Marketing automation tools and policies to manage the user’s ability to manage are rapidly being developed. While access to product and service information and applications is relatively advanced, marketing automation is still in the early stage of adoption. The rapid adoption of mobile devices and their management is now a key driver of marketing automation.
People are more satisfied and resourceful when they are working with their preferred applications, while the early adopters are looking for more automated solutions for their issues. The high demand for infrastructure as a service is increasing and needs to be addressed.
The term ‘marketing automation’ has become a buzz-word, where marketers seek out marketing automation software under the impression that all of the digital marketing strategies necessary for growth, including those needed to generate new leads, roll up under the banner of marketing automation. This misconception leaves many companies with sophisticated tools to automate part of their marketing, but no solution to generating new leads to nurture in the first place.
First, you need to have a website to focus marketing automation activities
You need to build into your website a way of capturing the email address of people who visit your website. If you don’t capture this information, you’ve possibly lost the opportunity to market to them forever.
The cloud price war means that implementing marketing solutions is easier than it was only a couple of years ago. Fragmentation that plagued smaller businesses has improved significantly. You may have an automated system that people can subscribe, or unsubscribe to automatically. It keeps you in front of that prospect, because you’re delivering valuable content on a regular and reliable basis.
People may even trade their email address to have access to the free reports, white-papers, articles and blogs of value. Blogs are a great way to build trust, spread your expertise and attract public relations opportunities. Blogs are also an important search engine (SEO) tool, with search engines finding you and indexing your content.
Marketing automation cost-benefit analysis
One of the great things about technology, websites and the marketing automation tools that are available, is that they allow you to market to prospects in a far more professional and consistent manner. A cost-benefit analysis based on what competition might, or might not be doing is important and should replace hearsay and emotional decisions.
Automation can also make a small business seem larger than it really is, or a small marketing budget more effective than other marketing methods. For most smaller businesses, marketing in the past consisted of dead end emails, phone calls and reliance on media ads and trade shows, to raise awareness of their presence in the marketplace. The biggest difference now is that marketing automation allows smoother marketing campaigns, allowing businesses to expand with little extra cost.
Mobility coupled with automation has allowed us to become faster at managing problems. With the price of cloud technology falling while showing strong signs of maturity, better business practices abound. In many cases, more than 60% of your customers will probably access you through their mobile device, so be ready for fast appropriate responses.
Simple automation ideas to start with
Automation works best when it starts small and solves a clear problem. Rather than trying to automate everything at once, choose one or two journeys where timely, consistent follow-up would make a real difference to your customers.
- Welcome series. Send new subscribers a short sequence that introduces your business and points them to your most helpful content.
- Enquiry follow-up. Confirm every website enquiry straight away and let people know when to expect a reply.
- Abandoned cart reminders. Prompt online shoppers who left items behind to complete their purchase.
- Post-purchase check-ins. Ask for feedback or a review a little while after a sale.
Keep the human touch. Write your automated messages in a friendly, natural voice, make it easy for people to reply and review results regularly. Automation should free up your time for real conversations, not replace them. Track opens, clicks and enquiries, then refine each sequence as you learn what your audience responds to.
