How many times have you received an email that read: “Not interested — Cancel.” The first time this happened, you were frustrated and almost gave up on marketing your business. 

But a few days later, you received another such message — but this time it was from someone you thought would want to hear from them: the jerk who deleted your Before You Buy page. If only there were a solution to these frustrating rejections! Thankfully, we live in a world where marketing automation is the answer to all our problems. 

Let’s take a look at how it can help you grow your business by automatically sending customers promotional emails that are specifically designed to draw them into buying from you.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a set of tools and processes designed to increase your chances of being successful with your marketing efforts. It is a catch-all term for automated email marketing and other forms of marketing that uses software to send and track leads and sales. 

Marketing automation has evolved from a niche tool with a few uses to a complete marketing solution that allows businesses to send personalized emails to their customers at any time, from any device. Automation can be used to find new customers, promote your company, and increase your sales. Marketing automation uses software to create and send personalized emails to your customers at their request. You can use it to: 

Sending personalized emails is crucial to growing your business. People are more likely to purchase from a brand they’ve bought a few things from in the past. Automation allows you to send targeted emails to your customers based on their queries and needs. 

It allows you to create landing pages that encourage visitors to make purchases from your site. It sends surveys to customers who bought something from you in the past. It sends emails that are custom tailored to each customer and their preferences.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing Automation is a set of tools and processes designed to increase your chances of being successful with your marketing efforts. It is a catch-all term for automated email marketing and other forms of marketing that uses software to send and track leads and sales. 

Marketing Automation has evolved from a niche tool with a few uses to a complete marketing solution that allows businesses to send personalized emails to their customers at any time, from any device. Automation can be used to find new customers, promote your company, and increase your sales.

The Top 3 Ways to Use Marketing Automation

Marketing automation has three major uses in business: customer discovery, customer relationships, and lead scoring. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn. 

Discovery

This is the process of finding new customers. Automation allows you to send personalized emails to your customers who have not bought from you before, and find out what type of customers they are. 

Relationships

This is the process of forming and building customer relationships. It is the core function of marketing automation. You can use automation to send surveys to your customers, find out what products and services they want to review and promote your social media accounts. 

Scoring

This is the process of measuring the success of the marketing campaign by tracking leads and sales. You can use it to understand which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t getting the results they should be getting.

The Pros of Using Marketing Automation

Marketing automation has a lot of advantages that make it the perfect solution for your business: 

Increased Customer Engagement

Customers who receive promotional emails from you are more likely to click through to your website. So, instead of seeing a few hundred emails a week, you can now see thousands!

Improved Click-Through Rates (CTR)

CTR, the percentage of visitors to your site who complete a purchase, is increased by marketing automation. So, even if a customer does not buy from you, you will still see a positive effect from this form of marketing.

Customized Email Marketing

When you use marketing automation, you can set up campaigns that are tailored to your customers. So, instead of sending the same emails to all your customers, you can send them to the right audience. 

For example, you can create a campaign to promote your new customer incentive program. You can send emails to your new customers with the following subject lines: 

  • “Get your gift.”
  • “Congratulations! You have been approved for your reward.”
  • “Your account has been credited with S$100.”
  • “Have a look at this cool product.” 
  • “Thank you for your patronage.” 

Customized email marketing is what marketing automation is all about. You can even send emails with your supplier referral links.

Lead Scoring

When you use automated marketing, you are not only boosting your customer engagement and click-through rates, you are improving your customer’s perception of you as well. So, how do you go about lead scoring? First, you need to understand your customer. What are they interested in? What are their pain points? What are their desires? 

Once you know this, you can create a lead scoring system to determine which offer(s) will be the most appealing to your customer’s needs and desire(s). Now, when a potential customer lands on your website, the first thing that you should do is to get their attention. This can be done by displaying a relevant image, a bold title, and a relevant PPC ad. You can also add an audio file to your website to attract the visitor’s attention even more. 

Now that you have the visitor’s attention, it is time to make them purchase from you. To do this, you should display 2 important things to keep in mind: 

The Price 

Just as with traditional marketing, the price of your products should be at a level that attracts the customer. But, do remember that your prices should be at a level that can sustain your business. So, if your product costs you S$100, and your monthly sales are only 100 units, then your price should be no higher than S$100. 

The Benefits

Benefits should be at a level that can justify the price of the product. For example, if your product gives you 5 days to test it out and return it if you don’t love it, then your benefits should be at a level that can get you to keep your product.

Marketing On The Go

No matter how hard you try, you will always find times when you are faced with a difficult decision. At these times, you are likely to feel pressure to purchase from one of your vendors. But what if you could avoid purchasing from them and still benefit from their fantastic products? 

Well, with marketing automation, you can. With a few simple buttons and/or calls to action on your website, you can install a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that automatically sends your customers marketing emails and/or texts when they purchase from one of your vendors. So, you don’t have to think about it. Just push one button and let the software do the rest.

The Cons of Using Marketing Automation

While there are many positive aspects to marketing automation, it does have some negatives that we must consider. Let’s take a look at the main ones:

Data Management 

One of the main negatives of marketing automation is that you will inevitably run into issues with data management. You might not be able to distinguish between two customers who have the same first and last name, or even use the same last name in two different places. In such cases, you will have no way of knowing which customer’s email you should be sending promotional emails to, or whether you should be hitting them up for the offer again. 

Black hat marketing

When you use marketing automation, you eliminate the human touch from your marketing strategy. This can be a huge turn-off for some customers, who might not understand that you want to give them deals and incentives, but rather want to sell them stuff.

Bottom Line

Marketing automation is the future. It can help you boost your conversions, increase your ROI and decrease your manual work. Marketing automation is also a great way to boost your efforts in the field of marketing and keep your clients happy. 

Automation can help you get more data, create more targeted emails, and boost your chances of making a sale.

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