results.

Here are some ideas of things to split test on different types of marketing assets to get you started:

Landing Pages

• Headline
• Hero image
• Location of main CTA
• Number of CTA buttons
• Copy
• Colors
• Layout / location of images and copy
• Location of opt-in form on page

Forms

• Number of fields
• Number of mandatory fields
• Design
• Form location (embedded vs. pop-up)
• Pop-up form timing
• Button color
• CTA copy

Offers and CTAs

• Different products
• Different pricing
• Different value-adds (bonus product or upgrades)

Emails

• From name
• Subject line and preheader
• Images
• Body copy
• CTA copy
• Layout
• Time of send

SMS Messages

• From name
• Headline
• Copy
• CTA copy
• Time of send

Ads

• Headline
• Image
• Body copy
• Description text
• Audience

Direct Mail

• Headline
• Image
• Body copy
• CTA copy
• Layout

Split Testing Iteration and Optimization

Split testing is worthless unless you take action from what you learn. Optimization from split testing usually entails removing and replacing parts of your campaign to get the best possible conversion rate for the least possible spend. Here are five steps for optimizing your campaigns in the most efficient way possible.

The Champion vs. Challenger Method

The following method is extremely reliable for finding the best possible versions of your campaign elements:

1. For your first test, start with an A/B or multivariate test with only four total options. Choose to test something that can have a big impact such as the headline or the location of the form on the page.
2. Run your test until you have statistical confidence that one of the versions is the winner. The winner is now your champion.
3. Introduce a new challenger version. Change one more element on the page and run another test. Run until you have statistical confidence.
4. Whichever version wins is the new champion. If you want, you can increase the proportion of the traffic you’re sending to this version since you now have more confidence that it is a high performer.
5. Repeat as many times as possible before the end of the campaign.

As you continue introducing new versions, you need to have some idea of why the winner won in order to iterate and improve. Try to see your landing page from the eyes of one of your leads or customers: What was more appealing about the version that won? Maybe moving your CTA up higher on the page made it easier to see so more viewers responded to it. Maybe one headline was more effective than another because it focused on a pain point that is more significant for the audience.

Even if you are wrong, you need a theory in order to run more tests. You will use this hypothesis to shape your next test. If the outcome disconfirms your hypothesis, then come up with a new one. If it was supported, then try and add onto it.

To do this effectively requires thinking like a psychologist to understand the reasons why people are behaving the way they are. As you run test after test, even if you aren’t highly skilled at accurately predicting people’s behavior, you will gain valuable objective data, and your predictions should improve over time. One of the best things about testing is just how much you will learn about your audience. Everyone has assumptions, and sometimes proving them wrong can turn out to be highly valuable to your business.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Adding tracking to your marketing campaigns gives you the insight you need to not only understand the effectiveness of your marketing, but also begin to make data-driven decisions that move your business forward.

The Importance of Data in Business Decisions

There’s a reason behind every decision you make and, in marketing, these decisions can either be made because you had a gut feeling or because you had a long history of data trends to support it. As you may have guessed, making decisions without data to support them is a riskier choice and could result in wasted budget and lost time for you and your team.

Data expert and Forbes author Bernard Marr believes that “Data should be at the heart of strategic decision making in businesses, whether they are huge multinationals or small family-run operations,” because data leads to insights, and insights are a key factor in business growth. According to CIO, “Companies engaged in data-driven decision-making experience a 6% increase in the productivity and output of the company over the companies that do not.”

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Why You Should Strive to Be a Data-Driven Marketer

When you use data to back up your marketing decisions, you’re more likely to see better ROI, improved time and cost efficiency, happier customers, and as a result, more customers through referrals. Here’s a breakdown of some of the greatest benefits:

Understood Customers Are Happier Customers

Knowing where your strongest customers and leads come from, learning their purchasing habits, and figuring out what they’re interested in is the best way to understand your customers and tailor your marketing to them and their needs. When your customers feel catered to, they feel special — creating an experience that keeps them coming back for more.

Remove the Mystery From Your Marketing

When you involve tracking and data in your marketing process, marketing expert Almitra Karnik says, “Customer journeys become clearer,” allowing you to make decisions based on concrete data. She says, “Data collection can tell you who to market to, what kind of content or incentive to send, and what improvements you should make to a product to increase customer satisfaction.”

Data and Quality Go Hand-in-Hand

As you keep track of and analyze data over time, every decision to optimize based on the results is a data-driven one — and every decision continuously improves the quality of your marketing. Marketing Insider Group says, “Data-driven marketing helps businesses deal with new information and improve the quality of their products and services to keep up with chances in the marketing environment.”

Improve Your Marketing ROI

All of the above benefits contribute to ultimately improving your marketing ROI. Spotright says, “Knowing the right metrics means making decisions based on facts and numbers. Your marketing will operate like a well-oiled machine, resulting in an increase in numbers, revenue and ROI.”

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