Marketing is a latent domain. It keeps restructuring on a daily basis. There was a time when TV, print media and billboards were the benchmarks, but it was a general communication, aimed at mass audience. With the growth of one-to-one interaction with customers, marketing is turning into a well structured relationship in which, the right decision, taken at the right moment, makes or breaks a customer.
While most of the MA software’s are either expensive or not very user friendly, but Getresponse recently released a cost effective marketing automation platform, with an easy drag-drop-join workflow builder. It combines user friendliness of Hubspot, with analytics of Infusionsoft at a price of inexpensive newsletter subscription.
Here are some ways in which marketing automation assists your decision making:
1- You Are Able to Better Guide Your Customers Through the Purchase Funnel
Consumers look forward to educate themselves at each stage of buying cycle before making a decision. This is where marketing automation comes in. It finds potential leads, scores them, assists their decision making and nurtures them for the benefit of your business. And the most impressive feature is that, it is driven by meaningful data and fully automated.
- Gauge patterns from the data collected by MA software or third party services. Use behavior analytics to identify new market or foster existing prospects.
- Use data sets to create tailored content. You can also use dynamic content to customize communications in real-time.
- Use Remarketing ads, which virtually lets you follow a potential lead, constantly reminding them of your brand and products. Remarketing ads are highly converting cheap clicks, but still a latent concept, within the marketing domain.
- Attract Top of the Funnel (ToFu) leads and push them to the middle funnel.
- Most marketers ignore prospects at this stage because of their willingness to close the deal, but it’s important to keep these MoFu leads informed and attached to your brand to smoothen their journey to the bottom funnel. Carelessness at this stage can instantly break off the prospect.
- MA softwares maintain contacts with these leads, down to the bottom funnel and even after closing the deal with automated support and product follow-up.
2- It Helps You Deliver Personalized Interactions
Gone are the days, when seeing your name in brand’s messages used to bring jitters and urged you to try their services. Consumers are driven by customized and personally targeted communication. It has become the key to generate tangible ROI. Combining data analytics with programmatic marketing, marketers are giving way to extremely personalized communications which can be dynamically altered in real-time, according to user behavior.
- MA softwares send your communications automatically, without delay or need of human actuator. Push personalized content at the correct moment.
- Coupling MA with third party services like CloudVote, increases its applicability by multitudes. It allows you to create forms or surveys with questions, and push individual slides to a large audience on their mobile devices. It makes your PowerPoint presentation, interactive.
- MA software’s use triggers events which are tracked in real-time. When a prospect executes a natural online activity, the subsequent display of data is customized according to the individual. It creates a unique buyer journey, and marketing automation maps the experience automatically.
3- You Can Reach Right Customers Using Prospect Patterns
To reach the right audience at the right time, you need to have information, regarding who exactly this right audience is. MA software does not magically tell you about the potential user base but it can refine the prospects with relevant data:
- Create buyer personas or discreet user profiles based on their past engagement and behavior data for different types of content pushed to them. Sort your database and segment users accordingly.
- Marketers used to create personas based on basic informations like industry, job title, budget etc but MA adds another dimension by showing exhaustive behavioral details. Prospects’ online interaction is translated into tangible data and used for subsequent targeting.
- MA helps you see who opens your emails, makes a purchase, reads your website, how many return, how long do they stay etc. It helps you send the right information to the correct prospect, who is interested in your service in a highly personalized way, which helps them to become buyers.
4- It Helps in Optimizing Customer Interactions by Nurturing Internal Sales Campaigns
Most of the businesses are aiming to directly connect with buyers to maximize their profits. But finding leads and then end up converting them, is a long and tiring process. Three factors to successfully convert a lead are: Quality of content, the exact moment of first contact and a continuous strategy to nourish:
- First step is to know where your market is and how others look for it. After gauging data and finding valuable leads, let MA software blast campaign at the correct time.
- It tracks lead and keeps adding subsequent data to their contact profile or card. It builds detailed user profiles and enhances sales campaigns by improving the visibility of high quality leads.
- It accelerates your sales pipeline by allowing you to ignore low quality leads with data segmentation. It helps you to follow sales leads from beginning to end and beyond.
- With the help of accurate tracking, analytics and reporting, calculate your ROI easily and correctly.
5- You Are Able to Publish Valuable Inbound Marketing Content
Content is becoming hyper-personal and interactive. Touch points, ranging from past month’s purchase to last night’s product research are being used to affect users’ buying decision. Instead of sellers pushing their products, buyers are readily searching for goods and services online undoing the outbound marketing concept completely. Ways in which MA softwares are utilizing inbound marketing:
- Content Marketing and SEO: Both these strategies are long term activities which generate organic traffic for a prolonged time. Focus on the most important onsite SEO factors and populate your website in the first SERPs. MA softwares distribute blogs and other content, to relevant audience and analyze their interaction to tailor the next cycle. They also cover social media, ecommerce websites, PPC campaigns etc to provide maximum reach to your business, at the perfect micro moment.
- Real-Time Data and Geofencing: MA software constantly track leads and send customized text message, email, push notification or any other types of communication depending on location based triggers. Geofencing uses GPS or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to define boundaries and sends promotional content on user’s mobile device upon entry or exit.
- Wearables and mobile marketing: Fitbit and smart watches store huge personal data of consumers which are integrated with cloud. Additionally, people constantly engage with multiple mobile apps. This data is a goldmine for marketers. Their engagement history allows MA softwares to send push notifications and in-app messages. It results in successful marketing and an enhanced user experience (UX).
The system is rapidly moving towards optimization and automation. There are countless (literally) ways in which you can reimagine your brand identity and engage with prospects, but make sure to leverage the 5 pillars of effective digital marketing strategy. Retaining an already satisfied consumer is more difficult because of the expectations and a need of “something new and exciting”. Use all inclusive, automated softwares, which keep track of user behavior and generate marketing communications at the right moment, in the right context.
