Marketing Automation is an amazing way to transform the marketing efforts of your business. It can make things easier to manage, require less work and manpower, and help free up resources that your business can spend elsewhere. The idea is to take a digital marketing strategy that has been proven to work – where the conversion rates are high and the sales are coming through – and apply it on every single lead that your website receives.
What are some examples of Digital Marketing Automation?
Here’s just a couple:
- Lead receives a specific e-mail or a series of e-mails after reading specific content or interacting with certain features of your website – Lead reads specific content, fills out a form with their information, and now the system sends them an e-mail with content it knows that their lead will be interested in. This helps with your lead nurturing process.
- Lead is targeted with specific call to action graphics based on:
- Which e-mails they interacted with (or didn’t).
- Whether they’ve chatted with a sales representative in the Live Chat.
- Whether they’ve viewed a specific blog post or page on the website.
- Whether they’ve interacted with you on social media.
- …and more.
- Scheduling social media posts and sending automated welcome messages to new followers – Engage with your social media followers even when you aren’t online.
The opportunities with marketing automation are essentially limitless. It takes some time to setup initially, but once it’s setup that’s all it takes. Your team can receive e-mail notifications based on the way your leads interact with your website. You can programmatically notify your team to step in and directly reach out to the lead to convert them into one of your customers.
6 Reasons to Start Using Marketing Automation ASAP
1. The big players are already doing it.
Huge companies have already automated their digital marketing processes. Look at large businesses like Twitter, YouTube/Google, large restaurant franchises, even political campaigns, eBay, and PayPal. Those are just a few examples that come to mind, but just about every single e-commerce company is using marketing automation. They’re using it because it works, they are using it because the ROI has outweighed the cost.
2. Free up your budget to spend on larger marketing initiatives.
Setting up digital marketing automation means that the marketing efforts of your business can be handled by a smaller, more tight-knit team. The smaller team can oversee the automation efforts, make improvements to it as time goes on, and interact with leads when necessary to convert them into a customer. Why manually reach out to every single lead when you can reach out to just the ones (based on lead scoring data) that will bring in a sale?
3. Market to leads on a much larger scale for no extra cost.
Take what works, keep using it, and apply it at a larger scale. Your business may start by pursuing specific segments and specific personas within your contact lists – and that makes sense, but as time goes on you can create more segments and even more personas to better target contacts that are ready for a conversion. With an overview of all of your marketing data over a certain timespan, it will show you and begin to shape out what is working, what’s not, and what can be done to make improvements to these campaigns.
4. Unify all of your marketing initiatives and share valuable data across mediums.
In digital marketing there’s a ton of different ways to market to potential leads. There’s social media, e-mail marketing, calls-to-action on website pages, blog content, downloadable resources, promotions, live chat features, contact forms, and more. There’s a multitude of ways and mediums for you to collect the contact information of potential leads, and there’s a number of platforms you use to make it happen. There are many marketing automation platforms that streamline all of these digital marketing processes into one dashboard, one platform, and that means you are able to share data across platforms to improve your marketing efforts across the board – and that’s a major benefit. The more data that your business has on a contact, the better you are able to segment, target, and therefor convert them by sharing specific content with them and using messaging that truly interests them.
5. Your website works, even when you and your team aren’t.
A lot of large businesses are closed on the weekends. Many businesses do not operate into the night. But the fact is – your contacts are using your website in the off hours all of the time. Instead of having your team reach out to all of the leads on Monday morning when resuming work, why not jump start the lead nurturing process and send them marketing campaigns that have worked for others in their segment? This method doesn’t waste time and doesn’t give the competitor that already is using marketing automation an advantage (reaching out to the contact before you do) – because you’re automated now too.
6. The return on investment makes sense.
When setup properly, automation efforts will return revenue that is significantly more than the cost of setting up the automation on the proper platform(s). Make sure you have an expert in automation to help you setup the processes.