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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, among others.
With marketing automation, everything is done by software or a set of tools. This goes in tandem with quick replies, quick actions, quick responses to customers’ queries, quick updates to customers in case of any changes in the services or products offered, and any other essential communication regarding the company itself.
Marketing automation simplifies and shortens the marketing process seamlessly. As a result, communication and conversions happen a lot quicker.
Marketing automation is what marketing automation does to get your email, deliver web information automatically, and automatically 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 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, aids with lead generation and scores. Of course, a good company goes along with good marketing automation.
Here is what Marketing Automation can help you with.
Marketing automation helps simplify and makes your work easier, reduces wastage of time, and delivers in time. Marketing automation is a set of tools to bring marketing activities down to their most accessible simplicity. Marketing automation makes work easy because messages, ad campaigns, emails, and posts are sent automatically without independently sending each item.
More so, it helps you find out who your correct audience is, sorts out the right content that your customers will appreciate, and also motivates customers to act; this could be through supporting the business by buying and purchasing goods and services, thus having more revenue flow into the business.
This is how marketing automation works.
You start by collecting customers’ data from website visits, email subscriptions, social media platforms, and application usages, which aids you in having a clear 360-degree view of every customer. The rest of the work is left to marketing automation tools when that's done—for example; finding the right audience and grading them perfectly, sorting and grouping messages depending on who should receive what, finding out the right platforms for each customer and where they can easily be accessed, finding out about whether to use emails, text messages, or websites while doing the best to serve your customers.
It is said that most customers appreciate marketing automation because the information is provided in time and when it’s wanted the most. Moreover, it delivers appropriate content to customers, sends notifications about any updates, and helps to avail the right products for each individual /independent customer.
Here is what you need to craft the best marketing automation strategy.
Discover, know, and unveil your marketing goals to your stakeholders and decide how much you wish to invest in this particular aspect.
Work with other people and the departments, especially where you feel they will need that specific product, and advise and give suggestions.
Making training essential and practical will help your team know what is to be done next, how it will work, the importance of the new system, and where it will be implemented. When this is done, it will create awareness among your team members and reduce the chances of rejecting change.
Review your customer database; choose which customer to engage, why, how, and when?
Construct exciting content for each of your customers depending on what you know that interests them the most, and of course, you must understand what services or goods each of your customers love to send content relevant to what they want.
Make a layout of your plan on when to start, don’t just rush to get started but instead take your time to study every other process step by step; this will help you understand more about the system as you implement it.
After implementing the system and working, trying to monitor what is working and what is not working, seek how best to improve and make it more productive.
Marketing automation is so versatile and comes in handy because it schedules and makes all ad campaigns with a single click, controls all the digital marketing activities, makes it easy to send emails, text messages, and also cares for all website subscriptions and website visitors/leads, runs check throughs to find out what attracts more engagement and what doesn’t, sets goals and measures performance.
Additionally, marketing automation allows you to care for prospects with highly personalized, valuable content that helps convert prospects to pleased clients. Having good marketing automation in place, it's friendly to take care of leads as much as necessary to fabricate them into paying customers. Victorious marketing automation reduces that resistance between you and customers, thus serving you to look after purchaser interactions well after being passed into Sales and the deal has been closed /completed.
Benefits of marketing automation
Businessmen and women keep wondering why they should use marketing automation. Marketing automation has many associated benefits, and these include;
1. Boosts the effectiveness of sales teams and sales cycles
It's easy to identify a qualified lead through progressive web form profiling, lead scoring, visitor tracking intelligence, email marketing, and CRM integrations. This aids in reducing time wastage and makes the process of selling easier.
2. Improves the efficiency of the marketing function
Marketing automation helps to convert leads on the landing pages at a higher rate, automates processes and nurtures leads, does social media management, and improves client management.
3. Saves time and money through automation of manual activities
Marketing automation aids you automate marketing administration tasks which would be time-consuming and tiresome. The activities include; ensuring that marketing lists are kept safe and in one place, sending customized emails to people (intended customers), managing campaigns, reporting, updating CRM software systems, and other tasks.
4. Delivers better targeted and relevant messaging in your demand generation program.
Marketing automation allowed you to use segmentation and programmed campaigns to send better messaging to your customers depending on their interests. This is done to enhance customer relationships.
5. Improves revenue
Marketing automation saves time and increases efficiency and how systems work, reducing wastage. Such improvements cause an increment in revenue since more time is created for people to engage in more money-making activities. In addition, customized communication increases conversion rates, which translates into revenue once purchases are made.
