Combined with your customer relationship management (CRM) database, marketing automation software can improve, simplify, and accelerate your sales and marketing efforts. Although marketing automation has been wrongly associated with spam, businesses and customers both benefit from the personalized, timely, and dynamic messages this powerful software enables.
Your competitors probably already know this, but more than 70 percent of businesses are using marketing automation software, and B2B marketers see an increase of 20 percent in marketing automation-based sales opportunities compared with leads nurtured through other means, according to IDG.
In this article, we’ll examine seven ways in which marketing automation software can help turn your static, impersonal marketing messages into sales generators.
1. Set It and Forget It
Marketing automation tools are first and foremost designed to turn manual processes into pre-programmed actions. For example: If your Salesforce CRM$25.00 at Salesforce.com gives you enough data to tell you when a customer’s birthday might be, or when his or her contract is ending, you can use your marketing automation platform to pre-set an email to launch on a specific day.
Yes, most email marketing tools can help you get this set up, but the data you generate from these emails won’t automatically transfer across each of your systems. If your customer opens your email, clicks on a link, heads to your website, asks for a demo, purchases your products, shares the product with friends on social media, and then goes on to buy a second product, your email marketing and CRM tools won’t be able to seamlessly track that entire progression without a marketing automation tool connecting them in the middle.
2. Prospect Scoring
In its most basic terms, prospect scoring enables you to rank prospective customers against one another to determine how valuable each person will be to your sales interests. If you’ve got a white whale account, your marketing automation solution will gather data from your Apptivo CRM$10.00 at Apptivodatabase to rank his or her account atop your prospect scoring rankings.
This is particularly useful as you get into the middle and lower rungs of your prospect database. Knowing whether a lead is important enough to dedicate valuable resources to can save you lots of time and money, as well as help you to improve overall sales performance.
3. Prospect Nurturing
Once you’ve determined whether someone is a top or a middle-rung prospect, you can begin to develop your prospect nurturing campaign driven by your marketing automation software. Sure, you can manually send emails, social media requests, and write blog posts that might attract or engage with your prospect, but a marketing automation tool will help you pre-establish a cadence, the messaging, and the deadline for when these communications need to deliver business results.
With your marketing automation solution, you’ll be able to track your customer down the sales funnel to determine if he or she is advancing, backtracking, or remaining stagnant, and you can adjust your campaign so that future automated communications reflect this change in tone.
4. Pull In Prospects with Content
No marketing automation suite is complete without the ability to create, track, share, and draw customers in through content marketing. Your company blog, whether it’s proprietary to the marketing automation suite, or if you use a third-party tool, is the lifeblood of your content marketing efforts. Every piece of paid and earned media should end up on your blog. You should be constantly creating new content that speaks to the values of your organization.
Your marketing automation software will help you track, share, and design that content in a way that provides the most business value for your team.
5. Marketing Analytics
We’ve discussed tracking your campaigns in-depth already, but it’s absolutely worth reiterating, especially for larger organizations that don’t mind having a few interns bang out the manual work done by automation software. Even the best interns won’t have the technology to be able to determine things like return-on-investment (ROI), how the customer journeyed through your messaging, whether or not the customer opened and forwarded your email, among many other data points. Once you have this information, you’ll be able to adapt your campaigns, accelerate or decelerate your messaging, or scrap your idea completely.
These analytics will be what you ultimately use to defend your campaigns, your budget, and your job to your CFO. Make sure you get as much as you can from them.
6. Enhanced Customer Data
Behind all of your campaigns you’ll want to pack as much customer data as you can into your messaging, your blog posts, and your social activity. We already discussed things like birthdays and contract deadlines, but there are other useful tidbits you can pull from your Zoho CRM$20.00 at Zoho tool to enhance your sales and marketing efforts.
For example: How often does a specific user share your content? How much did it cost to acquire this one specific customer? How influential is this person on social media? These metrics will turn your generic marketing efforts into focused, timely, and user-specific messages.
7. Personalization
Speaking of customer data: We’ve all received emails and pitches that have absolutely nothing to do with our interests. In fact, most of you have probably received messages addressed to “Dear Customer” or “Friend.” Those messages could have used some help from marketing automation software.
With these tools, you’ll be able to segment customers in order to send messages to groups of people for whom only that specific message is relevant. You can also pull in rich user data such as a person’s name, title, and location to make it seems as if the email message was sent by a human and not software. Perhaps more importantly, you can determine when users are more likely to open, read, and forward a message, and then set your software to communicate with him or her at that specific time only.
Sure, this sounds really easy when you’re dealing with one person at a time. But imagine if you had to send messages to thousands or millions of customers. Only marketing automation software, combined with email marketing and CRM tools, can get the job done.
This article was originally published at PCmag.com, by author Juan Martinez.
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