Spending too much time marketing to your audience? It’s easy to get wrapped up in all the ways you can connect with people online. Unfortunately, many of these practices are exhausting your valuable time. Ever considered automating marketing activities?
After all, automation promotes efficiency when used correctly. This translates to a better customer experience as well as increased revenues for yourself.
Reasons to Automate Marketing Activities
It’s funny when you think about it. Technology was supposed to make marketing easier. But instead, it has delivered even more ways to engage the consumer.
From personalized emails to social engagement, the Internet is full of ways to connect with consumers.
And if you want to compete, you need to expand into as many of those platforms as you can. Instead of expanding your workforce, it’s more efficient to use marketing automation tools.
It’s Faster
Automation is simply faster than human interaction in most cases. In mere seconds, mass emails are sent all personalized for individual customers…something that would take you a great deal of time to complete.
Reaction times are far superior while using marketing automation tools. Between algorithms and application coding, certain tasks are completed as needed in a fraction of the time it would take you.
It’s Cost Efficient
Yes, many automation services cost money to operate. The trade-off, though, is they streamline your marketing process. This directly affects the amount of money you’ll make online as efficient systems are often more profitable.
For example, email marketing has an average of 3,800% return-on-investment. This means theoretically you could invest $100 per month and receive $3,800 in revenue.
Of course this depends on industry, email tactics and the automation process itself. But you get the point.
Frees Up Your Time
In reality, you probably already use a form of automation right now. Do you use apps like SproutSocial or Buffer to share posts on social media? These kinds of platforms seriously cut how much time you need to spend on each social profile.
One of the primary goals behind automating marketing activities is to give you more time to focus on other tasks. This means you get more done throughout the day without worrying about the minutia of mundane jobs.
So, how do you automate marketing activities? Today, I’m sharing eight processes you need to consider for automation.
1. Email Campaigns
Email is still one of the most efficient methods of marketing. It costs little to nothing to interact with thousands upon thousands of people on a daily basis. In fact, experts believe more than four billion people will use email by 2022.
Instead of manually messaging even a fraction of these people, automation makes the process much easier to handle. Especially when you consider how personalizing messages with something as simple as the recipient’s name can increase open rates by more than 18%.
Using the right automated email system can make sure all of those recipients are having the best experience according to your campaign. For example, services like Mailchimp offer ad targeting, retargeting visitors and follow-up emails automatically.
The point I’m making is email will play a prominent role in how your business engages the customer. Making this process as efficient as possible has great potential to drive future sales while giving you more time to focus on other campaigns.
A lot of these systems also come with in-depth analytical data to show you what campaigns are the most effective. This gives you the ability to quickly alter how these messages are delivered which makes an impact in the short-term.
2. Sharing on Social Media
Social media sites play an important role in society. Hundreds of thousands of people flock to these sites to interact and follow brands. It only makes sense to use social media marketing tools to grow your target consumer base.
An example of this is the interaction on Twitter from millennials. As many as 81% of this age group check Twitter at least once per day. In fact, it’s common for many site owners to generate a lot of traffic from social platforms by sharing new posts.
But logging into all of these platforms one-by-one is a tedious and time-consuming process. Enter the automation for sharing content. From platforms like Buffer, Hootsuite, or SproutSocial you can share a single message to an array of social hubs instantly.
A lot of these systems also come with a lot of data regarding your social posts. At a glance, you can see what social updates had the biggest impact on your audience. This helps you create future posts to drive an even greater response.
As many of these automation systems have free versions or trial accounts, I suggest trying out a few before investing. Find a system that works perfectly for your purposes and you could vastly increase response rates and revenue.
3. CRM Integration
Customer Relations Management is vital for any business. It’s all about creating the best experience for those who give you money for products and services. And integrating CRM gives you the information you need to do just that.
But it’s not enough to simply have a good platform for CRM. Mobility matters when dealing with customers. In fact, companies are reported to have nearly three-times the sales quotes from mobile solutions as opposed to non-mobile versions.
One of the driving points behind CRM is how well many of them integrate with other systems. For example, the free CRM from HubSpot can connect with Gmail, Outlook and other platforms to give you all the data you need in one location.
Another free app you might want to try is Zoho CRM. This is one of those all-in-one platforms as Zoho offers almost everything you’ll need to run a business on the Internet. However, the free version only allows up to three users on the system. Which is perfect for small businesses.
Essentially, your CRM software is the central hub of your marketing activity. It’s like your online base of operations and where you go to get insight regarding your customers and how to improve the business.
