Quick Guide On How To Use Marketing Automation Software

Over half of the businesses out there are now using marketing automation tools to save precious time, get the load of repetitive tasks off their hands and make the marketing process more efficient and effective. If you ask someone who works with marketing automation software on a daily basis, to describe what it is, they too would find it a little difficult to put into words what is the essence of it. With customers now doing their own research before making a purchase, and social media channels growing out of control it can get quite impossible to be fully productive. Besides, marketing tasks entail a lot of repetitive work, measuring progress, follow-ups, generating reports etc. all of which can get quite a handful requiring you to deploy a lot of time and resources. A simple solution to all of this tediousness is marketing automation software.

So What Exactly does Marketing Automation do?

Simply put, via marketing automation tools, you automate your marketing efforts using technology which will optimize the output of your tasks and measure your progress. If you feel you are doing a task over and over again, stop doing it yourself and use marketing automation software instead so that you can use your time for better tasks. The prime areas where you can seek the assistance of marketing automation software are:

• Social Marketing
• Landing Pages
• Lead Management
• Email Marketing
• CRM Integration
• Analytics and Reporting and much more

Sound Good! How do I Deploy these tools to boost returns?

The first step in using marketing automation is to stop sending email blasts hoping someone will resonate with your email and make a purchase. Instead, start using marketing automation tools to nurture leads. Let us look at the prime areas where you can use marketing automation.

Generating Leads

When you are at ground zero, you can be tempted to send out email blasts all over the world to generate a database to work on. In such a case, you may consider getting company contacts through a broker, such as Luuminate at https://luuminate.co/singapore-company-contacts. But this can result in getting you marked as spam or get blacklisted if you reach out to people who aren’t even remotely interested. What you need to do is create and offer people valuable content like webinars or eBooks which will act as lead magnets to get their contact information. Marketing automation tools will help you set up landing pages where you can insert these lead magnets and score leads and get information about them.

Conversion Funnel

An important concept in marketing is keeping track of the user flow through the conversion funnel. This is important in the sense that it will help you keep your prospective customers moving through the funnel and also minimize the churn at the end of the funnel. You can use marketing automation to help achieve these goals by sending personalized and engaging emails to the people who have visited your website to get them to come back to your site. Then you create a targeted on boarding campaign to get them to move to the next stage of buying. As simple as this sounds; there are several stages involved in this and at each stage you are using the analytics that marketing automation tools generate for you and devising your next strategy based on those insights to keep the customer from churning.

Segmenting Your Database

Since every customer is at a different stage of the conversion funnel, you will first need to segment them into categories before you start working on them. Segmentation helps you deliver personalized content to the customers. Marketing automation tools come in handy here to group these customers based on criteria such as interests, demographics, etc.

Email Marketing

Once you understand the conversion funnel, you can start using marketing automation for your email workflow. You are now in a position to design specific campaigns to route these leads through different stages of the conversion funnel. You can create email campaigns based on different stages like welcome emails, emails for special offers during occasions like holidays or anniversaries etc. Marketing automation can be very useful when it comes to setting up email workflows based on the information in your database.

Now that you understand how you can use marketing automation software to your benefit, there are also some don’ts that you need to understand about it. Just because marketing automation seems like it can make your life easier, you can’t just go ahead and automate every single process. You will need to revisit your organizational goals first. If your automation strategies don’t make sense for your prospective audience, there is no point at all. Also, don’t get too carried away acquiring new customers that you forget about the existing ones. Use these tools well to create engaging campaigns to keep your customers happy and coming back. Remember the primary purpose of marketing automation is not about selling but about nurturing. There are many tools out there, choose one that fits your needs and you should be on your way to good ROIs.