14 Mar Automation in Marketing and Sales – Why You Need It
Automation. Many businesses hail the time-efficiency it offers in its marketing and sales. As great as automation is to one’s sales funnel management, there are some areas, such as social media management where automation has mixed reviews. While some sales and marketers like the time it saves, others claim that the automated responses and interactions with customers make the company seem impersonal and unsympathetic to the needs of the individual customers.
There is a fine balance between maintaining good, personal relationships with customers and using one’s time efficiently through automation. In fact, successful companies rely on both. The golden rules of marketing can still be followed with automation, and help out with your goals. If you’re a sales or marketing professional who thinks that the automation of your sales funnel management or email marketing funnel will jeopardize those crucial relationships with customers and remove a layer of personableness from your brand, here are some ways automation can help your business succeed:
In Marketing
As mentioned earlier, automation can help with monitoring client progress through your company’s email marketing funnel. Automated email programs enable you to sort your email list and come up with standardized templates for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Email marketing automation programs can also be set up to automatically send emails at a predetermined date and time so you can reach your customers and prospects at the time.
The tedious, monotonous tasks of posting on social media can also be helped through automation. Social media calendars can be pre-built and like email, posts on different social media platforms can be scheduled to be posted in advance.
Automation can help save your employees time to work on other tasks instead. This automation of email marketing and social media marketing is especially useful for small businesses and start-ups with limited number of employees and manpower. It makes employees more efficient, getting more tasks done. Email marketing automation also helps your company save money and improve the effectiveness of one’s email outreach.
In Sales
Automation tools have long been a favorite in sales because of the variety of processes that can be automated. For instance, automation can map out buyers journeys, rate leads, attract qualified leads and better ensure the positive progression of those qualified sales leads. Sales automation frees up the precious time of your salespeople by doing many of the menial, monotonous sales funnel management procedures. It allows your sales and marketing teams to identify marketing qualified leads that are more likely to convert, making better use of the salesperson’s time.
In Loyalty Programs
Just as automation can help rate, or score prospects into sales and marketing qualified leads, it can also help you identify your loyal customers and brand ambassadors. Marketing automation can help you quickly and easily entice customers into joining your loyalty program through exclusive deals and offers that you set up in your email and/or social media marketing strategy. Deals and offers are great ways to build a solid, loyal customer base.
In Customer Data
Automation makes it possible for one to have detailed customer data at his or her fingertips. One can easily access a customer’s demographics, their interests, activities, marital status, purchasing habits, pain points and income. This valuable information can help your marketing and sales teams to better serve advertising, marketing and sales messages to that specific customer. With targeted messaging, customers are more likely to be responsive and make the desired conversion.
Automation can also use customer data to segment customers along the marketing and sales funnels so your marketing and sales teams can more efficiently and accurately nurture marketing qualified leads.
Automation using customer data ensures the right messaging reaches the right customers and that your marketing and sales teams aren’t wasting time with customers that aren’t likely to move through the sales funnel and convert.
In Measurement and Analytics
A business can’t become more successful if it doesn’t know which of its marketing and sales techniques are and aren’t working. Automation can help shed light on what your company is doing well and what areas need improvements to take it to the next level and meet its sales and marketing goals. Marketing and sales automation software give you the ability to see how much time, resources and money are spent on campaigns and even on each customer. Automation can also inform you of how much each customer spent and how long it took them to convert. You can gain great insights into your sales funnel and identify trouble areas where leads get stalled so you can improve your sales funnel management.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t work using automated data can help your business make better, more informed decisions and alterations to your sales and marketing strategies so that your employees work more efficiently and get more sales.
Whether its concerning your sales funnel management or getting prospects through your email marketing funnel, automation can make your marketing and sales teams more effective and efficient in bringing about conversions. It also helps them make better use of their time, making them better employees.
Besides automation, the professionals at Aktify, can help your company bring in more sales. While we can’t automate your sales process, we can help resurrect your dead leads. To learn more about us and our successful process of reviving dead leads, contact us today.
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