You’ve done your research and picked a marketing automation solution. You’ve been trained. You set up some lists and lead nurtures and viewed reports. Now what? You could sit back and go the vanilla route with the standard set up, or you can blow this thing up with the rainbow sprinkle features and marketing automation tricks that make the software truly special. These marketing automation tricks are a little more outside the box of your typical (but important) functionality of email drips, autoresponders, lead scoring, etc. Here are five marketing automation tips to help you rock your marketing automation software and get some additional quick benefits.

1. Tweet a Known Visitor Based on Content Visited

Use this suggestion wisely. Your visitors could feel you are a little stalker-ish if you go overboard. With that said, here’s the idea. For known visitors for whom you have a Twitter profile recorded, you can set up an automation to tweet them (mention a person’s @twittername) along with a relevant message. I spoke with a representative from Lead Liaison, our marketing automation of solution, and it’s definitely do-able using webhooks and Zapier. As for other platforms, I’m sure there’s some level of configuration within the solution itself or using a tool like Zapier to help so that you can accomplish a similar outcome.

How could you use this? Let’s say a visitor downloads your latest e-book then comes back to read a blog post on a related topic. If you set up those as criteria (download this and visit that URL), you create an automation that tweets the visitor about your next blog post, webinar or other content on the topic.

Again, use this hack with care. You don’t want to be too creepy or do the Big Brother smother.

2. USE POP-UPS TO GUIDE READERS TO EXISTING INFORMATION WHILE BUILDING YOUR OPT-IN LISTS

Have you got a lot of great evergreen content on your site that could use a little love? Is it long forgotten and lonely? Create a pop-up campaign to help get some fresh eyes on that good content. Bonus: it can help you do list building, too! Next time you launch a new, long-form blog post, set up some criteria in your pop-up tool that leads readers (based on your criteria) to existing content on your blog or website. Let’s say you just published a new post on industrial widget use in China. You’ve also got some evergreen content about widget use in Asia. Your pop-up could be set to appear based on exit intent or page scroll (or any other number of criteria). Your guest gets more great content access, and you have added another name to one of your lists. You can use the specific list as scoring criteria to help get leads qualified for your sales team to follow up.

3. Personalize Content on the Page

Personalization isn’t just for email anymore. In fact, if you have ever filled out a form on this site before, you’ll see the classic “dramatic chipmunk gif” below. If you haven’t, then you’ll see Wesley from The Princess Bride.

This is just a silly example to show you how personalization can work when you have known visitors on your site. However, you could use these personalizations, depending on your marketing automation platform, to get more sophisticated. Just a few ideas include:

• Show a visitor a pop-up with information about an upcoming webinar that’s related to his or her interests based on past page visits on your site.
• Greet visitors from specific sources with special greetings.
• Show “consideration” or “decision” phase content to leads that are farther along in the sales cycle.

4. AUTOMATE TASKS WITH ZAPIER

Zapier, which I mentioned earlier in this post, is a handy service to automate a variety of different tasks — within a single service or between two service providers. In addition to using Zapier to help you tweet your visitors based on their interactions on your website, you can use Zapier to automate things like adding contacts from your email marketing solution (if you use a separate provider) to your marketing automation platform and vice versa. Use a service like Wufoo or SurveyMonkey to do surveys? Zapier can help you push responses from those services into your marketing automation or CRM system. Check out all the cool service integrations and ideas for using Zapier.

5. HELP YOUR SALES REPS WITH AUTOMATED ALERTS

Most marketing automation solutions have alert features. Why not use them to help your sales reps know when a known, hot lead is visiting an important conversion page on your website? You can set up an automation that says “when a contact has a lead score of X and visits the pricing page, alert the assigned sales rep.” This helps your sales reps reach out at the moment of interest. Cautions, here again, to not be too creepy/stalker-ish. Picking up the phone and saying, “I was watching you visit our website pages . . . ” can be a turnoff. Make sure it seems like a moment of serendipity.

Develop a process and script or opener for this type of outreach so sales reps know how to speak to the contact and touch on his or her most recent indicated topics of interest without sounding like Big Brother. A simple, “Hi, Jane. I thought I’d give you a call to see if you had any questions about pricing or features since our meeting last week.” No need to mention the fact that you know “Jane” was on the website 5 – 10 minutes ago.

WHAT SPECIAL MARKETING AUTOMATION TRICKS DO YOU USE?

Everyone knows a cool hack — or knows a guy with one. What’s yours — or your marketing tech person’s – trick? Share it in the comments below. If you aren’t yet using marketing automation software in your business, what holds your business back from moving forward? Concerns about time and resources? Don’t forget you — whether your a small business or a large enterprise, you can always outsource part or all of the martech management, so your team can continue focusing on marketing priorities instead of learning software.

CONTRIBUTED UPDATE Manage Online Reviews

Levi Olmstead of G2Crowd contributed this feedback that I thought I’d share with readers.

In the age of online reviews, every industry must adapt to the changing marketing strategy of customer feedback, peer-to-peer insights, and brand transparency. From Yelp and Google Reviews, to niche-industry review sites, those researching your company will find reviews of your company.

The revolution is here and the online review statistics behind it are staggering. 93% of local consumers use reviews to determine if a local business is good or bad and displaying reviews can increase conversion by 270%. Whether you are an early or late adopter, believer or nonbeliever, online reviews are a major driver of new customers and leads.

A marketing automation tool can help you manage your online review strategy. Email nurture campaigns can ask your best customers to review your platform at the exact right time. Your marketing automation platform can shoot an email to hot lead or prospect that includes a newly submitted review from someone just like them that could help close a big sale.