In today’s world, small businesses have found themselves in a new, more fairground. With all the tools necessary to start competing with the big players in the market. Smart business is all about tracking & analyzing the data
Small businesses initially are restricted with many constraints such as tight budgets, limited headcount, resources and a perpetual shortage of time. This is exactly where marketing automation can help.
If you’re a small business owner, unsure of implementing a marketing automation strategy, then read on to find out how it can benefit your business to achieve its goals.
Why Marketing Automation?
The sole purpose of marketing automation software is to automate manual marketing processes minimizing the cost. This means repetitive tasks that were done manually gets automated, such as sending emails, qualifying website leads, social media posting, and much more.
Just like any other marketing technique, marketing automation tools have gained acceptance because it helps companies and organizations attain certain business goals, the most important of which are:
- Leads Management– With marketing automation tools, small businesses can take advantage of lead acquisition, nurturing and conversion optimization tasks, even if you fall short on a team in particular to manage everything.
- Increase Sales– If the benefits of the marketing automation tools are properly utilized, it can boost up sales justifying the upfront investment.
- Measure ROI: Business owners have a transparent data and based on this data, you can track and measure the ROI of their marketing team’s or agency’s efforts. By auditing and analyzing this data, you can improve & strategize all their further marketing strategies and budget allocations that will help to grow your business.
- Increasing customer lifetime value: Marketing is not just about attracting new customers, but you need to understand existing client’s requirements which your business can deliver them. With marketing automation tools, you can create your customer segments and based on those segmented data you can plan retention & loyalty marketing strategies to increase your customer lifetime value. Not just this, with marketing automation tools you can request for reviews, feedback, send exclusive offers to high spending customer segments, and run a re-engagement or re-marketing campaign.
- Reduced lead conversion time: By making your sales process more efficient and effective, you reduce the time it takes for a potential lead to become a customer.
- Nurturing leads: Not every inquiry or form fills are going to be your customer on the first go itself for many reasons, so to convert your cold leads into hot leads you need a good lead nurturing plan & marketing automation platform. Because it is impossible to keep a track & monitor on your all leads activities without marketing automation platform. For high ticket price items or solutions or B2B services, lead nurturing is a very powerful marketing strategy, it’s considered to be mid to long term sales strategy. You need to educate your cold leads, counter objections and build a trust same time monitor their engagement & behaviors on your campaigns and website visits.
- Better data for smarter decisions: Nowadays, every organization I meet, talks about analytics, data analysis and big data but not many SME business owners are aware of tracking accurate data to utilize it for smarter decisions. Marketing automation tools help you track & collect valuable intelligence data in one place.
Top Benefits of Marketing Automation tool
- Generate qualified sales leads
- Convert qualified sales leads into profitable customers
- Increase the lifetime value of your customers through customer retention
- Understand different buyer persona
- Track your customer journeys
- Mobilize your sales & marketing data
- Take personalization to the next level
- Get sales and marketing on the same page
- Creating space for strategic thinking
- Improve accountability of marketing & sales teams
- Refine your marketing processes
- Better reporting on what’s working and what’s not
- Taking the guesswork out of lead scoring
The integration between sales and marketing for the organization is still very challenging. But have you ever thought why is it so challenging? With the rapidly evolving technologies, the buying cycle also changes. The work of marketing and sales only grows closer together, making efficient collaboration more important than ever.
The challenge is built when marketing and sales work with different tools toward separate goals. This challenge is catered by marketing automation by improving lead quality, increasing revenue, and automating traditionally manual processes like lead assignment and follow-up.
Detailed Profiles
Marketing automation software helps you to create detailed customer profiles using email open rates, web behavior and responses. Based on this information, you’ll be able to develop actions in the right places. Multiple communication channels will help you gather new information about customers and after analyzing this data, you can add more points in your customer profiles.
Give you a fair idea about what’s working and what’s not: Marketing automation system gives a clear insight and detailed analysis of what part of the chain is working and what isn’t. It also facilitates a marketer to make desired changes in the system at any point of time at any stage to leverage results. When all of the marketing task is automated, it becomes dead easy for a marketer to make these changes, which is not the case in manual system.
Here are some of them
Multi-channel visibility
Marketing automation system provide various touch-points to a marketer to connect with a visitor or a customer. It facilitates sales and marketing team to track a customer’s activity and interaction with your brand / product.
Identifying sales-ready opportunities
At some point, many of the leads you have been nurturing will need the services you provide. If these individuals have been well nurtured, they will know how you can help them, and your firm will be top of mind. They may even prefer you over other firms. When the time is right, they will reach out to you. There are a number of techniques that you can leverage for your business goals. For example, you can configure the system to send out a free consultation offer from time to time. In this way, you can look for opportunities while minimizing your time investment.
Segmenting your database for better targeting and more personalization
All prospects have different needs. It doesn’t make sense to treat them the same. However, when you have a single gigantic list, it can be hard not to. That’s why these systems provide tools to automatically segment your list by demographic or behavioral criteria. When you layer criteria like these, your marketing strategy effectively becomes “personalized.”
The key, of course, to get the right message to the right audience is segmentation. You want to segment your list as much as possible and tailor the journey from there. Marketing automation allows you to segment nearly any data point, including location, job title, job responsibilities, business revenue, status (lead, prospect, RFP/proposal, active client, past client), or the last time on your website.
Depending on the platform, segmentation can be highly dynamic, adjusting (adding or subtracting people) for a series of data or conditions. There are several benefits to dynamic segmentation.
- Keep messages relevant to a particular lead based on where they are within your sales funnel.
- Remove a person from a business development list once they have become a client.
- Send offers based on several different characteristics (e.g., location, revenue, or industry). For example, if you’re presenting at a conference in New York, you can email a personalized invite to leads within 100 miles. With segmentation, you will not bother a prospect in California with a useless invite. This is why sending relevant content is so compelling. In fact, relevant emails delivered to the relevant customer segment through marketing automation tool drives far more revenue than generic email blasts!
- If done manually, such dynamic segmentation would be overly time consuming and prone to error. A well-designed marketing automation platform lets you set it and forget it.
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