Marketing Automation Buyer's Guide

How Can You Use Marketing Automation to Improve Your Bottom Line?

How Can You Use Marketing Automation to Improve Your Bottom Line?

How Can You Use Marketing Automation to Improve Your Bottom Line?

We talk a lot about the usefulness of marketing automation. Most of it structured around how much it benefits your marketing team by saving them time, effort, and energy on superfluous tasks. But can automation directly impact a positive profit gain for your organization? The short answer is yes, but getting to that point is slightly more complicated. According to a report conducted by B2Bmarketing.net, only 8 percent of organizations see any sales growth in the first six months of automation. So it can prove difficult to see your desired results, if any, without a strong game plan. Directly impacting profit growth with your automation efforts requires some clever strategy moves and a comprehensive understanding of your solution.

A surefire way to securing a lead is to develop a relationship with them from the word “go.” This can be accomplished with inviting landing pages that welcome a lead into a relationship with your brand. Most automation solutions feature landing page building functionality. The more appealing your landing pages are, the more people will find themselves there and the more leads you have to work with the remainder of your automation toolkit. Mastering the landing page building tools at your disposal is the first step to increasing profits.

This is when your solution can really flex its muscles. Another universal feature of the software is automated emails. You should be sending those emails as aggressively as you can manage without annoying the recipients. Any solution worth its salt can send emails at key intervals to catch the lead’s attention: visits to your site, whenever they abandon shopping carts, birthdays, etc. Any date or action of relevance should be a sign for your solution to send an email. Those communications build rapport with leads and make them more likely to make a purchase.

The content of the emails can and should vary depending on the context of the interaction and your current relationship with the lead. Sometimes it will be more appropriate to send them special deals and discounts. Other times it may be appropriate to send them content that will appeal to them. You may also want to adopt a CRM tool in addition to your automated solution to better assist in determining lead sentiment.

Those may seem fairly obvious strategies, but sometimes the obvious options are the most effective and easily implemented. But what about some of the less obvious options at your disposal?

A particularly effective strategy is to adopt “shock and awe” marketing strategies to your especially qualified leads. Your solution will invariably offer some feature to score or otherwise rank leads. While you work on converting lower ranked leads with a slow-going backburner automated email campaign, those top-rated leads should be priorities 1, 2, and 3. The high ranked leads are all but sold on your organization at the outset. The sooner you can turn them into sales, the sooner you can devote more focus to lesser ranking possibilities and ultimately attain more quality leads to start the process over again.

Just because a lead has successfully become a sale doesn’t preclude them from further efforts. Your solution should be set up to contact customers a certain time after the sale and entice them to repeat business. Positive customer relationships can be among the most profitable efforts pursued by your team, especially in a B2B space. But when you have to focus on so many other things, it can fall by the wayside. Thankfully, your solution takes care of that.

At the end of the day, the automation strategies you can apply are limited only by your own creativity with the strategy itself and the software itself. A 2015 study by Ascend2 reports that 59 percent of companies do not use their technology to its fullest potential. You need to be in the other 41 percent. A mastery of your solution opens up entirely new realms of marketing possibilities that will eventually increase your profits in the long run.

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