Marketing Automation – What is it and how can you use it?

Marketing Automation takes repetitive marketing tasks and completes them automatically using pre-defined steps within your CRM software. It helps your business grow by freeing up valuable time and resources for other tasks.

What is Marketing Automation?

CRM software collects data from social media, website visits, online advertisements, and phone calls building rich profiles for your customers and leads, and sending them targeted content.

Automation is managed using workflows or instructions on who is to be contacted, and what to do next. Combined with the right marketing strategy, automation is very helpful in the process of lead nurturing. Sending personalised content at the right time enhances the customer’s journey and builds trust along the way – without bombarding them with loads of emails.

It’s also a great tool for improving customer satisfaction and retention by ensuring that the process doesn’t stop when a sale is made. Instead it lets you keep in touch with customers and identify any points of friction. Automation also nurtures customer relationships making it easier to sell to them again.

This is known as the flywheel concept: the more value added to the ‘wheel’ (customer journey) the easier it is to spin (make another sale)

How can Marketing Automation help your business?

Quality leads

Marketing Automation qualifies leads before passing them onto the sales team so they can make better use of their time. Act! CRM software ‘scores’ leads to prioritise which shortens the sales cycle and improves conversion rates.

Effective marketing

The line between effective marketing and marketing overload is blurry. Using automation, you can contact leads when they are most interested in your products or services so you don’t need to send loads of email blasts that will be deleted or marked as spam.

Automation lets you communicate with potential buyers at every milestone of their journey to reduce drop-off rates and lost sales.

Save time

Automating marketing processes frees up valuable time and resources. Once workflows are created they only need to be monitored for results so you can turn your attention to other areas of the business.

Customer service success

In a connected world, customers expect higher levels of service and immediate responses. Automated marketing helps you deliver the right level of service with minimal input.

For example, if a customer requests information about a specific product this can be automatically sent to them as soon as the request is received.

Better reporting

Effective marketing means drilling into your activities to see what is working and what isn’t. Act! Growth Suite offers dashboards with different KPI’s to help the business grow. Also use A/B split testing to refine and test your marketing techniques.

Want more information about marketing automation? Speak to our experts.