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Marketing automation uses software to automate monotonous marketing work. Tasks like SMS marketing, email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns are automated by marketers to improve efficiency.
The traditional marketer will tell you that they have systems that have always worked. Therefore, there is no need for automation.
Marketing automation is what marketing automation does to get your email, deliver web information automatically, and send social and text messages to your customers through workflows.
Marketers and sales personnel commonly use marketing automation to control a company’s online marketing activities. For example, campaigns help reduce the chances of human errors and are an excellent labor-saving technique that maximizes efficiency and effectiveness, thus delivering maximum revenue for the company-the overall goal. If you need to measure your return rate on investment, you have Marketing automation at your disposal; it's timely, cost-saving, and grows the organization/business as fast as possible because promotions are provided for, aiding lead generation and scores. Of course, a good company goes along with good marketing automation.
Ways To Use Marketing Automation To Generate More Sales
1. Identify and realign bad leads
Marketing automation feeds on the data about a client. The tracking starts right away from when a client begins following up about your company on the website and records all the activities. The system further captures customers' contacts and names and emails, and any other information concerning a client. This is the most important of all because it makes it easy for sales representatives to quickly tell which leads are interested in their products (hot leads) so that you can get to them at the right time and which ones are not (cold leads). This improves sales efficiency by choosing only those that will benefit the company and become customers and ignoring those who are likely to waste your time.
2. Helps to maintain existing customer relationships
Marketing automation stores customers' data from the first time they interact with the company website. This helps sales representatives keep following up with the customer even when they become part of the company due to continued business support. Having credible customer information helps sales representatives build rapport through consistent communication. In addition, it helps to understand customers' needs so you can address them accordingly, getting more referrals from customers. As a result, customer retention, thus increasing sales and promoting business growth.
3. Craft a standard sales process
The use of marketing automation can help build a strong, reliable and long-lasting sales process that your team can trust for easy execution of their activities. These tools help you identify leads with high interest and those that need extra nurturing, thus helping you know where to focus your energy. In this case, the sales process will be made shorter since you will be dealing with leads that are already interested. A straightforward sales process also makes it easy for sales representatives to understand fast, making sales a more straightforward execution, especially if you have new sales representatives in the company. Additionally, a direct sales process helps you articulate and evaluate sales representatives' performance concerning who does what, where and how, and what is working and not working. It's vital for your company's survival because it will help you figure out where there are inefficiencies in regards to sales performance, cash inflow and cash outflow and then figure out a way of how these can be addressed.
4. Good customer service support
It becomes easy to follow up because you have all the customer-relevant data captured within the CRM system. For example, suppose the person has already made some purchases from the company/business. In that case, you can follow up with them, asking them about how the product is working for them, whether it's performing as expected, whether they need more and show them that you are willing to supply at no cost on delivery. Furthermore, you can market the new products you have in store, explain to them how they could be relevant, and be of help. Of course, this has to go along with the continued nurturing of the customer about the product. Such attention and care to a customer gives them a feeling of being at home and always welcome, promoting a good customer experience with your business. In addition, this encourages customer retention and continued support for your business without forgetting that there could be referrals along the way, which may boost the growth of the business in the short /long run.
5. Improves the spirit of togetherness and collaboration among teams
Many business people, entrepreneurs, and owners of small startups believe that a CRM system is meant to build relationships between the company and its customers. However, it goes beyond enhancing collaboration and the spirit of working together and sharing information between teams, like sharing data between the marketing, sales, customer service and management teams. This is because any person who has logged into the company CRM software as an employee can access all the information as it is shared. In addition, by having all the data and information organized in one central place and updated, the different teams will be working within a much more efficient organizational structure, thus promoting team performance.
6. Helps you improve your marketing campaigns
The marketing automation system captures data from all your customers and puts it in one central place. This data will help you know and find out where the majority of your customers come from to put much more marketing efforts in that area and market to them more. For example, if you discover that most of your customers come from social media, you might need to do a lot of social media marketing.
7. Helps you to know your customer’s needs and be available for their needs
With all your data in one place, you can easily understand your audience's interests. You can quickly know their interests and wishes depending on whether their search is centered or where they spend a lot of time. Alternatively, you can give your visitors a chat option on your website to freely show their interests to you and capture queries or complaints if there are any. If you know who your clients are and what they want, you will catch a good market.
8. Appreciate your loyal clients
Every business will always have those clients who come back after the first purchase. Their return could be because they liked your product or gave them a good customer experience, and as time goes by, those customers become loyal. You, therefore, need to appreciate such clients. For example, you can give them a free offer of a service or a product that will keep them coming. The data you collect will show you which customers are most profitable over others. Please note them and reward them accordingly; this gives them a unique and special feeling, thus zeroing them down to stay around your business and prioritize it before any other.
You can also ask them to refer their friends to your shop/business; this will slowly increase the number of customers visiting your business. Finally, there will be growth stemming from increased sales. According to Bain and company, 5% customer retention can increase company profitability by 95%.
9. Helps you figure out which leads to prioritize
CRM gathers every piece of data about all customers and sorts them according to who is doing better in terms of business support. For example, CRM can help you know which kinds of leads to putting forward and be contacted immediately. Therefore, CRM helps you define between hot leads and cold leads so that you can choose where to focus your energy.
10. Reduces provision of duplicated data
This is one of the most common faults affecting businesses, especially if your data is collected manually. The chances are high that typing or writing errors will be made, incorrect data may be entered, and you might not notice. This would reduce your productivity, profitability, efficiency and time. But with CRM, you will no longer have to suffer from duplicated data. You can do away with that by ensuring that user logins for your sales team are given convenient access to the software. Ensure that your sales teams are connected, allow sales managers access those user logins for the sales representatives, and let the top management access the sales team data for review and evaluation. With all this in place, your business performance will be improved, and there won’t be any duplications.