For many companies marketing can be sporadic. Things are slow and it’s “all hands on deck” sending out emails and planning social media posts. Then things get busy and everyone’s helping new leads and clients, so marketing slows down until the next lull.
If you’re not streamlining and automating your marketing, doing everything manually can take a lot of time. The amount of “customer touches” you send out can also be limited by the time factor of what you can do using a manual system.
Discovering bottlenecks that slow down a company’s growth is something we do all the time when working with clients as an outsourced CIO. Often things that are limiting your company from moving forward can be solved by the use of the right technology.
When it comes to marketing automation, a little work up front setting things up can create a marketing program that works on autopilot, ensuring every single lead and customer get timely follow up with pertinent sales and product information tailored to their needs.
Marketing automation raises sales productivity by 14.5%.
It’s like having an online sales assistant 24/7 that has access to all your best sales materials and never misses a beat.
Automations You Can Set in Place to Supercharge Your Sales
Companies that take advantage of marketing automation note a number of benefits they experience. These include:
- Time savings
- Increased customer engagement
- More timely communications
- Increased opportunities, like upselling
Here are several ways you can make automation a key part of your marketing strategy.
Email Drip Campaigns
The goal of an email drip campaign is to send your leads and customers detailed information based upon their needs, actions they take, and/or time since they last received a communication.
Drip campaigns can save your sales team tons of time by pre-qualifying leads and nurturing them through sales stages where they have the opportunity to get questions answered and learn more about your products and services.
Email programs like Mail Chimp and Constant Contact allow you to set up drip campaigns and base the information sent on multiple factors.
- Step 1: You create a series of marketing emails for your different customer personas and stages of your buying cycle. (i.e. one might talk about how you’re better than a competitor, and another might offer a time limited coupon).
- Step 2: You decide on “tags” that you want to represent your different drip campaign paths. (i.e. one might be for companies over 1,000 employees, and another for small businesses).
- Step 3: Set up your drip campaigns using the emails you created, and decide on a decision tree for when the next email is being sent (i.e. it might be “5 days after the last email” or “if lead clicks on link in the last email, send email B in 2 days).
- Step 4: Tag your leads as you put them into your email list. This can be automated by offering choices to a lead filling out your contact form to designate their company size, their areas of interest, or another differentiating factor.
- Step 5: Turn your drip campaigns on, and now all leads that enter your system will go through the automated drip campaign that corresponds with their tagged attributes.
Automate Your Social Media
Trying to post content that’s interesting and also coincides with the times that get the most engagement can take up most of your day, every day. Or you can take a few hours once a month to load your social posts and let them send themselves out.
Social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer not only allow you to create and preschedule posts for all your social media accounts, they also have algorithms that will track engagement and automatically adjust when your posts are sent out to set you up for the most social interaction.
Streamline Your CRM and Sales
Your customer relationship management software (CRM) can take on more of the workload if you automate some of the tasks. For example, set up your contact forms, phone calls, live chats, and customer service emails to all come in automatically to your CRM, saving time on data entry.
Then once that information is in a program like Zendesk, you can add triggers and automations that save time and improve customer response time. Examples are:
- Create answer macros that can autofill into a ticket in a click
- Set up a trigger that if company size is “X”, the lead automatically gets sent to your sales team
- Use automated tags (like in drip campaigns) to automatically separate incoming leads into follow up lists
Use Chatbots on Social Media and Your Website
Chatbots have become quite advanced and can answer common questions for website visitors or leads on your Facebook page, freeing up your customer support team to handle more customers.
Not only do they respond immediately, they can be programmed with pre-set “personality packs” to interact in a more natural way with visitors so they’re helpful rather than annoying.
Chatbots also allow you to assist customers in some fashion 24/7, even on weekends and holidays. And you always know they’ll tell the customer exactly what you want, because you pre-program what they say.
Transform Your Marketing and Sales
Looking for a way to improve your customer response time without stressing out your staff? Marketing automation can free up your team, give them time to brainstorm creatively on new marketing, and improve lead generation.
Would you like to get started mapping out a plan? Genuine Technology Group can help!
Schedule a complimentary consultation today by calling 971-288-0880 or using our webform.