Introduction
Keeping your customers satisfied throughout their journey can be a difficult task at times. It's even more difficult if you don't have a system in place to take care of your customers, especially if you're trying to grow.
Can you imagine following up with every visitor and potential customer who interacts with your company via various online channels? Sending out follow-up emails and offers manually to every single one of them? It would take an army, or so one would think.
The answer to this conundrum is Marketing Automation!
A definition of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is the process of using technology and data to use different types of marketing channels in combination to optimise their performance. When done effectively, it can help your business grow more efficiently by converting more leads into customers, increasing sales volume, reducing cost per acquisition (CPA), increasing customer lifetime value (LTV), and even improving time to revenue.
Marketing Automation software nurtures prospective buyers through an entire sales funnel/cycle, from the moment they become aware of your brand, to the moment they purchase your products.
In order to provide customers with optimal results, marketing automation solutions are built upon a comprehensive framework that includes:
· An intuitive user interface (UI) that allows marketers to create and manage their campaigns quickly and easily
· A robust back-end system that enables you to automate tasks across multiple marketing channels such as email, social media, or landing pages on websites. · A powerful software suite – and our favourite here at Digitag is HubSpot, a great way to achieve a fully automated experience.
How to use Marketing Automation in your business
To get started, you need to:
Set achievable goals and KPIs. What are you trying to achieve with marketing automation? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to improve customer retention? Do you have specific goals for different buyer personas?
Setting clear goals and KPIs for each stage of the sales cycle will help guide how much time should be spent on different activities. For example, if someone is buying from your site via email or social media posts, then they must see an offer within 24 hours of submitting their information (or else they might move on).
On the other hand, if someone is looking at hiring a designer through headhunting platforms, then there isn’t much urgency behind getting those leads in front of them quickly, the longer the lead time allows designers more time to review opportunities before applying them directly onto resumes without having any prior knowledge about what kind of work experience would match well with each specific client need(s).
Who needs your product/service? Why would someone want to purchase it from you? What are the challenges they are facing?
A buyer persona is a fictitious person who represents your ideal customer. It assists you in understanding the various stages of their journey and creating content that resonates with them at each stage.
Every business has an ideal buyer persona, and it's critical to identify who these people are, not only as a point of reference for who to focus efforts on, but also to save time and money targeting people who do not fit your target audience
For example, if you have an email newsletter that’s going out to all of your customers every week and asking them for feedback about their experience with using your product or service, then this would be one type of sales funnel that could be created using marketing automation software.
The next step would be determining how many people will receive each email in the form of either getting them directly from an online form or having them sign up for an event somewhere where they’ll receive updates about what’s happening next. This information will help determine which types of engagement strategies should be used when sending out these communications via email campaigns.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is an excellent way to maximise the effectiveness of your campaigns by guiding customers through the sales funnel. It is the simplest and most cost-effective way to reduce your opportunity cost while also establishing healthy and long-term relationships with your customers, and all of this is made possible by different software, such as HubSpot, that provides a wide range of options and workflow customisation based on your company's needs.
