How can Marketing Automation help grow your business?
One of the things our clients are often looking for is a way to make their marketing communication more effective and efficient. While planning and scheduling email campaigns will always be part of a marketing team’s bread and butter, Marketing Automation can be an excellent way to move toward a more streamlined marketing approach.
So what is Marketing Automation?
In this instance, when we use the term Marketing Automation, we are talking about “a process where technology is used to automate several repetitive tasks that are undertaken on a regular basis in a marketing campaign.” (Wikipedia)
It therefore not only includes your email marketing but your entire marketing process, including capturing, nurturing and closing leads, increasing event attendance or managing a sales funnel. For example, does your sales team need some help following up on prospective clients?
Using Marketing Automation to send some initial follow-up emails could help save the sales team time in determining which enquiry is a hot lead and thereby allow them to focus their efforts on those contacts who are most likely to become customers.
How can it help your business?
To help answer this question, let’s have a quick look at an example of how marketing automation could be used.
Imagine you are looking to provide prospective clients with free PDFs when they sign up to a mailing list. You could easily settle for creating a campaign that sends out an email with a link to the PDF, but following up on that lead could then just as easily become a manual task, which your sales team may not have the resources to fulfill.
Instead, simply by building in some marketing automation, you can take the pressure off the sales team and help determine whether the lead is “just browsing” or ready to become a customer.
In our example, we might decide to check whether they have opened the email containing the PDF and only create a deal in the Sales Pipeline if they have done so.
The automation can then send the prospect a follow-up email, without your sales team having to do anything at this early stage of the customer journey. Adding conditions to your automation ensures that your prospective leads get the most relevant communication at the most suitable time.
In addition to conditions within the automation, adding personalisation to emails, as well as starting or stopping other automations depending on the actions the prospective client takes, can make the marketing communication relevant to every single person showing interest in your services.
Now, we of course all know the importance of the human touch, so you may wish to add some tasks for your sales team at different stages of the automation as well, but the use of personalised, timely emails could help focus their efforts on those leads that are most likely to convert into paying customers.
How do you start using Marketing Automation?
Switching from a manual marketing process to an automated one can be daunting, or you just may not know where to start. When looking for a Marketing Automation solution, there are a number of things you will want to consider, including:
- the User Interface and how easy the tool is to use;
- which features it has and how flexible it is in allowing you to make changes to it, based on your industry or use case;
- what support you get, be that setup and learning resources through to on-going technical support.
We have found that ActiveCampaign, which is available from Zephi Ltd has been a great solution for many of our clients that are looking to implement Marketing Automation.
ActiveCampaign has extremely flexible features, meaning that it scales as your business grows and changes. This allows you, as the user, to make the transition from your current marketing processes to automation at the pace you are comfortable with and are able to manage.
Fully customisable for your needs, ActiveCampaign offers a range of marketing tools, from simple email marketing to marketing automation that can be as straightforward or complex as your business needs them to be.
Not sure whether marketing automation can really help your business? Why not get in touch to find out more, or if you would like to arrange a demo give Zephi a call on 01543 523950, or drop them an email at hello@zephi.co.uk
