Benjamin Kepner is the CEO of Global Social Media Marketing, growing leads, customers, and fans for brands worldwide.
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Many companies still handle most sales tasks manually, which consumes a lot of time, resources, energy and money. With marketing automation, you can lower costs and allocate resources to a big extent to spend on other sales strategies.
As CEO of a social media marketing company, I have personally seen how effective these tools can be when used strategically. We have worked with many clients to improve their marketing campaigns by designing tailored sales funnels with marketing automation. This has resulted in increased show-up rates, more booked calls, responsive email replies and deals closed for incremental ROI.
In this article, I'd like to share some important things to keep in mind when working with marketing automation tools.
What To Look For In A Marketing Automation Tool
To pick the right tool, you should evaluate the price, familiarity with CRM, automation tools, company infrastructure, skills of the team, capabilities, scalability and customer support.
Pricing and features are the top two key factors I evaluate to pick any tool over others. Because if you're not getting enough automation features, there is no point to invest in a marketing automation tool.
Before purchasing, make sure to check the customer reviews and try to get feedback from real customers if you can. You can ask your network or connections to know which marketing tools they are using and how their customer support works.
Making Your Automation Platform Work For You
Landing Page Optimization
The sales funnel needs highly converting landing pages to capture leads. Most marketing automation tools allow you to host your landing page without paying extra money. You can either host landing pages on the tool itself or on your website by using a plug-in.
In case you want to host your landing pages on a specific subdomain, you can set up a subdomain using your hosting provider and then link it with a sales funnel. Also, you don't need to buy page builders separately, as many marketing automation tools come with a drag-and-drop builder. You can add surveys, forms or other elements to capture data from leads automatically.
Automatic Follow-Ups Based On Conditional Logic Without Any Human Input
Workflows, triggers and campaigns allow you to define a flow of actions or tasks that will be automatically completed once the lead is captured. Most leads don't convert into sales in one go, so you have to follow up with them many times. For this, you can set up automatic follow-up emails, SMS or voicemails with personalized names to build better relationships.
Further, organize your leads using tags, activity, contact info and pipeline stage to better differentiate prospects. You can categorize leads and send automatic emails to thousands of prospects in a single click. You can also schedule batched bulk email blasts to prevent your emails from going to spam.
Automatic Online Appointment Booking & Payments
Booking online appointments and payment collection consumes a huge chunk of time. But with marketing automation, it becomes easy. You can integrate third-party software with your marketing automation tool to automate call scheduling and payment collection.
For example, we have integrated our sales funnels with Calendly to automate appointment booking. This helps to save our time and leads' time as well because they can directly book calls with me and there's no need to follow up via email to know my availability. The same goes for payment collection. Integrate your payment processor with marketing automation tools and collect payments automatically.
Analytics Tracking & Lead Pipelines
Manually tracking and analyzing the results is challenging. But most marketing tools come with built-in tracking and analyzing features. So, you can easily see the performance of marketing sales funnels, forms, surveys and campaigns. You can also track the status of each lead quickly by setting up a pipeline. This helps you to check the lead's status, like whether the lead is dropped, closed, held, lost or won.
Wrapping Up
In a nutshell, marketing automation has the power to save a lot of time and money. But make sure you have the right tools and strategies to automate your most time-consuming marketing tasks.
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