Building a presence online isn’t necessarily difficult but it’s not easy either. It requires a lot of time and energy to get your company or product out there in the virtual universe. Once you have built your platform and have a steady flow of traffic now you need to make sure you keep the relationship with your audience.
Regular communication from you is required to remind them you exist. If you sell a product, it’s important to get your audience to subscribe to your e-mailing list. If you offer services, you should get them to sign-up for your blog updates. While you may have a person trying to keep up with contacting individual clients or sending mass e-mails, this is ineffective, time-consuming, and costly. Now it’s time for you to invest in marketing automation.
Marketing automation is when you use software to automate messages to keep in contact with your clientele. Basically, you have a salesperson, customer service representative, and a marketing person all rolled into one program. With proper use, marketing automation can help you keep the clients you already have without a single human intervention.
This doesn’t mean that marketing automation doesn’t require a more human touch. If anything, if a human doesn’t come up with the appropriate leads, marketing automation can seem just like some people think: a robot. Marketing automation can save a lot of time and money, but you have to input the parameters so that the automated messages seem personal to the client. For example, one school automates e-mails to their alumni by addressing the e-mail to the individual but it contains the same message. As long as your audience is entering the e-mail on your platform, this is simple to set up.
With the appropriate human touch, businesses have noticed a 451% increase in qualified leads. Not only that but also more and more businesses are planning on investing in marketing automation software. Several marketing teams across businesses have stated that marketing automation is essential to their marketing campaign. When done correctly, several businesses of seen a significant ROI. However, this doesn’t mean that marketing automation is the kind of strategy you set up once and call it a day. You have to be continuously updating the software and ensuring that it’s going to do what you want it to do.
Tools for Marketing Automation
There are 100s of reputable, business-approved marketing automation tools out there. This is a shortlist of some of the most useful marketing automation software:
- Hubspot: One of the best and comprehensive marketing automation software. However, it can be incredibly costly and seems to fit larger companies.
- Active Campaign: Has proven to be as good as Hubspot, but more cost-effective.
- Mailchimp: It’s cost-effective and is user-friendly. It’s a best fit for beginners who are just learning about marketing automation. However, it can be limiting.
- Vextras: It is great for eCommerce and has incredible customer service. It’s too new to determine how successful compared to Hubspot and Active Campaign.
- Klaviyo: It’s not the most user-friendly, but has good integration to Shopify, which makes it an eCommerce favorite.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
The benefits of marketing automation are two-fold:
1) It allows for constant interaction with your audience and clients.
2) It optimizes your staff’s time and focus. This provides your staff to think about more appropriate leads as the times change and update marketing strategies when necessary. By automating the day-by-day tasks in a nuanced manner, you’ll notice an increase in your client’s or audience’s lifetime value.
Instead of your number constantly fluctuating, you’ll see a steady increase. Marketing automation allows for less repetition and more creativity. It ensures that your marketing staff knows what they need to do and provides targeted focus. It also gives you the ability to have a bird-eye view of your marketing team’s reports.
The reality is marketing is a job that requires several different factors. You need to get your name out there. Then you need to ensure that you’re at the top with your competitors to guarantee a spot in Google’s top 10. And once you’ve done all that, you need to fight to keep your audience and clients.
Marketing automation helps with new account onboarding and nurturing current clients. While the setup of marketing automation is a bit of hassle, the efforts and research that you’ve put into it will provide a significant return on your investment. It’s not just about freeing up your team’s daily, menial tasks, but it’s about targeting goals and safeguarding your team’s marketing success.