Have you ever thought about how you can best market your products, your services or yourself?
For me the best way is an interested one-to-one conversation with your potential customer. You enjoy a freshly brewed coffee together and just talk about how you can work together.
Unimaginable in times of the Internet given the huge number of potential customers. Unless you can bend time. Or you can automate.
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Mass vs. Individual
If you can’t talk to all your leads personally, you can still establish individual communication with them.
There is a chance that your online marketing campaign will look like this if you focus on mass communication. You send out a nice newsletter twice a month and show all your visitors the same campaign banner on your homepage:
However, most of your leads may have different characteristics. They are in a different phase of the buying cycle, they have a different relationship with your brand and they may have a different interest at the beginning. So is it really a good idea to address everyone with the same message?
So Many Missed Opportunities
If you don’t send the right message at the right time through the right channel and with the right frequency, you’re missing valuable opportunities for more revenue:
Studies show that 70% of potential customers are not immediately ready to buy. The average customer journey has 12+ individual contact points.
Deliver the right message at the right time to the right person
Marketing Automation collects data on your leads and automates the delivery of the right message at the right time to the right person on the right channel:
This does not mean that you have to create 5-10 different newsletters to use marketing automation.
It means that you can trigger the right automation sequence when your potential customer needs a little push.
I would like to present a few examples of this:
From Unknown Visitor To Loyal Customer
By using the right triggers at the right time, you can advance your contacts in your sales funnel.
Unknown visitors without a known email address are hard to communicate with. But these unknown visitors can be turned into interested leads by using lead magnets and freebies.
As soon as you have possibilities to communicate with your leads, you can start an automation. You could do this by sending leads regular e-mails with information that might be of interest to them.
You can handle objections about price, quality or anything that might prevent them from completing their first order.
You can turn them into first-time buyers by giving them individual offers without jeopardizing your overall sales with general discounts.
As soon as someone opens their wallet, a special relationship starts. You have the chance to offer a great service, prove yourself and amaze your customer with your product or service.
Marketing automation will help you maintain the relationship. It gives you the tools to turn a first-time customer into a loyal customer by continuing to provide relevant offers and maybe special discounts based on their order history.
Reduce Churn and Raise Profitability
Winning new customers is one way to grow. A usually much cheaper option is to lose fewer existing customers.
Become aware of how much money you spend on advertising and customer acquisition. There is no easier way to get a better ROI than not losing a customer.
Marketing Automation collects data from website visits, email openings and clicks, giving you a complete picture of your individual customers’ current engagement levels. When engagement levels drop, automated retention campaigns allow you to reactivate customers and generate revenue that would otherwise be clearly lost.
Treat Your Contacts as Individuals
Most companies use some kind of web analytics to understand customer interest based on the data collected on the website.
If you send newsletters, you can also draw conclusions based on the emails that are opened and clicked. Not all page visits are equal. A recurring visit to your pricing page, repeated clicks on your terms of delivery, long time spent on certain products show clear interest.
Marketing automation takes the hard work out of the process by summarizing the contact’s activity into actionable information. With lead scoring or persona building, you can communicate differently with your contacts and ensure that your message is relevant. It’s easy to segment and create automations for specific groups of contacts based on their behavior.
Make Better Use of Your Sales Team
Automation can have an enormous effect not only on your income but also on your expenses.
A great advertising campaign could make champagne bottles pop in your marketing department.
At the same time, it can lead to your sales team having to work with numerous unqualified leads generated by irrelevant traffic.
Marketing Automation allows you to pre-filter certain contacts and have them pushed into your sales CRM only when they are qualified and ready to talk to a person.
This can work in both directions. Closed deals in your sales CRM can trigger automations that provide real value to the customer after the sale.
The Untold Secret Side Effect of Marketing Automation
Because email traffic is increasing every year, email service providers try to cut the noise.
They sort your email into different tabs like Primary, Promotions and Updates.
The filters are developed further every day. At first they were based on the content, that is, what was written in your email. Then it was the reputation – that means how well you have behaved as an email sender so far.
Today it is the relationship that matters most. It is determined by whether a person opens your emails and clicks. And that depends on how much data you collect, how well organized that data is and how you use it. In other words – how accurate your communication is. Better communication means better deliverability, more successful campaigns and higher ROI.
So marketing automation allows you to build better relationships with your contacts – automated and scalable.
Marketing Automation is closest to an honest, one-to-one conversation with your potential customer, while you enjoy a freshly brewed coffee together.
If you would like to learn more about how marketing automation can improve your business, please arrange a free initial consultation.
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