If any business capitalizes on it efficiently, Marketing Automation is a real time saver. This is a simple concept and an effective tool, especially for SMB’s to manage daily tasks while saving time for the more important ones. The sole aim of using marketing automation is to provide a standardized communication platform to track the journey of the customer in a sales funnel.
Before understanding why marketing automation is required for your business, let us see some eye-opening stats!
- After just one follow up with a prospect, 44% of small businesses give up.
- Only 10% make more than 3 follow-ups with a prospective customer.
- Do you know how many follow-ups it takes to close 80% of sales? 5 to 12!
As the popular saying goes “Fortune lies in Follow up!”
Having known the uses of follow-ups to convert a prospect into a lead, 90% of small businesses are missing out on it. In between all the roles that we play in our daily life, it is very easy to miss follow-ups before we move to the next thing. When you are on the go half the time, manually keeping track of the leads is a cumbersome task. Here comes marketing automation to the rescue.
Benefits of Marketing Automation:
1. Time Saving:
By using marketing automation tools, regular marketing tasks can be quickly automated while saving time for other tasks. Multiple campaigns and customized emails can be scheduled for any number of prospects and auto respondents can be set up for daily follow-ups.
For example, if you have a list of prospects and a list of followers to send your message to, you can create weekly communication for all the lists at a single go and schedule them for 2-3 months instead of working every week on them.
2. Track Leads:
From the time your prospect has filled an enquiry in your website, till the time you close the deal, every movement of the prospect through the buying journey can be tracked. Accordingly, the marketing message can be communicated depending on the stage of the sales funnel that they are in.
For example, after a prospect fills an inquiry form on your website, an automated introductory email is scheduled to create awareness about your business. The lead will be added to the awareness list and a series of messages go every week. The leads who respond can move into the next stage where a relevant communication can be triggered as per the awareness level that they have.
3. Build Relationships:
By using marketing automation tools, businesses can make meaningful relationships with prospects by personalizing interactions. It helps to deliver information that is valuable to the prospect and build a strong relationship. Basically, after data collection, you can segment the data and create workflows according to the segmentation and trigger messages.
You may write a personalized message to whoever subscribed for your product demo about scheduling a call for 10 minutes to clear their queries. This often leads to a positive and interactive relationship as they respond and may even lead to one-to-one meetings.
4. Maintain Consistency:
Using Marketing automation tools help us in maintaining consistency in our communication by scheduling tasks. It will be easy to schedule timely follow-ups for our leads.
While these are a few benefits, marketing automation makes it easy in following leads that pour in from multiple channels like website, social media, etc. and send across a proper communication message.
Few popular marketing automation tools:
Although there are a number of automation tools, we have listed out some of the popular and favorite ones among the marketers.
1. Automate.io:
This is a great tool to manage your leads pouring in from different sources. Using this CRM, we can manage leads and do various campaigns.
2. Mail chimp:
This provides a long list of automation features when it comes to email data basing. It is easy to set up auto-emails triggered by signups, purchases, enquiries etc.
3. Marketo:
This is a great tool for businesses that want to go beyond basic marketing automation. Lead nurturing, lead scoring, and CRM syncing are some great features present in Marketo.
4. HubSpot:
HubSpot gives an advantage of the all-in-one approach. It is best for businesses which are new to automation and want to try permutations and combination of different marketing systems for their business.
We have been successful in planning marketing automation flows to our clients and implemented using various marketing automation tools as per their business needs.
Talk to our Digital Marketing Consultant who can help analyze your business requirement and give recommendations on which can help you the best.
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Contact us if you like our ideas and want to take our service and implement for your business.