Marketing automation & why your business will need it?
Marketing automation has become a need for today's entrepreneurs since it is utilized to restructure and quantify their marketing campaigns and workflows in addition to automating activities. Sales automation can help eliminate repetitive operations associated with lead acquisition, follow-up, and sales pipelines.
From time and energy savings to increased revenue generation, the combined benefit of sales and marketing automation goes beyond automating repetitive operations. It streamlines business operations, allowing entrepreneurs to focus more on client relationship development.
What can marketing automation do?
When we consider the most prevalent company difficulties, we see that generating leads and retaining clients throughout their journey stay top of mind. Along with these objectives, organizations are confronted with an explosion of data collection but limited ability to utilize it.
Marketing automation software can assist us in overcoming these obstacles by utilizing data and optimizing our procedures.
The majority of firms view marketing automation as a mid-funnel tool that is suitable for nurturing prospects via automated email sequences. While email marketing is an excellent application of marketing automation, this method can result in a disconnected experience for prospects and customers as they go from marketing to sales to customer care.
Prospects are pushed through an illusory sales funnel filled with irrelevant touchpoints and material. Rather than responding to unique customer needs, corporations recycle the same playbook.
Automated marketing tactics, on the other hand, should be used throughout the customer lifecycle. When marketing automation is implemented properly, it offers the ideal environment for developing healthy, long-term relationships with your customers. When done correctly, marketing automation provides your firm with three primary benefits:
Individualized workflows
Each action taken by a prospect adds another data point to your marketing plan, indicating what customers are looking for at the present. As beneficial as this data is, tracking these habits manually is impossible. However, businesses may leverage these inputs across many channels to gain a holistic understanding of their customer's demands and offer the correct content at the right time using marketing automation software.
These processes assist in directing qualified prospects to beneficial information, resulting in warm leads that may subsequently be intelligently nurtured to become customers. However, marketing automation does not end there. With the consumer at the flywheel's center, businesses can continue to engage customers through custom workflows that result in loyal, repeat customers who refer their friends and family.
Process simplifications
Bring your entire organization together with efficient processes that put your customers at the forefront. Create processes that span many functional teams in order to minimize customer effort at each stage of the journey. Break down divisions and collaborate to deliver a cohesive customer experience beginning with the initial contact and continuing well beyond the consumer purchase.
There is no need for complicated hand-off procedures with successful marketing automation, since everything is automatically kept in your central data storage, and internal workflows can assist you in prioritizing jobs as needed.
Data and analytics integration
Each action taken by a prospect adds another data point to your marketing campaign, quickly revealing what customers are looking for. As beneficial as this data is, tracking these habits manually is impossible.
However, businesses may leverage these inputs across many channels to gain a holistic understanding of their customer's demands and offer the correct content at the right time using marketing automation software. These processes assist in directing qualified prospects to beneficial information, resulting in warm leads that may subsequently be intelligently nurtured to become customers. However, marketing automation does not end there.
With the consumer at the flywheel's center, businesses can continue to engage customers through custom workflows that result in loyal, repeat customers who refer their friends and family.
What are the benefits of marketing automation?
1. Cost savings
According to the Keeps 2020 Customer Survey, the top problem for small businesses is finding time and resources for marketing. For example, 22.9 percent of respondents reported manually collecting contact information over the phone or in-person rather than automating the process.
Not only can software save time, but it also gives much-needed resources to accomplish more.
If you're employing the correct marketing automation software, such as Keap, it's as if one employee can perform the work of 50 people manually.
All that is required is the development of a process for generating and nurturing leads, as well as marketing campaigns that are activated spontaneously in response to specified benchmarks. Within a few months of deploying automated campaigns, you may use basic autopilot software to send hundreds of tailored emails daily.
For instance, a small bed & breakfast in France noticed a 25% reduction in workload after implementing Keap as their sales and marketing automation software. The small firm implemented automated follow-up email campaigns that increased recurring business and attracted new guests, doubling revenue—all while saving time.
2. Increased revenue
Along with cost savings, another advantage of marketing automation software is increased income. When lead management and prioritizing are combined, your sales operations can generate a higher return on investment.
Several small businesses have claimed revenue increases of up to 800 percent, $100k in new income, and even revenue growth to annual revenue objectives of over $1 million after implementing automation software.
3. Lead generation and nurturing
If you own a small business, you understand how critical lead generation is to the growth of your enterprise. By automating marketing and sales processes, you can focus more on developing strategies for generating and nurturing prospective prospects. In other words, you can acquire more customers as a result of increased prospecting.
