New to Marketing Automation? Here are a few benefits of integrating marketing automation into your business.
Marketing Automation – what is it and how can you use it to grow your business?
Marketing Automation is one of the newer tools out there in the marketing space. What it really does is it allows you to automate certain tasks that you may be doing manually when it comes to communicating with your customers and prospects.
Here’s a couple of ways you can use it to make an impact on your business.
You can use it to automate the communications and emails you’re sending out to your prospects. Let’s talk about that. Let’s say you have leads coming in thru a Facebook form, and these leads end up on a spreadsheet and you have a salesperson that’s supposed to be reaching out to these contacts by email or by phone. That’s a manual step. This salesperson has to draft an email, customize it for the person and then send it out. Then they have to wait for a reply. And so on…
With automation, you don’t have to do any of that. You build out email templates and they’re based on certain rules.
You can have a certain email go out to a lead that comes in from a Facebook form, automatically the minute that lead comes in.
That’s not where thing end, in fact, this is where things get interesting.
Your automation platform can look and see well, it’s been 2 days, this person hasn’t opened an email yet from me, so I think I should send them another email.
So you can now automatically send follow-up messages. And you continue on that route depending on how your prospect interacts with you.
If they don’t open that one, you can switch communication channels and send them a text message, or you can send your salesperson a notification that it’s time to call this lead because they’re not responding to email. This allows you to adjust depending on your prospects communications preferences. After all, not everyone wants to communicate via email.
Open-tracking is one way you can use as a parameter for how your automation system behaves, but you can use other variables such as clicks or pages visited on your website.
If you want your prospects to reach your blog when you’re sending out an email campaign, but they’re not reading your blog, send them a message to remind them to, maybe include some juicy tidbits from an article on your blog.
If they do end up on your blog, you can actually see which post(s) they go to and customize communications based on that!
Let’s say you’ve got a furniture blog, and your prospect is looking at articles on armchairs. The profile you’re maintaining for this prospect can factor that in, so that your team already knows what the prospect might be interested in, and respond accordingly. Your email automation can send them an email about armchairs a couple of days later, maybe talking about some popular new models.
Not only are you automating the task, which saves you time, but you’re also now able to send personalized messages to your prospects, to your potential customers with minimal effort from your sales team. This is just scratching the surface of what you can do with marketing automation.
I encourage you to look into marketing automation, if you haven’t already. It could result in huge savings in your sales process, making things more efficient and providing your prospects and customers with an experience that makes them feel you really understand them.
