Marketing automation helps businesses by boosting sales and marketing efficiency and increase the return of investment of your business by attracting potential leads and making them into customers later on. This article will talk about how marketing automation software can help you and your business.
Why Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation has a lot of things to offer in businesses. The best marketing automation software often have four main goals. These are:
- Improve the success of nurture campaigns. Nurture campaign’s main goal is to provide engaging relevant content to potential leads and guide them through the process.
- Reconnect and keep existing clients. You still need to provide them with the information they need and notify them of your offers or remind them on what’s happening to their account.
- Guides the customers’ journey. The journey of a customer does not stop even if they already used your products and services. We’ll be talking about their journey in a short while, so keep on reading.
- Analyzes your data. Using your previous marketing automation campaign data can help improve your next campaign. You’ll be able to find out which methods were effective and which ones you need to improve on.
The Customers’ Journey Guide
Did you know that customers go through a journey in your business? They start as strangers then gradually become customers. The last part of their journey is becoming a loyal and delighted customer. Here are the stages of their journey:
- Strangers to visitors. No one knows your product until they find out about it. They are considered as strangers at first. As strangers, you need to entice them with your products and services with your marketing strategy until they become visitors. With marketing automation, you’ll be able to do that by doing email campaigns or advertisements. Your sales and marketing team should be active. It is recommended to use social media to gather the attention of strangers to check out your business. Let them know that you have something that they want or need.
- Visitors to potential leads. Visitors can become potential leads when you have an efficient marketing strategy. Not all visitors can become a potential lead though. You can offer promotions that interest your visitors and create call-to-actions that will let you know where they stand. Those visitors who are genuinely interested in your company are the ones that willingly provide their personal details and become leads.
- Potential leads to customers. Now that your potential leads are hooked with your company, the next step you need to do is making them your customers. A great strategy to do that is by providing useful information to your leads while integrating your products to them. Another great strategy is by offering promotions or free stuff like webinars and eBooks to them. Be careful with your words and personalize your messages. Don’t send too many messages that they think you’re annoying but don’t send too little message that they think you don’t care about them.
- Customers to loyal customers. Loyal customers are happy customers. Be sure to provide great customer experiences to make them delighted about your products. Keep in touch with them by sending them updates on what’s happening to your company. Provide them additional content or send them reminders of what’s happening to your account. By keeping them happy, they unconsciously promote your company and show your brand’s presence.
By reading CrowdReviews.com’s reviews of marketing automation software, you’ll be able to decide which software can help you meet your marketing automation needs. To know more on the stages of a customers’ journey, check out Info.TMRDirect’s article.
The next thing we’re going to talk about are some features of marketing automation and how it can help you become successful in your business.
Content Generation
To fully utilize your marketing automation tool, you need to know how to send the right content to the right people. In order to do that, you need to analyze and understand your customer and their needs. There are two types of content you can do. These are:
- Short form content. These are bits and pieces of information that is easy to read and entices readers to learn more about it. This is often used in email marketing and in nurturing leads campaigns.
- Long form content. These are often done using analysis and thorough research. They offer more content and is usually needed for making inquiries or study. Customers or potential leads are willing to sign up or fill up a form in order to get this information. This is often used for SEO, social and SEM lead generation and in paid searches.
You use content generation to provide quality, engaging and entertaining content to your target users. You can find more information on how to create content in your marketing automation by reading Dummies.com’s article.
Cross Channel Capabilities and Integration
The best marketing automation software can help you connect with all platforms that your customer has. In today’s digital world, customers can choose whatever method they want to engage your company, whether it would be email or using social media. The software can help you determine what platforms your customers are using and be able to provide feedback on how you can communicate with them.
By integrating your software with the resources that you have, you’ll be able to send the right messages in the way your customers can receive them faster. Communication is one way to have a great user experience with your customers.
Personalization
Marketing automation software can provider your users with customized messages and content. According to Experian Marketing Services, if you use personalized emails, it can deliver six times more in transaction rates. It’s actually easy to personalize your messages. You can actually start with personalizing the recipients’ name and even the senders’ name. Other ways you can personalize include:
- Recommending products based on the customers history or preference
- Personalizing content using customer’s personal information such as greeting them on their birthdays
- Providing limited or selected offers to certain customers once they reach a certain target
- Provides call-to-action based on customer preference
- Use of dynamic landing pages
By personalizing your content, it can build a one-on-one relationship with your customers and make them feel valued. Sometimes it’s hard to balance personalization with automation, so try to check the top marketing automation software and see if it works for you.
Focus on Conversion
Going on one stage of the customers’ journey to the next is not easy. Each stage undergoes a specific marketing need. To amplify your conversion strategy, you can follow these steps below:
- Focus on your content. Based on your customers’ interests, provide them relevant content to be able to have a more positive reaction from them. You’ll be able to gauge quickly on what stage they are and analyze what needs to be done further.
- Send reminders. Sometimes users are too busy that they forget things like forgetting to complete their interaction or their shopping cart. You can provide them reminders to let them know what’s happening and will let them know that you care about them. Marketing automation tools can aid you by sending out reports of abandoned shopping carts or finding out which user needs your help. This is especially helpful because you don’t need to monitor all of your leads and customers.
- Engage with your users. Build rapport with your users. Having great communication with your users can have a higher chance of interest with your company, leading to sales purchases.
- Improve your campaigns. Use your data from previous campaigns to refine your next strategy. Find out what your customers needs are and use that data as a weapon for your success.
Marketing automation integrates the main components of marketing into a centralized system, making it easier to provide sales and marketing campaigns. Read Business.com’s article about boosting leads and conversions if you like to focus on conversions.
Customer Engagement and Delighting Customers
Using marketing automation encourages user participation. Using email marketing automation software can greatly boost user engagement. You need to make your users feel valued by consistently give valuable content.
The best marketing automation tools not only provide personalized content, but also find out more about your customers preferences. You can also see what content they’re looking for by using custom redirects and be able to collect data to be used for future campaigns.
If your customer has experienced a positive situation with your company can be an advantage of your success. If you have delighted customers, chances are they become loyal customers. They can help you in obtaining more customers by giving you referrals or providing you an upbeat testimonial or a glowing feedback.
Having someone purchasing your products or services is not just the main goal of marketing automation. It’s about helping your users throughout their customers’ journey. Delighted customers can mean more revenue for your business, so make it a point to have a positive relationship with your customers. If you want to know more about marketing automation, you can read QuickSprout’s article in greater depth.
Having this software is an excellent way for business to achieve their sales and marketing goals. But before purchasing it, find out what your goals are. Then, why not check out CrowdReview.com’s reviews of marketing automation software? It will greatly help you decide which software to purchase.
Keith Moore
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