If you’re looking to increase productivity within your marketing team, you might want to consider using marketing automation. Marketing automation allows you to assign certain repetitive marketing tasks to software. This way, your marketing team can spend time on more important tasks. The time spent implementing marketing automation will save you even more time in the future. As everyone knows in business, time is money!
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What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation can be used to do various tasks like generating leads, budgeting marketing activities, monitoring your customers buying patterns, and more. Learning what is marketing automation and how to effectively use it is a very crucial step in growing your business. After all, 75% of companies are currently using marketing automation. So why shouldn’t you?
Why You Should Be Using Marketing Automation
If you are still not convinced that you should be using marketing automation, then you should consider the fact that when businesses use marketing automation to generate leads they see an average of a 14.5% increase in revenue. Additionally, this increases the quality of your leads because the users often have to opt-in to the mailing list. Opting in means that users will have to willingly give you their information to be on the mailing list. Since the users are on your mailing list, it is a safe assumption that they will be likely to make a purchase. Additionally, this can improve your company’s relationship with its customers. For example, you can send out things like information on positive PR your company has received. Even having your users just read the subject of your email could help them subconsciously see your company in a positive light.
Generating Leads Through Marketing Automation
When many firms are looking to generate more leads, they use automated marketing solutions. One way marketing automation software can help your business with a email marketing. Email marketing is an extremely effective marketing strategy. One way firms do this is by asking users to enter their email address when they visit their website. This will automatically put the users on a mailing list. Then, you can send out information about various promotions and general information to everyone on your mailing list. This will get users to start thinking about your website and its products more often in the hopes that they become customers.
Since this is an opt-in mailing list, it is important to provide an incentive to users to enter their email address. Many websites will offer a certain percentage off of the users purchase if they enter their email address. This is a good way to get users on the mailing list that have some interest in purchasing your website’s or company’s products.
Once you have gotten leads to sign up for the mailing list, you can send out automated emails with various promotions so you can hopefully convert the leads to customers. Employing a marketer to find leads for you is much more expensive and less time efficient. This gives your business an advantage compared to businesses that may not even know what is marketing automation.
How Marketing Automation Can Help You Monitor Your Customers’ Buying Behaviors
When most people first try to understand what is marketing automation, they may not be thinking that marketing automation can be used to monitor the behaviors of your customers. However, monitoring data from customers is a large part of what is marketing automation. Marketing automation can track and monitor the success of different ad campaigns. If you want to know which ad campaign is the most effective, use marketing automation.
For example, if you send out two different email campaigns to your prospects you can use marketing automation to monitor which campaign receives the most clicks. Want to know how long they read the email or if the email prompted them to go to your website? Well, marketing automation can monitor that too.
Often companies that use marketing automation to monitor the success of different ad campaigns will create two different campaigns and test them with A/B testing. A/B testing randomly sends out one of the two campaigns to prospects and sees which one is more effective. Based on the data the A/B testing collects will determine which of the two ad campaigns are more effective. The two ad campaigns do not have to be that different. Even a different image or subject line could dramatically change the click-through rate of your promotion.
Regardless of what you how you decide to use marketing automation, you should consider using it to monitor your prospects’ data, especially if you are just first learning about marketing automation.
How to Tell the Value of Your Customers with Marketing Automation
When researching marketing automation, you may have stumbled across the term customer value marketing. Customer value marketing assigns a value to each of your customers based on how much they purchase and how frequently they make those purchases. More specifically, customer value marketing uses RFM: recency, frequency, and monetary analysis. This is exactly what it sounds like.
Recency factors in the last time the customer made a purchase. Frequency factors in how often they purchase. And lastly, monetary factors in the price of their purchases. The basic idea is that if you know the value each customer has to your business, you can learn how to maximize the return of your investment for every customer. When using marketing automation to assess customer value analysis, you can even create specific marketing campaigns for different “values of customers.”
For example, maybe you want to reward customers who make purchases frequently, you might send out an email with a coupon for a percentage off or a free gift. Additionally this can help you track why you may be losing customers and how you can improve your business. For example, if you are noticing some customers that frequently make purchases have stopped or slowed down their purchases, you can send out an automated survey asking why they have stopped purchasing from your website. There are countless ways you can use this automated marketing solution to your businesses advantage, so try implementing customer value marketing with your business.
What Marketing Automation Platforms Should You Use?
Now that you have a better understanding of what is marketing automation and how it works, you might be wondering what specific marketing automation tools you should be using. You are in luck, there are several marketing automation software options available that you can use to elevate your business today.
HubSpot
Looking to generate new leads? Then you might want to consider using HubSpot. HubSpot starts charging 200 dollars for every 100 leads. Additionally, HubSpot allows its customers access to email marketing tools, various optimization tools, and more.
Oracle Eloqua
Maybe you have enough leads and want to use a marketing automation platform to help with your advertising campaigns. This is where Oracle Eloqua comes in. Oracle Eloqua helps create personalized ad campaigns through mediums like email, video, and mobile devices. It also tracks how each individual consumer responds to their ad campaigns. This allows you to see the results of the ad campaigns. Oracle Eloqua prices start at 2,000 dollars a month for 10,000 contacts.
Infusionsoft
Maybe you already have enough leads, and you have an ad campaign or content in place. In that case, you can use software to monitor how well it is doing. Well, there is actually a marketing automation platform for that too. Infusionsoft helps you better monitor how your customers make purchases. It also helps you automate small tasks that could save you a lot of precious time. It can also assist in helping you close sales quicker than before by automating different tasks in the sales process. Infusionsoft can help automate follow-ups, payments, and managing contacts. Infusionsoft starts its pricing at 99 dollars for every 500 contacts and 2,500 emails a month.
If HubSpot, Oracle Eloqua, and Infusionsoft are not what you are looking for, that is okay. There are several other marketing automation platforms you could use instead. Different platforms will have different pricing structures and achieve different results. It just depends what you are looking for marketing automation to achieve. Researching what different platforms for marketing automation do is important when learning what is marketing automation because you want to find the right fit for your marketing budget and company. Hopefully looking at a couple of these platforms can give you a better idea of what you hope to achieve through marketing automation.
Hopefully now you understand what is marketing automation and how you can implement it into your business. It is a very broad topic and is being improved on often. More businesses than ever are starting to implement it into their marketing strategy every day. So, get out there and try using it today. You might be surprised how much it can increase the success of your business. Especially now that more and more shopping is online, there is more competition than ever. Using marketing automation can help give your business a competitive edge. For help setting up marketing automation for your business, contact us at SEO Design Chicago today!
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