How Marketing Automation can transform your sales growth
We’re all busy trying to develop our businesses, gain new customers and nurture and retain our existing customers. And our customers and clients are in the same position, with business plans to write, targets to achieve and meetings to attend to. Wouldn’t it be great if you could ensure you didn’t miss any opportunities while you were in a whirlwind of other activity?
Well I already have a system where I email all my customers regularly
Email communication as a part of customer relationship management has been around for a while and has become more sophisticated over time. It’s now straightforward to create and send a blanket email to all your customers – perhaps directly from your own database, or by using an automated platform to mail to people at set times – without it looking too much like a blanket email. And many of us rely on this type of marketing to generate leads and sales. Although it’s a quick and relatively cheap way of getting your product or service out there, it’s still a bit of a scattergun approach, where you hope some of the target customers might ‘get hit’. However, you’ll know from your own experience that receiving email after email from a company – and especially emails that have no relevance to you – can be tiresome and after a period of deleting emails without even opening them, you eventually unsubscribe.
So there are 3 key disadvantages to this approach:
- It’s a waste of time (and therefore money) if you’re marketing to someone who at this time has no interest in what you’re selling
- You don’t know who is actually interested
- Potential customers get fed up and leave you with no opportunity to market to them in future – when the time might be right for them to purchase what you have to offer
But what if you could be sure that your marketing communication was reaching people who were not only interested in your product but also probably considering making a purchase very soon? How might that transform your sales growth?
What is marketing automation?
Basically, marketing automation uses technology to automate the way you nurture your sales leads, by sending highly-targeted and personalised messages to prospective customers. The software is designed to prioritise and execute marketing tasks efficiently, freeing up time and helping you achieve your business goals. Where it makes the most impact in the sales process is the conversion and closure stages.
You’ve probably experienced marketing automation as a consumer – big companies have been using it for a while. For example, if you’ve been looking for a particular book or product on Amazon, you might have had a follow-up email from them suggesting other books and products you might be interested in. In a nutshell, they’ve used marketing automation to grasp a sales lead from your buying signals, sent you a personalised message to nurture the relationship – and ultimately you might make that purchase. They haven’t bombarded you with irrelevant products (well not much!)
The foundation of marketing automation is about nurturing the customer, rather than using hard selling techniques, by giving them the information they need to help their buying decision – when they’re in a position to want it. Personalisation and relevance are the key drivers. By quickly giving you visibility into what your website visitors are doing, the type of content they’re looking at or downloading and the way they respond to your emails, you can assess where they might be in the sales process. It doesn’t mean a loss of personal contact and interaction with your customers, but it does help with making sure the meetings you have with them are timely and productive for both parties.
Should my company use marketing automation?
If you’d like to streamline sales and marketing and grow sales, then the answer is yes!
As well as ensuring your messages are tailor-made and relevant to your customer there are many advantages to the system:
- Marketing automation is time-saving and efficient. For example, you can plan marketing campaigns ahead of time so that they can be automatically scheduled for implementation at an optimum time. No mad scrambling to hit deadlines or missing opportunities.
- It’s cost-effective – no wasting time following up uninterested parties, thus releasing time and energy to focus on and nurture existing and real potential customers.
- You can integrate with your CRM system to make sure leads don’t disappear if you’ve been unsuccessful in making contact with the customer a couple of times (perhaps when they’ve been out of the office or unable to take your call).
- Marketing automation allows you to collect data to provide better insight into your customers in order to improve future communication or campaigns.
- Easily keeps track of customers who have multiple email channels
- A good marketing automation system can be monitored and measured to show where tweaks are needed to improve results.
