When we hear the term ‘marketing automation’ it’s fundamentally seen as a process of simplifying tasks and automating business operations. While managing day-to-day tasks like sending emails and follow-up messages, marking team attendance, creating & sending invoices, and so on, takes so much time if performed using manual traditional methods.
The concept of marketing automation was initially developed for customer relationship management, serving as your personal assistant to organize everything in the right manner and help you increase sales, save time and improve customer experience (CX). In this blog, we’ll get to know how marketing automation works and how SMEs can integrate their businesses with awesome automation technology to streamline various business processes.
The most fundamental operation that a marketing automation solution performs is to send specific content via automated campaigns to the leads as per the behavioral data aiming to close more and more sales.
Let’s understand how it works with a quick example:
- If you’re organizing a webinar about your product or service, you can send quick automated email campaigns to the new leads inviting them to attend the webinar.
- All the relevant leads are redirected to fill out the form to attend the webinar. So, everyone who is interested in the webinar will be funneled into the email list, and it’s possible using a marketing automation tool.
- The leads captured into the email list will automatically start receiving the email who attended the webinar. The emails may be regarding thank you emails for attending the webinar or any relevant future updates.
- The leads who seem interested will then be funneled to the sales team, who will then connect and pitch them to get qualified and move the leads down into the sales funnel. This is how marketing automation works in the most simple way.
What is the need for marketing automation?
There is not a single reason that defines the necessity for marketing automation for business, there is quite a long list of usecases that one can avail by integrating CRM-LMS software into the system.
Build sound & long-term customer relationships
When we hear about CXM (Customer Experience Management), it’s about building long-term and sound customer relationships. Achieving high CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is only possible by staying connected with your customers via personalized Emails, SMS, and other modes. Sending them regular updates about market trends, and thoughtful information will help them get knowledge and turn into loyal customers.
Take regular follow-ups on potential as well as existing buyers
Sending regular follow-up emails to the customers who keep on browsing your website, putting the products in the cart, or dropping an inquiry, will trigger the existing customers to make a new purchase and convert the hot leads into new customers.
Track the complete lead journey
Definitely, when you know your customers well, you will be able to deliver better. The magic of marketing automation is that you can track the customer journey and understand what is needed to make the customer complete the transaction.
Extract behavioral data
Understanding user behavior and pouring exactly the same on the table is the game of marketing and marketing automation tool plays it well. With CRM-LMS software, you can extract detailed data about user activity and it will help in formulating the marketing process accordingly.
Insights into reports and analytics
Reports and analytics serve as a barometer for measuring your marketing campaigns’ performance. With a good marketing automation solution, you can get complete details about how well your campaigns are going and what is required to improve the process, which will save a lot of time.
How to choose the best marketing automation software (CRM-LMS)?
If your business is struggling with issues like leads mismanagement, communication gap with your customers and potential leads, inability to track and manage team performance, etc, then you must get a marketing automation solution. Well, now the challenge is, there are so many CRM alternatives available, so which one to go with?
Major and top characteristics to consider while buying marketing automation software.
Ability to personalize the communication funnel
Connecting with people means personalizing communications.
More than 49% of marketers feel marketing automation makes personalization easy and more fruitful. Therefore, the personalization-enabled trait is the most fundamental feature to consider while selecting marketing automation & CRM software.
Minimization of the effort to nurture the leads
Nurturing leads is one of the most significant functions that must be performed carefully and diligently. Marketing automation helps in minimizing team efforts by creating a flow of campaigning journeys with inputs like content, duration, frequency, etc. It also improves the follow-up and nurturing process, making it more result-oriented.
Quick lead capture with website integration and custom forms
Digitalization is at its peak and every business be it large or small is actively promoting business online. So using marketing automation software, you can integrate your website and use custom forms for capturing potential leads, increasing the chances of more closures.
Track the customer journey milestones
Milestones are always great and getting the right mapping of the customer journey makes it more achievable in a shorter span of time. Marketing automation acts as a tracker of every lead coming and lets you get insights about the behavior of the lead, so as to execute the right marketing & sales strategy.
Enable targeted campaigning
Targeted campaigning refers to sending bulk Emails, SMS & Push notifications as per the behavioral data that marketing automation software fetches. With the right segmentation of the leads into cold, hot, interested, and potential categories, relevant personalized campaigning is possible, thereby triggering the leads faster into closures.
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