No longer is marketing automation reserved for big businesses with big budgets. Thanks to lower-priced platforms that have emerged onto the market, marketing automation is now possible for businesses of all sizes. With the help of this software, you can automate marketing processes and make better use of your time. But before you jump into marketing automation, it’s a good idea to know what to expect.
Let’s discuss the top reasons why your business should be utilizing marketing automation.
Track, Nurture and Qualify Leads
The customer-management component in marketing automation software allows you to track, nurture and qualify leads. By giving your leads the attention they deserve, you can guide them through the buying funnel and close more sales. You can also use the tool to predict revenue growth. As you learn about your leads and what motivates them to move forward, you can up-sell or cross-sell products that are highly personalized.
Improve the Efficiency of Your Sales Team
As your company grows, it gets harder for the sales team to give leads the attention they need. In fact, if you don’t keep up with the demand, your leads will fall through the cracks, and this will negatively impact your sales potential. Rather than hiring on new salespeople, you can use marketing automation software. With this platform, one employee can compete with a 30-person sales team. Marketing automation software gives a salesperson the capability to run automated campaigns that are triggered based on certain criteria.
Increase Revenue
Marketing automation software increases revenue because customers get more nurturing, and you have the opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell products. As you know, consumers don’t always buy the first time they land on your website. Instead, they go through various touch points that take them along the customer journey. Marketing automation software takes this journey with them, keeping them on the right path and boosting revenue.
Produce Detailed Reports
You can track all of your marketing efforts using marketing automation software and make sure that you are not missing anything. With comprehensive tracking, you get the full picture on what’s working and what’s not. In addition to getting detailed reports regarding new contacts, new qualified leads, open rates and more, marketing automation software also helps you gain valuable insight into your target customer.
Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams
Though these two teams should work together cohesively, they often times don’t. In order to strengthen the relationship between your marketing and sales teams, you can use marketing automation software. The software solidifies the relationship by giving both teams the same information. When everyone is on the same page, they can work together to develop marketing campaigns that fit the target customer. Marketers can use the information to create marketing materials that are segmented to various audiences, and the sales team can qualify individual prospects as they move down the buying funnel.
Improve Efficiency
Efficiency is a built-in benefit of any marketing automation program. But how you improve efficiency is important. First, marketing automation allows your staff to be more productive with their time. Redundancy is eliminated with automated tasks, freeing up time for your team members to be more creative and innovative.
Second, marketing automation reduces the learning curve. Rather than having to teach your staff how to use different software, there’s only one that they need to get comfortable with. Luckily, most marketing automation systems are user-friendly and don’t require any previous knowledge of HTML or design. You can customize your branding using one of the templates and get started automating tasks right away.
Personalize Your Interactions
As your business grows, it becomes harder to personalize the interaction with each customer. If the leads aren’t falling through the cracks, then the relationships you have with them will turn more generalized if you’re not using marketing automation. Though some people think that automation makes marketing less personal, it’s actually the opposite. The key is taking the time to personalize the messaging to fit your audience.
Also, marketing automation allows you to track your customers so you can learn a lot more about them: the keywords they’re using, the emails they’ve opened, the social media interactions they’ve had with your business and so on. Using this information, you can target your customers based on their interests, goals and demographics.
Schedule in Advance
If there’s one thing that marketing automation has down, it’s scheduling posts and campaigns in advance. You can put together targeted campaigns and then schedule them ahead of time to stay organized. While this feature is certainly nothing new, marketing automation software makes it easier and more efficient. Thanks to the targeting features available, you can schedule different posts to different segments of your audience. This means that instead of sending out one mass email to all of your prospects, you can send out three slightly different emails that are personalized to your three different audiences.
Better Lead Scoring
When you first setup the software, you’ll need to decide on a list of rules that will automatically score leads as they come in. This helps you make better use of your time, as you’ll know which leads are worth nurturing and which ones are better left alone. You can also use marketing automation software to prioritize your leads based on how likely they are to convert or the size of the sale. This ensures that the leads you are putting your time into will yield the best results if they do convert. Again, this is nothing new, but the capability of doing everything from one platform is a nice perk.
Conclusion
We hope that you have learned a bit more about what makes marketing automation a great tool to use for your own business. If you’re currently not using marketing automation software, or you tried it once and didn’t like it, we encourage you to give it another go. Many programs offer free trials so that you can test the waters and see what you like best. While it does take some reseraching and exploration on your end to find the right program, it will be worth it in the end. Anything that makes marketing more productive is worth looking into.
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