21 ways that marketing automation can help

The thought of marketing automation may seem confusing, expensive and complicated. In reality, with a CRM and Marketing Automation system in place, you are able to have “So much room for activities!”. Allowing for you to focus on the most important part of your business, your customers. Why should you consider marketing automation?

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1. Be more effective

Teams of all sizes benefit from having a marketing automation program in place, frees up time for the whole team, allowing for maximizing time on other vital operational tasks.

2. Creativity

Being in a time crunch often cause repetitiveness and stifles creativity. Being able to get creative with graphics, templates and other marketing shows in the work performed. Automated messages that don’t have to be updated daily and manually sent out frees up a lot of valuable time.

3. Hitting potential customers across different mediums

Marketing automation offers a lot of different benefits, like the ability to hit potential customers across multiple mediums, in a personalized way. Being able to create a whole marketing strategy to send customers an email, postcard, text message, tweet, or phone call when they reach certain stages of the customer journey.


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4. Better reporting on what’s working and what’s not

By working with the data in your CRM system, your marketing automation software won’t just tell you which campaigns worked, but what type of customer they worked for.

How will Marketing automation benefit sales?

You may be thinking that marketing automation is a tool exclusively a marketing team, however pairing both that and a CRM maximizes the greatest value, making marketing and sales a great combined team.

5. Keep your CRM data up to date

Building a CRM database is incredibly valuable, but it can quickly diminish in value if information isn’t kept up to date.

By connecting your CRM system with your marketing automation tool, you can gradually capture more and more information about your leads over time, while confirming that their key information is still the same.


Email


#6

6. Cut your design time to create campaigns

Most marketing automation tools have premade templates that you can edit and add content to. Enabling you to build great looking email templates in a snap.

By not having to schedule lengthy amounts of time in for you to create campaigns, you can execute marketing campaigns more efficiently.


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7. Never stop A/B testing your campaigns

A/B testing your emails and subject lines, whichever gets the most traction ends up getting the rest of the batch going to them. Marketing automation tools make it easy to run ongoing A/B tests, having an A/B test running on campaigns that can run at every stage of your marketing process all the time. Over time, the incremental improvements across your marketing activity will generate a significant improvement in your funnel’s efficiency.


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8.Target …

Create targeted campaigns and hit the people you need it to hit is ultra-important. You won’t waste time hitting a whole list if it isn’t needed. The more a customer can relate to the offer being presented to them the more likely they would be to purchase or go shopping.

A/B testing has been around for a while, but with marketing automation, the process is so much easier with email marketing and social media marketing tied in. Instead of scheduling one message to your whole database, you could, for example, scheduling different variations to go to segmented parts of your database and test out which one is the most popular.


Social


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9. Social Media

Track your social media campaigns, make sure that the mesh with your current marketing efforts. Managing all the efforts in one place will make you get a glimpse of what is going on in your accounts, in the people who are interested and involved in what is being put out there. While this has been easy to do with tools like Tweetdeck and HootSuite, but having everything in one central area, is a time saver.

10. Schedule posts and campaigns ahead of time

Being able to pre-schedule, plan and keep your editorial Marketing automation tools make staying organized easily by enabling you to schedule your campaigns and social media posts ahead of time.


Eleven

11. Don’t let your content die …

Repurpose your content after you put it out there, use it to nurture your leads, and introduce to your audience. If your company has a blog, it’s quite likely that once you’ve written a blog post and shared it from your social media profiles, you do nothing.

Give your content a second chance at being seen and keep sharing it with the world, vary it with pics of blurbs that link to it.


Sales and Marketing


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12. Increased revenue and average deal size

A better lead management system and prioritization with automation, cross-selling and upselling you’ll likely notice an increase in your customer lifetime value. it’s likely that your sales activity will produce a better ROI on your activities.


#1313. Marketing and Sales teams increased accountability

Marketing automation makes it very clear where the bottlenecks in your company are, thanks to having clearly defined processes, and birds-eye view reporting of the company’s pipeline.

Marketing’s goal is to capture as many leads as they can, but if they are not being nurtured, how are is the sales team going to adequately turn them into sales? Being about to get the marketing department will receive instant and impartial feedback that they need to improve their nurturing campaigns.

This process improves conversions and the ability to convert the tough conversions. Allowing the sales and marketing teams to concentrate on the tasks that make them successful.


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14. Refine your marketing processes

Implementing marketing automation software is that, makes you visualize your customer journey and marketing strategy to create processes that are perfect for them. Creating a process around the customer journey enables you to gradually refine how you target and nurture your leads. Visualizing a funnel, which enables you to see where leads are getting lost in your nurturing process, and make refinements in those areas.

15. Taking the guesswork out of lead scoring

Setting up your marketing automation software, you’ll need to create a set of rules and criteria that automatically will score any incoming leads based on the leads set of actions through the channels that they have taken. Most tools, leads are prioritized on a scale of 1-5, and then categorized as either ‘marketing qualified leads’ or ‘sales qualified leads’ or MQLs and SQLs. If a lead is classed as an MQL, it remains in a nurturing campaign until it becomes an SQL.

This means that your company’s sales team are only ever focused on converting pre-qualified SQLs, and not wasting their time on unqualified leads.


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16. Lead scoring and its awesomeness

Knowing which leads are the most involved and that keep qualified to move further into the sales process is amazing. Being able to prioritize those leads is also super helpful so you can spend the right amount of time on the qualified leads versus wasting time on the leads that aren’t ready or just looking. Knowing that this isn’t a new idea, but not everyone is using this system If you’ve been using a CRM system over the past few years, it isn’t a big surprise, however, it is still valuable to a business and sales cycle.

17. Know when to call …

Okay, okay this ties into #17 … but you will save time by calling only the leads that are ready to be called instead of going in cold. See what the lead is interested in and how interested they are by being able to see when they’ve visited the website. This insight enables you to pick up the phone to qualified leads after they’ve visited your site.


… 18 and 1918. Reduce lead conversion time

Making a sales process that is more efficient and effective, you reduce the time it takes for a potential lead to becoming a customer. By implementing marketing automation software, lead conversion time typically is dropped and an increase of revenue is usually experienced due to implementing software to help with Marketing Automation and a CRM.

19. Automatically follow-up with leads

With automation, ensure that every qualified lead is followed up, faster. It could be the first lead you touch when you get into work.


Number … 2020. Never make another cold call

Many people are not a fan of cold calling and are afraid of rejection … human nature. There are two ways to look at it takes, X amount of No’s to get to your Yes, and the use of marketing automation can help this process minimal by providing the marketing department deliver enough sales-qualified leads!


Annnnnd 21!

Final point – because why work harder, work smarter …

Call us today at (800) SOFFRONT or go to Soffront.com to see how a marketing automation and CRM program can help your business

grow.


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21 ways that marketing automation can help · 2017. 2. 18. · marketing automation software, lead...

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