4. Inbound Call Analytics
Voice recognition has come a long way over the past decade. Today, you’re capable of converting conversations into data. Using artificial intelligence automation, platforms like Dialogtech can analyze speech patterns and create reports regarding the interaction.
This can lead to a better experience as you fine-tune your campaigns to increase the likelihood of sales. By looking over the reports, you can see when someone converted and who you should call for potential to make a sale.
On average, you’ll take 18 calls before connecting with a buyer. However, using data from automated call analytics has potential to decrease the number of lost opportunities.
Inbound call analytics can include everything from actual sales to follow-ups regarding a purchase. And the better the experience a caller has, the more likely he or she will return. It’ll also impact whether or not the buyer shares your business with friends and family.
Although chatbots can help engage visitors on your site, never underestimate the power of the human voice. Not everyone wants to interact with computer programming.
5. Capturing Leads
Do you know with certainty which marketing channels work best for generating leads? By automating the process, you know exactly whether or not your social media campaigns are more effective than pay-per-click ads.
Platforms like LeadSquared automate this process by taking a look at all of your campaigns as they happen. This kind of software helps reduce losing leads across channels while increasing the odds of making a sale.
In reality, salespeople can earn as much as five times more when seeking out referrals. An automation system to make all of these easily accessible is ideal if you want to increase revenue. The last thing you want is a customer thinking he or she is being ignored.
In fact, nurturing leads has potential to generate 50% more income at a third of the cost. As you can see, it’s worth the effort to automate the process when possible to get those sales. It just makes the entire process much easier to manage and maintain over time.
In some cases, caring for leads generated greater sales than just the basic purchase. It’s all about engaging the customer and giving what he or she wants.
6. Dynamic Content
Speaking of giving customers what they want, don’t underestimate automating dynamic content. Personalization goes beyond email marketing campaigns as many websites gear content according to the visitor.
You see this in some degree anytime you make an online purchase. For example, the section stating something like, “you might also like” when buying a product is often based on previous searches and the items you view when visiting.
This is automation in practice. Sites like Amazon put this into practice when showing suggested items based on your website activity.
About 90% of consumers would rather have customized content. This is why things like up-selling and cross-selling based on personal interaction work so well.
It’s all about showing a customer things they are most likely to buy. Consider how 40% of the things people buy are the result of impulse purchases. When you personalize the content of the site, you’re engaging the part of a person’s behavior that causes him or her to act.
Dynamic content can come in a variety of ways. Native languages, geographic locations, personal account details and more can drive personalization on a site. And all of it has a lot of potential for benefit.
7. Resharing Old Content
Do you have a post or article that brought in a lot of traffic back in the day? That content can still have life if you reshare it on social media. For instance, you can automatically repurpose content from WordPress with a simple plugin.
Why is this important for marketing? Because the audience you reached back then is more than likely not the same audience as today. People who follow your social profiles may not even know that stellar content from before even exists.
Sharing evergreen content is even more effective as it will remain “current” through the passage of time. Think of how many Google results show content from more than 10 years ago. This is the power of old content still having relevance.
Many social sharing apps like the ones I mentioned earlier have the capacity to schedule content down the road. Depending on your website, you may also have access to plugins or features to share the material automatically.
The bottom line is old effective content doesn’t have to be forgotten, and it may still drive sales and leads if used correctly.
8. Automate Website Operation
Dynamic content works well, but there is more you can do to a site to automatically engage the visitor. For example, you can show a pop-up to engage the visitor if he or she performs a certain action on the site.
You’ve probably visited websites that launch a subscription form of some kind when you move the mouse off the page. This is one of the forms of automation I am talking about for converting sales and leads.
Although many sites experience a great deal of success with this kind of system, you want to use pop-ups sparingly. They can quickly become annoying, which reduces the chances of successfully making a conversion.
There’s a reason why most browsers built blockers into the browsing experience in the mid-2000s.
Automation can come in the form of pop-ups, elapsed time, clicking certain links or even moving the mouse pointer over certain areas of the page. All of these methods have a chance of boosting sales, and it really depends on what kind of experience you want to give the visitor.
Remember, you want to give visitors a positive experience with your company. One-third of mobile consumers start researching a company from its website. It’s imperative that you give them a lasting first impression.
Streamline with Marketing Automation
There’s really no doubt of the available benefits of marketing automation. Anything that helps you keep your system efficient and productive is going to help the business. Find systems that work best with your company and reap the rewards.
The right platform could assist in generating greater income for a small investment.