So, you’ve got a great website?
Your marketing team spends hours driving visitors to it and nurturing them into leads. Your sales team spends hours collecting, qualifying, organizing, and chasing those leads.
That is not very efficient.
Your sales team wants to focus on what they do best- selling, and marketing team wants to get on with what they do best – creating innovative campaigns.
But how do you make both teams happy? The solution is marketing automation. But how does marketing automation work?
Marketing automation works by automating all repetitive processes, you free up your teams to focus on bringing new customers and making more sales.
You align your marketing and sales efforts and empower them to increase ROI and revenue. It can even inspire new automated processes.
Defining Marketing Automation for Dummies
As a simple definition, marketing automation for dummies is about using software and technology to perform sales and marketing functions more efficiently.
This is achieved through multiple channels. It automates simple tasks.
How Does Marketing Automation for Dummies Work?
Imagine you’re the owner of a giraffe business. Thousands of people visit your website with various levels of interest and engagement. But how can you boost visitor engagement?
Some visitors show their area of interest by downloading your top ten cutest giraffe calves.
With marketing automation for dummies in place, this action automatically triggers your pre-planned giraffes as pets workflow for these visitors, designed to warm them up from cold to warm leads gradually.
Main Benefits
Marketing automation for dummies automates those little things that you should be regularly doing and probably have already done at one time or another.
It enables you to:
- find new customers faster
- onboard existing customers
- increase loyalty among your current customers
- identify your high-growth and highly profitable customer segments
- and increase your communication and your engagement with them
That might seem complicated, but let’s divide that up.
How Does Marketing Automation Work to Increase Engagement
The first thing is, by automating simple repetitive messages that you’ve probably already written, you can explode your engagement among prospects, existing customers, and onboarding new customers.
For example, a new customer to your business may not know everything about you and all the aspects of the products or services that you have.
Welcome Series
Use a welcome series, where you time-specific messages to them to familiarize your new customer with your company, what you offer, and focus on educating them.
They’re your newest customer; you’re going to engage them for a more extended period.
You’re going to drive some immediate responses, and they’re going to become familiar with you, your company, and your brand.
Send a welcome series of emails that inform and educate them about your company. You may audit their keyword search to personalize your emails.
Welcome series emails are opened more frequently, they’re clicked through more regularly, and they drive more revenue than any other type of email.
By taking communications that you’ve most likely already written, it’s a matter of putting them on a schedule.
But they’re only going to be sent to new customers at specific intervals. You can plan these communications to elicit a response.
Utilize links in those emails to drive those new customers back to your site to learn more information about your company or provide a specific call to action.
Thank You Email
Anytime anyone takes action and interacts with your website or with your company; you can also send them a thank-you email.
A Thank You email gets much more engagement than the other type of email. People open and click through at a higher rate than typical email campaigns.
But what’s interesting is just by sending a thank-you email, it can also generate six times the revenue of other types of email campaigns as well.
People like to be recognized and noticed for the things they do. When you do that through interactions with your company, you increase your customer loyalty.
How Does Marketing Automation Work to Flatten Your Sales Funnel?
The other exciting thing about marketing automation for dummies is the ability to flatten your sales funnel.
You can reduce the amount of time of taking someone from a lead to a prospect, to a sale. You can also decrease the amount of time it takes for someone who has an interest in your company until they’re a customer.
Because through coordinating planned communications, you walk them through the steps of giving them the answers to the questions that they have because you probably already have these emails.
Your sales team may already have written these emails.
But by identifying the typical questions prospects have before they become a customer and the usual obstacles that are encountered, you can create planned communications that go out on a schedule and lead people through the process.
By doing that, you’re automating information through a series that helps to prioritize on who you should contact first.
You can learn if these are good leads or just someone who is just looking for some information and they don’t have any intention of becoming a customer.
Through these planned communications, you can see who is interacting with your company and who have expressed needs that you can act on.
Close More Deals
By flattening the sales funnel, you’re going to close more deals. And you close more deals because you have the ability, through marketing automation for dummies, to focus on the right leads at the right time.
Here are a couple of examples and maybe some of this has happened to you.
First Scenario
The first scenario is a user downloaded a white paper that was promoted on Twitter. The user followed the link, filled out the form, and downloaded the white paper.
But what was interesting was the user received a sales call the same day, and then he received two more sales calls trying to close him in in two weeks.
Now, what’s the problem with that?
It was too many sales and too much pressure, and all he did was download a white paper. They never even asked if he got anything out of the white paper; they just treated him as a lead in the funnel.
Second Scenario
Now let’s look at the next scenario.
A user received a sponsored email from someone that she already trusted, and they pitched a white paper. She went ahead and downloaded that white paper.
Over the course of the next four months, she received invitations to download additional white papers to attend webinars, helpful information about that content and got a few emails that just walked her along the process of what this company can do.
The emails also highlighted some success stories.
After those four months, she received a phone call. It was incredible they knew the content that she had looked at. They knew which webinars she attended, and they had a good conversation.
Because it wasn’t high pressure, they knew precisely the content she was interested in.
They were using the phone call to gauge her urgency. Was she ready to buy? What was her timeline? It was an intelligent conversation about specific content.
The result of that type of scenario is that it is going to result in a high conversion, qualified sales call that has actionable results.
Marketing automation for dummies does require some patience, but it will limit the amount of time you spend with leads that don’t exhibit any behavior of interest or desire to become a customer.
Marketing automation for dummies enables you to close the prospect more efficiently because you have a shared experience and content.
Approach a phone call or a closing conversation with specific information about that prospect. You can use that phone call simply to gather more data rather than to apply pressure to make a decision.
Make More Money
If all these things happen, you’re going to make more money.
You’re going to make more money also by evaluating your existing customers through marketing automation for dummies.
Through marketing automation for dummies, you can nurture leads to become customers. You can nurture your existing customer base to learn more information about them.
As you learn where your customers live, their likes, their dislikes, their preferences, the content they find interesting, and the products that they are more attracted to, then you can start conversing with them on a more personable level.
Develop highly efficient customer segments from the data that you’ve accumulated.
Present offers that are highly targeted, relevant, and specific to each group of customers.
Develop Best Customers
You will love going through and looking for your top 20% of customers and figuring out why are they your top 20%.
Then you can build better loyalty by giving better offers that are more customized and personalized to the client
Develop an inner circle mentality and provide incentives. Talk to them at a different level because these are the ones that are most likely going to be your advocates
Feed Them Information.
Treat them differently because they’re on a different level than the rest of your customers.
Implement Marketing Automation for Dummies
Automation helps you identify these customers faster, more efficiently, and deliver information that they want to hear.
Actively using marketing automation on your website may lead to boosted sales, the readiness of your leads, improve marketing and sales productivity.
You will increase customer engagement through enhanced targeting, deepen and maintained positive customer relationships.
Marketing automation for dummies reveals its real power when used with other website activities like personalizing web content.