With so many different digital marketing mediums – social, email, content, and more – finding time to dedicate to each can be a challenge for any business. That is why marketing automation has become so popular, and important, for successful online marketing.
What is marketing automation? Marketing automation refers to the software that allows you to automate certain kinds of marketing actions. The goal of marketing automation is to save you time and ensure that no customers slip through the cracks.
Let’s talk about some of the most useful marketing automation features, and how you can use them to save time and improve your own marketing.
Email Autoresponders
Email is still the top way to stay in contact with your customers and leads. The most-clicked emails are ones triggered by the users’ own actions. For example, if they sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your blog, this is the perfect opportunity to begin a pre-written chain of emails.
These auto-responders should send every few days or weeks, and have carefully written content that focuses on their needs and how your product or service will solve their problems. These emails will serve to build trust with the recipient, and also keep your brand front-of-mind when they are considering purchasing what you’re selling.
Be sure your autoresponders are personalized, carefully targeted towards your audience, and include a call-to-action.
Below is an example of our landing page forms for
MarketingWebsite.com, and one of the emails that is triggered automatically after the form is filled out:
Customer Relationship Manager Software
A CRM, which we simply call our Contact Manager, can be a huge resource to your sales and marketing team, regardless of how large or small.
A CRM will keep track of all the pertinent information for your contacts, such as name, email, etc. It should also track helpful marketing information, such as the contact referral, when they have been contacted last, and for systems like ours that are directly integrated with email, how often and what emails they have opened and clicked on.
The more information your CRM / contact manager tracks, the less work you and your employees will need to do. My favorite features of our Contact Manager, which is included in all our products, is the automatic segmentation of audiences for my email marketing. Every new contact is automatically assigned a tag based on where they came from (MarketingWebsite, iPayAuto, or TitanMLM) so I know what kind of potential customer they are, and how to best target our products for them. Check out the example below:
Social Media Automation
Social media is still a valuable way to connect with your audience. Businesses, particularly B2B, are finding social media a good place to build their brand persona. But posting on all the different social sites can be time-consuming.
Some social sites have automated features. For example, Twitter allows you to set up an automatic Direct Message to send to each new follower. And Facebook allows you to set up a message autoresponder for your anyone who contacts your Page.
However, too much automation will make your brand disingenuous, which will completely defeat the purpose of using social media to form a more personal connection. Instead, considering using software to schedule posts and manage responses across all your social media channels. This will have the benefit of giving you a consistent brand message while also saving time from posting on each social site.
Marketing Analytics
One of the most commonly neglected, but very important parts, of marketing is results. Learning what works and what doesn’t, what people click on and don’t click on, is essential to creating a great marketing strategy.
Software that tracks and organizes data from your website or blog can help you create the best possible marketing campaigns. Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used analytics software, but some platforms include analytics. You can also find software to help with A/B testing (where you compare two nearly similar campaigns to see which one works best), and many other ways to track results and fine-tune your marketing.
Give marketing automation a try, if you aren't already. See how much time you can save by letting software do the most tedious part of marketing so you can be free to spend time with your customers and building your business.
