This simple question is something I have been asking myself for over two years now; why don’t more business use marketing automation tools to improve their sales pipeline and increase customer engagement?
Marketing automation tools are usually software tools to automate those manual processes that follow in a basic marketing role, like sending emails, checking website traffic or posting on social media accounts. The thing is, a lot of these basic actions can now be automated and tailored based on your marketing objective.
This is a Pandora’s Box and I do not want to open it right now, and I have a feeling this is going to turn into a series of blogs, but right now, this is what you are missing out on if you are not using marketing automation for your business.
What marketing automation can add to your marketing activities:
The ability to generate personalized emails based on specific customer actions on your website. Simply put; if your customer likes Product A, and can’t stop looking at it, you can send an email to your customers inbox with Product A and a coupon! It’s genius.
You can also see when an email is opened and how the customer engages with the email. This will allow you to send additional responses, follow ups or content.
You can see how a prospect has navigated through your site, viewed certain content and you can then assign ‘points’ to this customer or lead and add them to a customer journey plan to turn them into a customer.
You can market on multiple channels at once and track all engagement, assign scores/points and drive marketing activities around those scores. So higher points get certain marketing content and lower points get another.
You can basically measure in real time if the marketing activities you are doing are working. Are those banner ads converting, versus an email you sent out last week, versus and Facebook campaign you are running, and how did that prospect engage with your site and move through your sales funnel. All of this is clearly visible in your tool and allows you to make decisions in an instant to further improve your marketing efforts.
Having used a few different platforms; Pardot, Marketo, Act-On, Hubspot, Mailchimp, I definitely do have my favorites. But they all add an extra layer of visibility we as marketers need to be more strategic with our jobs. It’s worth checking them out and even doing a 30 day free trial to see what information you garner from your data.
Photo Cred: Ron Jack Rogue
Blog by:
Jay Bowen
These writings are the musings of a marketer and are not representative of client work or brands. Please share the love and share the post!
