Utilizing Advertising and marketing Automation To Improve Company eLearning
Automate for a better eLearning experience
Marketing automation traditionally refers to technologies and software platforms specifically designed to assist companies and their marketing departments in their efforts to market across multiple channels and automate repetitive tasks to save time and get work done effectively.
When used correctly, marketing automation can increase the number of leads, qualify them and convert them into new sales opportunities. This type of automation is an effective tool and has many benefits for marketers, sales teams, and management.
But that is not all.
Demystify Marketing Automation
The traditional view is that marketing automation only affects the software or technology platform. By speeding up the automation of tasks, the marketing process becomes more efficient and can target specific customers or users, enabling a more personalized experience.
Examples of some of these tasks are:
- Email Marketing
- Social media posts
- Advertising campaigns
- Workflow diagrams
- Notifications
While it may seem contradictory to use automated processes to achieve individual results, it does exactly when technology and methodology are combined to establish a new paradigm.
The many advantages of marketing automation are being expanded even further. By automating repetitive tasks and processes, marketers can drive more engagement with their target audience, convert more leads, and nurture those leads more effectively.
Extending the reach of marketing automation
The same principles of marketing automation apply to corporate training and learning environments.
A goal of most eLearning programs is to create a highly personalized experience for the learner. By applying the techniques derived from marketing automation and adapting the messages and applications, it is possible to increase the effectiveness of online training platforms and achieve highly personalized, beneficial results.
We now have the methodology, technology, and opportunity to extend this innovation to learners throughout their training programs and beyond. It has opened up new worlds for corporate training and for monitoring and measuring training results.
Some of the identified benefits of automation in eLearning are:
- Providing a high level of personalization in learning experiences
- Increasing commitment to the full range of learners
- Improve communication through automated notifications
- Create insightful and custom reports
- Improving the quality of feedback throughout the training cycle
Assess the value of eLearning
As mentioned earlier, effective eLearning programs depend on audience engagement, and the feedback gained can help develop improved training campaigns that grab the audience’s attention. Not only do they generate instant enthusiasm, but they also lead to better loyalty and competence. One of the benefits of automated notifications, reminders, and reports is instant delivery and the associated ability to track and take action.
Automation helps speed a message on its way, but is also used to validate information. In fact, it can be verified that the intended message has been delivered and understood. Automation can also be used as a checkpoint for program designers to ensure that errors are minimized and learning is maximized.
The principles of marketing automation go a long way in helping the process continue throughout the eLearning experience in the following ways:
- Easily track the progress of participants in training programs.
- Assign learners to different lists as they progress through different levels of training.
- Notify learners when they hit certain benchmarks and milestones, when they meet certain goals, or when they are eligible for badges and certifications. It is possible to automate the process even further by sending digital badges, congratulatory messages and automatically updating participants’ personal profiles.
- Send messages that contain links to additional training content when the learner fails a specific goal or fails a quiz.
- Deliver updates and notifications of progress to immediate supervisors and managers on learners’ progress.
- Empower learning and drive participant engagement in eLearning programs through automated messaging. Take the opportunity to automatically award points and rewards when learners reach certain levels and achieve certain training goals. These small rewards are just as effective as games and contests in promoting healthy competition among program participants.
- Generate automatic polls or polls to get valuable feedback during training. Encourage learners to share their experiences and make suggestions for improving specific eLearning modules, courses and programs.
The principles of marketing automation can be adapted in different ways for trainers and managers who need to monitor and analyze the value of such training efforts. Problem areas can be identified and addressed by establishing workflow designs that automatically personalize each learner’s experience.
Communication is the key
In the Intel® Retail Edge Program, a recent communications survey of program members revealed some interesting results. Respondents placed email and text messages at the bottom of a list of preferred communication methods. The immediacy of these communications, however, was appreciated when the news concerned prizes earned or eligibility for rewards.
In particular, the program members tried to find out about their progress in achieving master or legend status or, conversely, about the possibility of losing this status.
Simply enabling the automatic SMS communication feature in these areas resulted in vastly improved program reviews. Based on this experience, we have found that there are several uses for automating and sending messages about reward status. Since then, we have expanded the use of automated messaging and plan to explore the expanded use of marketing automation in other program areas in the future.
We believe there are effective ways to automatically schedule events through automation, using triggers, dates and times to send automatic information. We can identify and segment different populations and use multiple methods of communication depending on individual preferences. We believe this is a way to improve and strengthen our retail sales training program.
Automation offers a way of responding to individual needs and goals. For example, we can customize communication with different messages – push, text, email, private mailbox and others. We agree that our members should be able to choose what works best for them and we hope to make the program more effective in new ways by further integrating automation.
The parallel advantage is that such bespoke programming empowers and encourages retail partner sales reps to choose not only certain types of communication but also the specific training campaigns that serve to expand their capabilities.
Summary
Marketing automation is an important component in creating and customizing a robust training platform for businesses. Automation also allows you to better communicate and interact with your participants, both individually and as a group, in their preferred methods.
This article has highlighted just a few ways that marketing automation can be uniquely applied in an eLearning environment. Is Marketing Automation Part of Your Enterprise eLearning Platform? If so, I’d love to hear how it benefits your training efforts.
Notices and disclaimers
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and trademarks may be claimed as the property of others.
Intel® Retail Edge Program
We’re a branded promotion and e-learning program for retail salespeople designed to encourage engagement during major sales seasons. To date, over 500,000 employees at large electronic retailers have completed over 20 million training modules.
