For those who want to bring profit to their business through online marketing efforts, marketing automation is an invaluable tool. Marketing automation allows automated information sharing with your leads and customers to be carried out over a number of channels, from your website to email and social media platforms. You provide the content, and marketing automation technology will distribute it for you at carefully scheduled times of optimal lead and customer activity.
As a business owner you may not want to set aside the money for a dedicated social media team, and your current staff may not have the time to dedicate to a solid social media campaign while taking care of their other responsibilities. With marketing automation, you can easily carry out an online marketing campaign using streamlined technology that will quickly convert leads to customers and allow you to maintain a solid online presence while you are attending to other aspects of your business.
How Marketing Automation Converts Leads to Customers
As you know, leads are individuals who aren't sure if they want to buy your product or not, but they show an initial level of interest. Marketing automation is a tool you can use to keep track of who your leads are, how they found you, how many you have, as well as gauge where their interest level lies at any given time. Marketing automation technology can keep track of which leads simply open your email and which leads click over to your landing page after viewing the email. Your marketing automation technology will act accordingly by sending the lead personalized emails that will keep them engaged (monthly newsletters, for example), or reengage them if necessary.
Studies show that businesses who use marketing automation generate 50% more sales-ready leads while cutting a third of the cost when compared to businesses who do not use marketing automation. Marketing automation is about making sure each lead and customer feels appreciated and noticed, even when time and money are limited, because even when you have secured a customer, you should be doing everything you can to make sure they are a satisfied customer.
Marketing Automation is Designed To Provide a Personal Voice
Marketing automation isn't about sending generic emails to all of your customers and making them feel like anonymous cogs in the machine that makes your business tick. Marketing automation takes information it knows about different customers and uses that information to share personalized messages with them that make them feel noticed as individuals. Marketing automation will send carefully chosen product suggestions, meet customers at their chosen social media platforms, and send emails reaching out to customers you haven't heard from in a while. This makes customers feel valued, because you are making the effort to support their information needs at the same time as they are supporting your business.
Improve Your Marketing Strategy with Marketing Automation
Once you analyze the results of your use of marketing automation technology, you can modify your approach in specific areas to optimize efficiency. Marketing automation can keep track of all the ways that leads are discovering your business (through an online search, through Facebook, etc.), and how they are interacting with your online content throughout various channels, which is very insightful information when you are deciding which channels you need to focus on more. Whether that means focusing more on marketing efforts when it comes to social media or making your website more engaging for leads and customers, marketing automation will give you the data that will help you make the best decisions to keep leads and customers engaged and satisfied so they will begin or continue to buy your product and support your business as well as recommend your business to their social circle.
Using marketing automation doesn't mean you shouldn't consider personally communicating with each of your customers a high priority. It is simply a useful method of facilitating that personal communication more efficiently so you can reach as many people as possible using the sophisticated technology that has become available. Marketing automation will quickly give you a return on your investment, saving you time and money while giving you more customers and helping you to secure the loyalty of your current customers.