Between emails, blog posts, ad campaigns, social media and even direct mail, there’s no shortage of options for your marketing. With so many moving parts, it can be challenging to keep on top of everything and ensure things are running smoothly.
This is where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation provides a way to simplify your day-to-day marketing operations. It puts technology to work for you and helps to eliminate time-consuming manual processes.
Perhaps you’ve considered automating some of your marketing but hesitated because it seemed impersonal or overly complicated. Implementing marketing automation can streamline and simplify everything while providing data to help measure your results and make better business decisions.
Not convinced? Email marketing is a key component of marketing automation and a 2016 VentureBeat Insight study found that email marketing has an average return of $38 for every $1 spent.
Plus, when you choose to automate your marketing, you’re still in control of the content and the messaging coming from your business, but you can save time and energy by not having to do everything manually.
Here are three signs your business is ready for marketing automation:
#1. You Need to Reach More People
If you’ve hit a plateau with your overall business growth, it’s likely time broaden your reach and cast your marketing net a little wider.
If you already have an email list, you should be looking for ways to maximize the impact of your efforts. For example, many times you’ll have an email list, but you won’t have very much information on your subscribers.
Using segmentation based on different criteria will provide a means to directly target subscribers with information. You’ll know what they are most interested in and have the intelligence needed to make offers that will be the most meaningful to them. This ultimately increases your odds of converting one of your subscribers into a paying customer.
Every business wants more leads, but what happens if the potential clients you’re currently finding aren’t ideal? Or if you’re getting valuable leads but just don’t have the time to follow up?
Marketing automation can be designed to funnel your leads through a qualification process and nurture them into action. As a small business, you may not have a dedicated person for sales, which means it can be a challenge to keep your leads active and interested. Automating your processes gives you more time to keep your leads warm and reach out to them personally.
For example, an email sequence after someone signs up for email updates can enable you to create the know, like, trust factor at the point they’re most interested in your business. This, in turn, can then become a powerful way to schedule appointments or close sales. That automation will help you ensure those leads don’t die on the vine.
#2. You Want to Stay In Touch with Existing and Past Clients
Whether someone is in the middle of your sales cycle or has gone the whole way through, ensuring your relationships with clients are ongoing is critical. We all know that repeat customers generally spend more than new customers and it’s much easier to do business with someone who’s already bought from you in the past.
Whether it’s an upsell, a cross-sell or a referral, there are various ways you can get more revenue from your existing customer base.
With marketing automation, you can gather data on behaviors like webpage visits or purchase details which can give you the insight you need to better target customer’s specific needs.
Whether you choose to use personalized emails or target them with automatic campaigns to reach out periodically, the use of marketing software can be invaluable to help you continue to nurture your client relationships.
#3. You Want to Support Your Offline Marketing Activities
It’s not uncommon for most businesses to have cycles in your business where sales take a dip. This happens for many reasons but often we lack the insight into what’s really happening.
Marketing automation provides insight into the realities of your business and helps to reveal blindspots.
For example, as you continue to build a bigger customer base and subscriber list, it becomes more difficult to keep track of who has been contacted and when. This means you run the risk of repeatedly contacting someone for the same thing, or missing an opportunity because you aren’t clear on who is following up.
With marketing automation, you’ll have your CRM and marketing tools in a single system, providing a better view into the entire sales cycle. Everyone on your team has access to the same information and this helps ensure time isn’t wasted on things that may have already been handled.
From a customer experience standpoint, not having clear records of contacts that have been made with a customer can make your team look disorganized and unprofessional, which is a surefire way to ensure people reconsider their decision to do business with you.
#4. You Need to Streamline Your Onboarding
First impressions matter. By ensuring your onboarding processes are as efficient and streamlined as possible, your clients start off on the right foot with your business.
Whether you’re building new homes or training people on software, there are steps early in the onboarding process that can be preset through automation.
Your automation of onboarding can include things like a personalized welcome message, outlining timelines and expectations, feedback surveys, getting started training videos and other personalized communications. All of these will go a long way to create a good customer experience, as well as save you time and ensure consistency from one client to the next.
By improving your marketing processes and incorporating automation, you can use the real-time data you have on hand to come up with strategies that will drive sales and further grow your business.
About the Author
Gary is OnMerit Marketing’s owner and blog writer. A Brand Designer and Internet Marketing Specialist, he has a passion for helping small businesses look great and grow their businesses online. Follow Gary on Twitter @onmerit, or Facebook: www.facebook.com/onmeritmarketing
