In 2022, asking whether your business needs marketing automation is like asking whether you need a website, a brand name, or even contact details: it is essential if you want to streamline and improve every aspect of your business’ marketing strategies. You can be assured that your competition is definitely using marketing automation - so if your business is not, you’re definitely missing out.
Any business that has customers at this point and is looking to attract more now and in the future is going to benefit from using a marketing automation system, regardless of the industry you’re in; be it financial services, retail, or a cat cafe, marketing automation is the best and most efficient way of getting your brand ‘out there and of interacting with the public.
But why?
If you run a business that needs to keep in regular communication with customers (and to be honest, we can’t think of one where this doesn’t apply!), you’re going to see huge improvements in productivity by implementing a marketing automation system. This is largely because it is the easiest and quickest way to attract visitors to your website, convert those visitors into leads and, ultimately, turn them into sales. A good marketing automation system will save you and your team time, freeing up resources that can be used in other areas of your business.
Capturing leads is your essential first step to creating a loyal customer base and making sales, and marketing automation is the best way to integrate all of your lead-capturing techniques into your existing workflow. A marketing automation system allows you to create customised lead forms that can be used on your website and within your social media platforms - providing a hugely valuable asset for your company.
The Tricky Business of Email Marketing
Email marketing can be hugely beneficial and profitable for your business if done correctly. But getting the balance right can be hard to pull off: if you send out too many emails to your current and potential customers, many of them might find their way straight into spam folders - never to be seen again…You will not hit those all-important sales targets if you send out too few.
In an ideal world, you want your emails going out to your customer list at a regular and steady pace, with follow-up emails being sent based on your customers’ specific reactions. An email campaign relies on precision - and a marketing automation system offers the ability to create a personalised and effective marketing campaign that will capture your customers’ imaginations - and their wallets.
For your marketing campaigns to be truly successful, you need to appreciate that it’s not simply a process used to capture leads and make sales. You also need to be able to respond to the reactions generated by your marketing campaign. One of the most exciting features of marketing automation is that it can filter your customers into categories based on their behaviours - for example identifying the customers who make the largest purchases or who buy from you more often. In the past, this sorting process was done manually - which is just as time-consuming as it sounds.
Sorting all of this data manually only really tells you the basics, but marketing automation systems can predict what your customers will do next, meaning you can focus your marketing efforts where they are likely to have the most success.
There was a time when this type of bespoke marketing was reserved for the big boys - corporations with unlimited marketing budgets - but today, marketing automation systems are available and affordable for businesses both large and small, meaning that whether you are a small start-up or a global business giant, you can rank your customers based on whether or not they are likely to purchase your goods or services, and then market to those specific customer groups.
Responding to Your Website Visitors
You’ve no doubt spent a ridiculous amount of time (and possibly money) on your company website - but you’re not really paying attention to your website visitors or tracking their actions, and so now it’s just sitting there looking pretty, but not doing much else.
For your business to succeed, you shouldn’t just be ignoring or underestimating the importance of website visitor data - you should be reacting to it quickly!
One of the benefits of using a marketing automation system is that it responds to incoming website visitors in real-time, sending out alerts to the relevant departments in your company so that they know they need to respond. One of the most valuable forms of communication when it comes to addressing the queries of website visitors is email, which has proven to be a great way to generate interest and sales repeatedly. In the past, the main problem with this has come from businesses not collecting all of the customer data that results from these emails - it’s generally just been that either a sale has been made or it hasn’t.
Marketing automation allows you to take so much more from these emails. Not only can they be sent to targeted subscriber groups, but you’ll be able to track your customers’ response rate and even what time of day they’re most likely to read their emails.
Email marketing campaigns are also popular because of split-testing, presenting different marketing to small customer groups, with the marketing that gets the most desired responses being the ‘winner’. In theory, these split tests can be used repeatedly to boost sales. But, aside from being time-consuming, split-test results don’t always seem to justify the amount of effort that needs to be dedicated to the favoured marketing strategy.
Marketing automation systems do all of the hard work for you by creating and analysing the tests and then quickly sending out the best marketing material to the customers you haven’t yet reached. If you’ve been conducting split-testing without marketing automation, it might surprise you to know that a job that was previously taking you days (possibly weeks) to conduct can be carried out in a couple of hours - a reason to implement a marketing automation system if ever we’ve seen one.
Social Media
Whether you’re a fan of social media or not, there’s no denying that it is a huge driving force for online sales, so your business should be harnessing that power. Every one of the millions of users logging on to social media platforms daily is a potential customer for your business.
The problem, of course, is that the number of social media platforms out there is growing rapidly, and creating and posting content to any one of them can be a full-time job, and cultivating, growing and maintaining a following on all of the major social media sites is almost impossible - and it’s certainly not a job that’s going to get any easier as time goes on.
Marketing automation systems allow you to manage every one of the social media accounts from one location, from creating the content and scheduling the posts to seeing who viewed your content and interacting with your customers through comments and messages.
If you want to reap the benefits of marketing automation for your business, the experts at Flowbird are here to help. We can find the right system for you, saving you time and energy and boosting your sales through your marketing campaigns.