What Marketing Automation Can Do for Your Business

Marketing automation isn't just a buzzword to describe a few quick and easy marketing techniques.

It doesn't mean things like setting up automatic boosting of posts on Facebook or scheduling your social media on Hootsuite.

What marketing automation actually means is this:

Your business should have efficient, automatic, consistent, yet personalized marketing communications at every stage of the sales funnel, leading to more sales and a better bottom line.

Businesses that automate their marketing significantly outperform those that don't. If you're in the "don't" column, read on to learn why you should reconsider your approach to marketing.

Why Marketing Automation is a Must

There's a constant push-pull relationship involved between your business and your customers. In an ideal world, you could give each customer your undivided attention.

But as your B2C or B2B business grows, you simply don't have the staff to provide that kind of personalized focus. Fortunately, marketing automation can close that gap.

Yes, it sounds counter-intuitive: How can automation provide personalization?

Through the right combination of software tools and content strategy.

Marketing automation streamlines your marketing tasks, all while measuring the results of each contact with your customers, so you can keep improving your sales strategy, month by month, based on what works.

Through the use of marketing automation, your marketing team can be more focused and productive, while you increase your revenue.

It turns tasks that might once have been tedious into a seamless part of your workflow, and it releases your talented employees to handle other things where they can put their skills to work more profitably.

Here are just a few of the many ways marketing automation can help your business grow and thrive:

• Sales funnels that adapt in real time to customer behavior
• Marketing emails (including abandoned cart emails, drip email marketing campaigns, promotional campaigns & more)
• Cross-channel marketing campaigns
• Market segmentation
• Upselling
• Personalization of landing pages and other website pages
• Customer retention
• Lead generation, lead scoring and lead nurturing
• Customer onboarding
• Post-purchase follow up to increase customer satisfaction
• Post-purchase outreach to increase repeat sales
• Measurement of ROI and other analytics
• Integration of website usage and behavior with your CRM
• Automate back office business processes

Don't be left behind.

Your competitors may already be taking advantage of these automated processes to boost their own bottom lines. With increased reliance on social media marketing and the way channels keep changing, if you don't have a marketing automation solution that's responsive, flexible, and scalable, you could be left in the dust.

Marketing Automation + Personalization = Sales

Marketing automation is far more than a convenience or a labor-saving tool.

When you use it to personalize the customer experience, you don't just give your customers and clients the products and services they're looking for most.

You also give them convenience and the personal touch that cements brand loyalty.

Show your customers that you understand their busy lives. That you care about what they care about.

By personalizing your landing pages or an email, marketing automation makes a true connection that adds value. 

It builds bridges of communications and lets your customers know that you truly want to meet their needs.

And when you do that, visitors and leads can become customers for life.

Analyzing and Improving Your Marketing Automation (and Sales)

Your eCommerce platform provides you with some good tools to understand your customer base. But it can't tell you everything you need to know.

It can't tell you the type of information you can learn through marketing automation. Once fully implemented, marketing automation systems can take you along the entire customer journey each visitor to your site has traveled.

You may already know what they're reading on your website, what they're lingering over, what they're clicking on, what they're putting in their cart. But now you'll also be able to see clearly what  specific content is bringing about conversions, how different types of people are responding to your content, and when it's time to make adjustments to your sales funnel.

Once you better understand your customer journey, marketing automation strategy helps you pinpoint the behaviors and trends of customers who are of greatest value to your company.

With the data you receive and analyze from your marketing automation, you're in an excellent position to segment your customer base. Then we determine which stage of the funnel a customer is in and how ready they are for different kinds of marketing campaigns.

And all of this happens automagically, 24/7/365, without precious time being wasted by you or your staff.

Marketing automation helps create dynamic marketing campaigns with a higher ROI payoff, nuturing your leads in ways that produces real results.