When people think of marketing automation, email is the first — and sometimes only — area that comes to mind. While email marketing automation is a powerful tool, you are missing opportunities if that is the extent of your marketing automation software. A few of the other applications and benefits:
Nurturing Prospects All Through the Sales Funnel
Few people are ready to make a purchase the first time they learn that a product or company exists. Marketing automation allows you to extend just the right information at just the right time. New visitors will see something different from those who’ve visited before and considered whether to buy. You can even reach out to those who change their minds at the last minute and leave a full shopping cart before navigating away. All of this can allow you to nurture prospects all the way through the sales funnel, dramatically increasing your conversion rate.
Cross Selling and Upselling
Your current customers are your best prospects. Twenty-seven percent of people who have done business with a company once will do so again. By the time you’ve made four sales to a person, the chance that they’ll keep coming back nearly triples. And, in stable businesses, as much as 40% of sales come from repeat customers.
Marketing automation lets you use the knowledge you have about your customers’ buying habits to keep them coming back to you. You can send automated emails when it is time to restock on a consumable. Or, you can show logged-in customers items that relate to ones they have already purchased.
Multi-Channel Marketing Automation
When you collect contact information from your customers, you get the ability to promote not just through email, but also through social and SMS channels when appropriate. Each of these can serve a different purpose when you choose to reach them. For instance, brick and mortar customers may be swayed to come into your store after receiving a text message promotion. Social customers on platforms like Instagram may see an image of an item they like and be tempted to buy.
Highly Personalized Marketing
With marketing automation, you remove a lot of the labor included in personalizing emails. You can also personalize landing pages, so that prospects see something different based on whether it is their first visit, whether they’ve browsed without purchasing or based on what they’ve purchased before.
Detailed, Real-time Reporting
Good marketing is as much science as it is art. When you bring automation into the mix, you also get the ability to collect and organize real-time data on the fly. You can learn which emails are the most likely to get responses. You can learn which color schemes are most beneficial and whether it works better to warm someone up or include your CTA right at the top. Results can be tracked through different cohorts or even down to the individual.
Over time, you can make every marketing effort more and more effective by using what you have learned. This improves your return on your marketing investment and can increase your revenue overall.
No solution is truly set-it-and-forget-it. But, marketing automation can reduce the labor needed to offer highly personalized communications. It can even give you abilities that you would never have even if every marketing action was completed just for this customer by an individual human being. By incorporating this powerful toolset into your marketing efforts, you can reduce your cost per lead, increase your sales per customer and fuel your company’s success.