Marketing is an important aspect on any business because it determines the profits, sales and growth of the company. In the push to increase sales, companies have come up with creative ways to attract potential customers and turn them into repetitive customers. One great technique that seems perfect is the marketing automation.
Marketing automation is the use of various tools to streamline, automate and evaluate marketing workflows and tasks with the aim of enhancing efficiency in your business marketing plan. Automating your business marketing strategies and plans will help you enhance and swiftly respond to the prospects and needs of leads by offering an automated delivery of timely, valuable and relevant information when needed.
However, despite the potential and efficiency offered by marketing automation, you must be careful with how you utilize the service. You must avoid blindly using the service to deliver the same information to different customers because of the diversity between various individuals. If you give a customer details and information of a product or a service he or she does not need, you are simply spamming. To avoid this, you must embrace different tools such as web analytics platform, lead management system and customer relationship manager to help you understand specific needs of different customers.
Despite the anticipated growth and embracement, marketing automation tools remain the most under-utilized customer relationship management tools. A study by Genius survey in 2011 reported that more than half of respondents using the tools felt they had not seen the value of their investment. The dissatisfaction could be because they did not know how to fully utilize the tools or did not fully understand the role of the system.
How to Achieve Value and Returns From Your Marketing Automation System
- Be Creative: On default, most automation systems gather intelligence through website lead contacts with the company and thus, only leveraging a small amount of intelligence. You must be willing and interested in gathering more to make your system more effective. You should use the tools to gather addition information from website, blog and social interactions, purchase history and leads and prospects behavioral data. Therefore, you should make sure your automation systems work with these additional sources of information.
- Venture More: Most companies still use the traditional email marketing as the only marketing strategy. You should be willing to venture more into other channels such as phone campaigns, social and online initiatives. The best way is to embrace all of them to capture a greater market base.
- Consider Customer Interactions: Despite the ideal strategies and initiatives that your company embraces, your marketing automation system should accommodate other possible initiatives. Some customers may request information using other submissions such as requesting a free quote, whitepaper or an ebook. You should make sure your system is taking into account the methods.
- Do Not Ignore Your Loyal Customers: To many people, marketing is about turning new leads into customers. However, you should go beyond this definition and value your loyal customers more. Maintaining a good relationship with your existing customers will encourage future sales and even referral customers.
- Create A Relationship With New Customers: In most occasions, once a lead becomes a customer, the automation systems tend to forget about the new customer. You should take it upon yourself to deepen the relationship for future sales.
The success of your marketing automation technology purely depends on how well your strategy is planned, content, lead flow and a devoted team.
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Raleigh
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