6. Boosts close rates through sales automation
Marketing automation helps to improve the rate at which sales deals are closed. Marketing automation software enables you to identify the lead's stage in the sales process, making following up easy. Knowing the lead's stage in the sales funnel enables you to choose what content to market to convert to buying or make quicker purchasing decisions.
Marketing Automation Tools You Can Use
1. MonkeyPesa CRM
MonkeyPesa CRM is in the bracket of an all-in-one business automation tool. From sales marketing, automation or customer support. With the devotion to help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), MonkeyPesa is a user-friendly tool. The pricing, features, analytics, easy-to-interpret dashboard make it ideal for you.
The CRM aids businesses to get prospects, insights, converts more leads to become customers and manages with customers across several channels. At the same time, they go through the selling process.
The services offered include; Sales pipeline management which helps companies to sell faster and get more prospects into the business. The invoicing and billing system allows track time, generating invoices, Pro-forma invoices, quotes, and getting much more money faster. And the real estate system helps real estate companies to acquire property, landlord management, tenant and the necessary automation.
MonkeyPesa CRM Features:
Team collaboration
Contact management
Pipeline management
Data security
Insights, analytics and reports
Human Resource and payroll
Inventory and stores
Bulk SMS and emailing
Accessible Communication is a giant step into maintaining good relationships with clients. Strong relationships generate more sales and support, improve client satisfaction, and even reduce business expenses.
A closed buyer is just as vital as a new lead. MonkeyPesa CRM allows you to create charges based on a prospect’s information, schedule calls for them at any point in time, take notes based on our interactions, and easily save and organize that data for future use. In a nutshell, you are moving a sales lead, or prospect from one stage of your sales funnel to the next.
The MonkeyPesa CRM allows you to add contacts manually or upload files. Because the goal is to have streamlined communication in the sales process, you do not have to open another platform to make calls with your clients and prospects. The dashboard enables calls. In addition, all these interactions are captured in case you need to make clarifications and references.
Social Media is a very relevant tool of sales and marketing today. Every passing day, there is a new social media channel your clients and prospects sign up for. MonkeyPesa provides a centralized location for all your social media interactions — tweets, posts, reels, videos, comments, replies, Direct Messages.
2. HubSpot
This inbound marketing tool helps generate leads, make deals, manage your sales automatically, and maintain your customer relationships. More so, it keeps marketing organized, attracts the flow of traffic onto your business site, and helps you to achieve more profits with less work done. We all know that the goal of HubSpot is” turning unbound customers into inbound ones” and does the best when it comes to content marketing through the use of emails, website messages, and texts. Its price flows depending on the target number of customers you aim to reach out; for example, if you reach out to 1000 contacts, then the monthly charge is $800.
3. Use constant contact to pass information over to your clients easily
Constant Contact is one of the most powerful email marketing automation tools that can be used to deliver your messages to most of your customers through emails and websites. It offers fan promotion, coupons, deals, and events management. This tool is not only used to send emails, website messages, and text messages automatically, but you can also use it to edit emails before sending them out to respective clients; thus, it's worth having and using it to promote your business. Furthermore, their cost is pocket-friendly and bearable that is accessing all features costs $45, while reaching out to about 500 contacts is only $20.
4. Make customer.io your number 1 priority
Customer.io provides the construction of messages and sends them to customers based on how they interact with the website and the business. Each customer receives a message in line with the services they signed up for. It is personalized to suit each customer. It offers many other features, such as conversion tracking, customer profiles, context conversations, and A/B testing. Their charges are pretty interesting. They have a free offer if your email contact list is between 200 to 400 people; however, for an email contact list of 5000 to 10000 people, the charge is $50 per month; this is more than cost-effective and a must-target every other business.
5. You have pardot in place, then you have it all
Your leads are nurtured because you have pardot, your leads are scored because you have pardot, your CRM integration is perfect because you employed pardot, your email marketing goals have been achieved because pardot is the real deal. Your rate on return on investment is reported because pardot does so, revenues are boosted, and sales cycles shortened only if you have pardot in place. So what is a business without pardot? Their Standard pricing is $1,000 per month, and features include; in-depth prospect tracking and lead grading.
6. Marketo
Marketo is a cloud-based tool for large and small enterprises that helps construct and maintain relationships. Marketo offers a free trial on top of zero charges upon setting up.
Finally, marketing automation should no longer be a choice for businesses but a must-have system. The benefits are massive.