Marketing automation is one of the best ways to maximise the productivity of your business. Whether you are running a large corporation or a small company, automation can help you to stay in touch with your customers, improve your processes and pursue leads more efficiently.
Freeing your staff from repetitive actions through automation is a good way to give them more fulfilling and creative roles that they can thrive in. All you need to do is set up your automated systems once and you are away.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is any action that your business takes automatically. A welcome email sent to new customers or a reminder that your online basket is still full are both typical examples of the kind of automated marketing big retailers tend to use.
There are also other methods that come under the automated marketing umbrella. For example, you could automate reminders sent to both your staff and customers, you could automatically send your customers a request for feedback or you could use automation to build your social media profile and followers.
Essentially, anything that you can use to market your business and that can be automated falls under marketing automation.
Who Can Use Marketing Automation?
Though many people tend to assume that automation on this level must be for large companies only, small businesses can also reap the benefits. Marketing automation means that your staff won’t have to spend so much time setting processes up and can, therefore, spend more time analyzing results and coming up with new creative ideas.
In fact, you could easily argue that small businesses need marketing automation far more than large companies do, especially while you are building your profile as a company. As you need to spend more time building up your company and refining your offering, automation gives you the chance to do more with your time and to ditch the repetitive work that is holding your staff back from more creative pursuits.
How does Marketing Automation Work?
In a broad sense, marketing automation works using the data you put in and following the rules you set. So, if you were to tell your system that you would like to send a happy birthday email to your customers on your birthday, you would simply input the birthdays of your customers into the system and then set a rule to send the email on this date.
Other automated systems work in much the same way. For example, if you receive an email enquiry, you could easily set up an automated response to say that you have received the email and will deal with it as soon as possible. This reassures the customer that you are listening to them without placing a greater burden on your staff.
Marketing automation can be used to great effect in 6 areas of your business: sales, leads, e-commerce, customer service and engagement, office management and events. With such broad coverage, you can see how quickly you will be able to make your business more efficient at every level.
If you haven’t done it yet, download our free ebook ’25 things every small business should automate’. This is a huge asset to get you on your feet.
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