And sales and marketing automation statistics corroborate this. Those who implemented sales automation early on typically claim a potential increase in sales of up to 10%.
4. Improved data for more informed decisions
Big Data is one of the hottest buzzwords in information technology these days. Regrettably, not all firms are adept at collecting and utilizing this data for marketing and sales purposes. Marketing automation enables the comprehension of Big Data, and assembling the necessary intelligence enables things to operate for you.
A sales and marketing automation platform, such as Keap, is one of the more comprehensive options available for evaluating marketing campaigns and forecasting consumer attitudes or reactions. It is capable of compiling a comprehensive profile of your prospects.
How to succeed with marketing automation?
1. Create a plan for customer involvement
Prior to automating marketing, you must have a comprehensive go-to-market strategy involving all aspects of the firm – marketing, sales, delivery, and support. Define your target market categories, ideal customer profile, and target personas, including their characteristics and interests. Additionally, define the measures that most accurately reflect what constitutes success. There are several points throughout your customer's purchasing journey, and the more you capture, the more detailed the picture becomes.
2. Establish a centralized consumer datastore
Choosing the appropriate CRM to serve your organization is critical, but even the most seasoned professionals can find it difficult. If data is stored in several databases, integration efforts must be managed carefully to avoid jeopardizing the customer image, which requires more money. A single-platform CRM avoids the need for additional integration and the risk of client data corruption. Additionally, it ensures that everyone who interacts with the customer has the same view of the customer data, regardless of their role in marketing, sales, delivery, or support. Which is fantastic for your consumers.
3. Establish a single exhaustive data dictionary
You'd be surprised at how many countless hours I've spent answering the question "What is a lead?" with sales and marketing teams. Something as simple as this, if misunderstood, can destroy marketing automation's efficacy before it even gets started. I cannot underscore enough how critical it is for everyone involved in consumer engagement to speak the same language. Everything from prospects to ideal customer profiles to lead scoring and SQL's, and everything in between. Make a note of them and review them often with all parties involved.
4. Align your roles
Your marketing, sales, delivery, and support teams must all understand precisely when and how to engage customers. In a nutshell, outline the processes, activities, and handoffs that occur as a result of your customer's progression through the buyer's journey. The benefit of centralizing all customer data is that everyone has the same perspective of the customer throughout the customer journey. Transparency throughout the customer acquisition and advocacy process provide your organization with the best possible chance of attracting and maintaining clients.
5. Comprehend your customers' journeys
For decades, a fundamental notion in demand generation has been "the funnel" — an organized technique to categorize prospective buyers into or out of buying phases based on sales and marketing-defined criteria. When the funnel was conceived, it made sense since purchasing behaviors were simpler and more linear. Today, your buyer has access to whatever information they require. The business-to-business purchasing process has evolved into a non-linear, highly competitive, and sophisticated one. A modern organization must understand the origin, nature, and outcome of each connection with clients throughout their purchasing journey - and a fully integrated CRM platform enables this.
What tools can one use in marketing automation?
There exist a significantly huge amount of business tools that are capable of automation most of the services that a marketing department would use. Starting from the Hubspot and ending with pretty much famous Mailchimp that everyone already knows. However, these are mostly marketing automation tools directed toward the majority of your social channels. What about your mobile app? How do you automate the marketing process within it?
InAppStory provides a whole bundle toolkit that you can actively use to automate the engagement with your audience inside a mobile application. In fact, our tool consists of several components that create an immersive and interactive experience for your users. Just to name a few examples, our experts offer:
- Onboarding Screens - whether it’s about your own mobile application features or relevant educational material, the onboarding sets of screens will be able to provide short and impact content that every user can easily digest.
- Quizzes - instead of a boring survey, you can collect the necessary feedback from users through a simple and funny quiz.
- Gamification - be it an interactive Candy Crash similar game or an adventure-based one, you might want to incorporate them into your mobile app. The engagement and stickiness rates will surely go up in a matter of a few months.
- App Stories - if you want to share valuable and informative content with other people about your own organization, then mobile Stories can also provide you with such a feature.
As you can see, our toolkit based on SDK allows us to greatly simplify the content approach and at the same time impact your major mobile app metrics. If you want to see the full potential of the Stories feature, then try it out for FREE for an entire month. All you need to do is leave your contact details and we’ll be able to give you access within 24 hours!