3 Reasons Your Business Needs Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is one tools that can be used to grow and market your business. One study concluded that over 80% of business will handle consumer relations solely through a dedicated automation, while never talking to anyone. But wait you say; “customers want to deal with a person.” How can our contact be replaced by marketing automation?
The secret is found in the engine and content that drives the automation software. Companies can spend thousands of dollars creating workflows, templates, customer-response emails, and a whole host of other content. Then plug that content into the marketing automation software. While this represents a significant investment of time up front, the savings on the back end is enormous. Marketing automation creates a virtually hands-off approach to customer relationships.
You are also right – none of this is a replacement for actual human beings. A living person needs to monitor these systems, but also step in and interact when necessary. For small businesses, marketing automation is a game changer. It creates more hours in the day for skilled employees to perform skilled work. It frees you up from posting and preparing emails to allow you to do the work that pays the bills.
So how can marketing automation help you and your company? Here are a few reasons to look into implementing it today.
1. Customized Messaging Increases Sales
It’s no secret that customers are moving towards a more integrated and intimate shopping experience. They want to associate with brands that resonate with them. Thanks to the ever-widening landscape of online business options, they have more than ever to choose from. If they don’t like one provider, they’ll simply switch to another.
This is where automation comes in super handy. Say you have a subscriber list of over 50,000 people based in various parts of London and Windsor. How will you provide each one of those people an experience that speaks to them personally?
The answer? Marketing Automation. A recent report by Customer Communication Insights revealed that customers are 77% more likely to purchase from a business that offered a personalized shopping experience, as opposed to a company that treated customers like another nameless member of the herd. Moreover, a company that knows a customer’s purchase history, recommends future purchases based on that past history, or even addresses them by name can expect around a 75% increase in conversions.
Marketing Automation allows you to create a sales funnel that can curate and deliver content to the end user. By creating different landing pages, CTA or call-to-action, and valuable blog content you can create a unique experience for each user. Once you combine personalized email marketing with an automated sequence, you’ll have a customer that is loyal to you.
2. Automation Increases Your Customer Retention Rate
New leads are great, but your best revenue-generating tools are the customers already on your email list. Why not cater to them after the initial sale? Upsells and referrals sent via email automation do wonders for your bottom line, so make sure you continue to deliver content to your existing customers after the sale is over.
Automated software that continues to nurture the customer relationship long-term is one way to gather testimonials and referrals. Then use these testimonials to give your business the social proof to drive in new leads and turn them into future customers and eventually ambassadors.
Customer retention is what turns a business into an empire. Even retaining 5% more customers results in a profit increase by anywhere from 25-90%. Utilizing marketing automation software customer retention is easier.
3. You’ll Know Your Numbers, and Know Where to Spend More
Marketing, traditionally seen as an art uses promotions and advertisements designed to evoke a powerful sense of connection and trust. These days, marketing is much more about the numbers. You need to know exactly which campaigns are performing, how well, and when they are performing. This information allows you to compile a list of future strategies that will allow you to funnel marketing dollars into the area that will return the most in revenue.
With the amount of information available, crunching these numbers is not only labour intensive, it can be downright impossible. Customers can come from all corners of the globe and buy for any number of reasons, so understanding the analytics behind revenue is key to capturing repeat business.
Automation allows you to understand the numbers behind different marketing strategies. These include your return on investment (ROI), behavior for individual leads, email performance and effectiveness, and web pages performance and effectiveness. Without this information, you can’t tell where your marketing efforts should be focused, which makes for an inefficient marketing plan.
Automation takes all of this data and can put it into a spreadsheet in real time that allows the individual marketers to make the best decisions possible. And with more than half of marketers stating that analytics and reporting is one of the most important marketing tools they own, you’ll need this information in order to stay competitive.
