Why use marketing automation for your business?

Lead generation is an extremely important step in any business’ growth. 

Bringing together information from all your customer touchpoints — including website visits and downloads, social media activity, and direct marketing — enables automatic scoring, qualifying, and prioritising of leads. This, in turn, can drive wider marketing campaigns, including:

• Trigger-based marketing messages
• “Drip-feed” emails to maintain interest
• Personalised emails 
• Facebook or Twitter messages

Automating the many steps between marketing and sales gives your team more time to focus on overall strategy and focusing on the highest quality leads. Marketing automation can also give you a richer, more detailed picture of potential customer behaviour.

Using behavioural tracking methods such as following a user’s path through your website, marketing automation software can help your marketing team understand prospects’ interests and where they are in the purchasing lifecycle. 

For instance, say a particular customer is reading about a broad category of products. This might indicate that they are at the beginning of the purchasing process, researching and comparing while preparing a short list. If they later download white papers on a specific product, that could indicate a narrowed focus, and a readiness to talk with a salesperson.

Nurturing leads can be tricky and time-consuming. Guiding a lead through the journey is absolutely worth it when it ends in a sale, but not all of your leads are going to convert to sales. In fact, according to Gleanster Research, 50% of the leads businesses generate are qualified, but not ready to buy right now.

For a small business, that can create a dilemma: You know roughly half of your leads will buy from you, just not right now. But with a small team handling both sales and marketing, you can’t exactly afford to keep constant tabs on half of your leads. Don’t stress! Automation can save the day.

New Zealand payments provider Paysauce has transformed its lead nurture process. Where sales reps once managed leads by manually following up, automated journeys now manage the entire nurture process. With new leads being nurtured through the sales funnel automatically, reps are given time back in their day to chase more leads.

Marketing automation tools simplify the process of getting the right content to the right buyer at the right time. They also capture data from all of that content: which emails are customers opening and clicking on? What posts are performing well on your social media channels? How is that engagement converting to website visits and other user actions? Are mobile messages driving traffic? Automated data capture can answer these and many other questions relevant to your content marketing strategies.

Data gathered by a marketing automation system is also super effective for qualifying leads on the marketing side before passing them on to sales. Lead scoring and lead grading are two ways a good automation system captures and processes visitor data to trigger automatic routing of qualified leads to the right sales reps.

Everyone is embracing data these days, but most businesses are still struggling to use it effectively. 

By using a single platform for dashboarding and analytics, closed-loop reporting, and collecting and storing data, marketing automation platforms are the most comprehensive solution for measuring campaigns and predicting consumer behaviour on a small business budget. 

Celebrity Ink is one local example. The tattoo brand now integrates its data across marketing, sales and service to automate personalised experiences. New sales data can trigger automated email campaigns that are styled with custom imagery, branding, colours and product recommendations based on individual preferences. CTO Nick Bird believes it is this level of customer knowledge required to exceed high customer expectations today. 

“Once you've got everything aggregated and connected between your CRM and Marketing Cloud, the ease of understanding who you’re delivering the message to really helps the team.” 

A marketing automation platform can assemble a more complete profile of your prospects than ever before. A/B test marketing assets to find the techniques that work best, and truly understand how sales and marketing are impacting the bottom line.