Marketing Automation: Your 24-Hour Sales Support Team14 min read
It’s 3:00 am and a potential customer runs a Google search for sleep remedies. Your company shows up on the first page of results and they click through to your site. They scroll the homepage and find a link to view products for sleeplessness. They click through, and not only do they find the products your company makes to help with insomnia, but they also see a “Top Five Natural Remedies for Insomnia” guide your experts put together exclusively for potential customers. All they need to do is submit their name and email address and the guide is delivered to their inbox. Now, not only do you have their contact information but there’s a good chance they see your company has a go-to resource for insomnia. And with their contact information, you can follow-up with them directly and provide additional tips and products for insomnia.
So how does marketing automation play a role in this scenario? Since the potential customer willingly submitted the form and provided their email address, marketing automation software can track what that person looks at on your website, the content they interact with, and when the engagement occurs. The potential customer will essentially paint a road map for you to understand what they need from your company. Marketing automation can help you grow and nurture that relationship with the potential customer when they most likely want to hear from you, not when your salesperson is working 8:00am – 5:00pm.
Marketing automation is an all-in-one software to assist your sales team on a daily basis. It organizes, nurtures, and helps convert leads into sales. It is a 24-hour complement to your sales team.
Marketing Automation Provides 24/7 Support
Marketing automation is the use of software and technology to automate and efficiently employ tasks your sales team would either spend hours doing manually or not be able to do at all. Marketing automation tracks a prospect’s activity and captures, nurtures, and scores them to capitalize on your sales team’s efforts.
Track Activity
Anyone can use software and heat maps to see where website traffic is most active, but marketing automation keeps track of a prospect’s specific behavior at all times. That behavior includes their journey on your website, engagement with email, and how they interact with your social media posts. This allows you to better understand them as a customer and enables you to help them with their needs in a timely manner. The ability to track a user’s activity on your site and with your content starts the conversation.
Capture Leads
Your SEO is great, but is it capturing leads? When a prospect visits your website, automation will have some sort of call to action (CTA) in place. The CTA could be a form fill to receive a guide, white paper or e-book, sign up for email newsletters, watch a proprietary how-to video, and more. Pop-up windows can also be placed throughout the site to encourage additional interaction. And, since a prospect has interacted with your website, marketing automation provides ways for them to stay connected after they leave.
Nurture Leads
When marketing automation tracks a prospect’s behavior, it bases actions on how they interact with your site and content. This makes for an easy way to send a targeted message through voicemail, text message, email, and other communication preferences. Marketing automation can also assist prospects in answering questions they may have, and can guide them through their experience with your business. Lead nurturing reminds the user why they became interested in the first place.
Lead Scoring
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, like Salesforce, organize contacts, but automation, like HubSpot, gives you insight into those contacts. That’s where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring measures the value of a lead. It takes all of the information gathered when tracking a prospect’s behavior (email opens and clicks, website visits, document downloads, etc.) and prioritizes actions that result in a score. The higher the prospect’s score, the better chance they’ll convert into a customer.
Lead scoring comes with many benefits, including:
- Increased sales efficiency and effectiveness
- Increased marketing effectiveness
- Aligned sales and marketing efforts
- Increase in Revenue
Lead Nurturing When You’re Sleeping
We live in a 24/7 world where technology doesn’t sleep. Prospects expect to be engaged according to their schedule, and for the right reasons, they should. Automation can nurture leads around the clock.
Lead nurturing is important for various reasons. It allows your sales team to identify what point in the sales funnel a prospect is, then they can cater messages or offers based on what that prospect is researching or reading. Automation sends targeted messages based on the prospect’s journey. This saves time for the sales team and the prospect, skipping the cold calls, the ignored emails and addressing their needs directly.
Automation is constantly working to build that one-of-a-kind relationship with the customer, meeting their needs at every corner. Of the many things automation does, it nurtures leads by implementing tasks that use:
- Web engagement/ chat bot
- Personalized email campaigns
- Automated voicemails
If You Haven’t Realized It Yet, Marketing Automation is Important
Marketing automation doesn’t pick up the workload of an entire sales team. It complements their work and allows them to focus their efforts on converting qualified leads into sales. Marketing automation can do many things, and the key benefits include:
- Allows sales team to act at the right time
- Build customer relationships when it’s convenient for them
- Increase in conversions in a shorter period of time
- Target the right customers who actually want your product/service
- Save staff time and company money
How Can I Use Marketing Automation?
It doesn’t matter the length of the sales process or the size of your company. By implementing marketing automation, you can have enterprise-level marketing 24/7.
If you are a small business or startup company, don’t let the size of your sales team limit you from getting the most out of your workday. Marketing automation is an excellent way for small sales teams to better understand their customers’ wants and needs, grow their prospect list, and bring in more sales.
Marketing automation for medium-size businesses is completely necessary to maximize your sales potential. It automates a large number of tasks, allowing your team to efficiently focus on the leads that matter, giving them the content they want, and tracking the effectiveness of that content from beginning to conversion.
If you’re a large company, you most likely already have a sizable contact list. Automation maintains customer relationships and filters through and engages with contacts based on their status and preferences at the time they are most likely to listen.
Want to Learn More About Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is an easier and more efficient way to communicate to your customers and perform sales tasks around the clock. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business may be—every sales team can benefit from including automation as part of their process. Want to learn how DVS can help implement marketing automation campaigns for your growing business? Click here to learn more about what we do and how we do it.