Business is fraught with traps, pits and trip hazards, all of which are seemingly designed to bring you down while you are in full flow. So how can we avoid these?
Marketing automation provides the key to help us navigate these treacherous waters with relative ease. Read on for five examples of marketing automation in action, and discover how it could make your life that little bit easier.
Customer retention
A business’s prospect nurturing and customer retention processes need a tune up. The problem lies not in the nurturing process but afterwards, when providing ongoing support and continued value to customers.
The business has tried many different strategies, but to no avail; customers simply make a single, one-off purchase and then disengage. Exasperated, the team have decided to focus on bringing in new customers to combat the high churn rate.
Marketing automation to the rescue
The problem with this approach is that bringing new customers into a damaged cycle is like pouring water into a broken bottle. No matter how many new customers you bring in, your customer retention rate is going to continue causing serious problems.
Marketing automation can make all the difference here, tightening up the cycle by providing data-focused support to customers directly after a purchase, and by using smart insight to connect these customers with further products and services going forward.
Cooling leads
You are working hard to nurture your leads, developing them slowly along the acquisitions pathway, providing them with the resources they need and the support they require, but it is not working. Rather than engaging directly and making a purchase, your prospects are cooling, and many of them are disengaging altogether.
The ones that do make it through the system and convert seem to be progressing at a painfully slow rate. You want to hone the process, taking steps to accelerate the journey, but you don’t know where to start.
Marketing automation to the rescue
Mapping the route your customers take – or the route you want them to take – on the way to a conversion is a standard step in business, but this cannot accomplish results by itself. If we try to go it alone, even with these processes in place, we lack the insight required to give prospects the support they need, and the responsiveness required to provide this support in a timely manner.
Instead, we must implement our strategies via a marketing automation system. This system will unify our efforts and provide up-to-the-minute information on the status of a lead. Suddenly, we find that we are capable of encouraging conversions more efficiently and minimizing rates of disengagement.
An example of this approach in action comes from SignUp4, who implemented automation within their sales cycle in an effort to increase its efficiency. They succeeded in reducing the length of the sales cycle by 15%, boosting conversion rates in the process.
Data control
Your company has the data it needs, but your teams can’t decide on how to apply it. All of your sales agents keep spreadsheets and documents containing data from the customers they interact with, feeding it back into the team during a weekly planning meeting.
However, the data is too cumbersome to wield appropriately and you can’t help but think that there is so much extra insight to be gained from your customer interactions.
Marketing automation to the rescue
A conundrum like this is a marketing automation system’s bread and butter. To put it simply, a good quality marketing automation system is a data warehouse, collecting and storing vast amounts of data from numerous sources, ready for application within your company’s processes.
But, of course, the functionality of these systems goes far beyond mere storage. With a system in place, you will be able to commission powerful reports on the data, using its insight in a meaningful way. This level of business intelligence is simply impossible to achieve on your own; give yourself a helping hand with good quality automation.
Customer understanding
You’ve been in business for many years, and you understand what your customers need. Over time, the market you operate in has changed and so the goalposts for success have shifted. Nevertheless, you carry on as before, but the old strategies don’t seem to be working the way they used to.
You try to change things, altering bits and pieces here as you try to engineer a more successful solution. Unfortunately, it seems to be to no avail.
Marketing automation to the rescue
Taking a guess – even an educated guess – is not the way to gain an advantage in business. In the modern landscape of business, all our processes must be data-driven; each and every move we make must be backed up by cold, hard facts.
Marketing automation gives us the tools to make this possible. Using the data and insight we receive from automation, we can build customer segments and buyer profiles, dividing up our customer base. Through this division, we can gain a better understanding of what customers need and how we can deliver the solution.
The next steps
Things are going pretty well and you feel that it is time to take things to the next level. You start deciding what moves you need to make to boost your company’s performance and secure dominance in your local marketplace.
However, you find that you are stumped. You just don’t know which strategy is the best for you company.
Marketing automation to the rescue
You can’t put too high a price on data and being data-driven. After all, it is this which informs our next move in business. Where does this data come from? Our own processes of course.
We’ve already explored the power of marketing automation systems in capturing, storing, and managing data. This simply represents another application of this data.
Don’t make any moves until you have consulted the data, commissioned reports, and discovered what works and what doesn’t. This is your roadmap as you develop your organization, grow in the market, and meet the challenges which such development brings with it.
In what ways has marketing automation made your life easier? Share your story in the comments below.
The post Making Life Easier with Marketing Automation appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Online Marketing Tips.
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