With the growth in the use of the internet and e-commerce in business today, we’re also seeing a whole new world of marketing techniques. As the saying goes, ‘if you snooze, you lose’, and this has never been truer especially with digital marketing.
One area which is developing quickly is the use of marketing automation – a software platform which allows you to automate and therefore streamline your marketing efforts, as well as giving you measurable data which means that you can tell exactly what is, and what isn’t working. Marketing automation gives you the chance of offering a personalized service to your customers, but with minimal time spent.
Marketing automation helps you to carry out the following tasks easily and quickly, giving you the extra time for coming up with great marketing ideas:
- Email marketing
- Generating Leads
- Personalization of website
- Creating landing pages
- Customer retention
- Customer segmentation
- Cross-channel marketing campaigns
- Nurturing and scoring of leads
- Cross-sell and up-sell
- ROI measuring
As your business grows, carrying out all of these tasks, whilst trying to maintain a good relationship with all of your customers becomes time-consuming and costly, and this is where marketing automation comes in.
How Does It Work?
Marketing automation runs alongside your current marketing team, giving them the chance to work on the important stuff and leave the boring, time-consuming part of their job to the automation process.
Marketing automation will:
- Engage with, identify and track online customers individually
- Filter leads according to interest and engagement
- Prioritize customers from a list according to likelihood to buy
- Give useful, measurable data about individual marketing campaigns
It isn’t just about sending out automated emails. The technology has moved on a lot since the beginnings and marketing automation now works across all of the internet channels, from email to social media.
For Sales
As well as being a useful tool for the marketing team in a business, marketing automation is also extremely useful to the sales team.
80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase. -VB Insight, 2015
The sales team can get prioritized leads so that those with a higher likelihood of converting to a sale become available first.
Leads can be sorted into groups with different definitions, allowing for different sales approaches.
Through more specific marketing, potential customers are better informed and this (should) make selling easier.
Marketing automation gives better insight into the sales funnels giving the sales team a better chance at selling.
It is clear to see that marketing automation can be used to give your business’s sales and marketing efforts a real boost. So much so, that soon you won’t be able to understand how you lived without it. When running alongside a good team, marketing automation will become a core tool in the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts.
Contact us today to discuss how marketing automation can work for you.
