Marketing Automation

Digital Marketing

MARKETING AUTOMATION IS A POWERFUL DIGITAL MARKETING TOOL.

It is the means by which the efficacy of the sales pipeline process and the efficiency of the customer lifetime value model can be improved through automated engagements with prospects and customers to generate leads, close sales and encourage repeat sales.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

It can also create opportunities for cross-selling, up-selling, repeat purchase, and recommendation and referral.

We invest in research and planning to understand a client’s business, its marketplace and its customers, in order to create and deliver effective marketing automation strategies.

The most crucial elements in a marketing automation strategy are content messaging, journey planning, software integration, contact information and timeline frequency.

Marketing automation software links to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, email marketing platforms and website databases. Most of the time and effort is invested in the planning process, in terms of understanding the customer journey, and working out the best ways to encourage and persuade the right types of actions and behaviours. Once things are properly set up, campaigns can run more or less on autopilot with minimal ongoing management.

SALES STRATEGY

It might be that the sales strategy for your business requires the development of relationships with prospective customers over a long period of time.

This aim might be supported by sending out emails to prospects on an ongoing basis until they are ready to move forward. Or it might be that you are primarily interested in encouraging potential customers to make a first purchase, so that their credit card details are added to your payment platform, thereby making future transactions easier.

All you need for most marketing automation strategies to work is an email address for a prospect or customer. This means that capturing data is crucial, which is why it may make strategic sense to ask people to provide email details before downloading certain content, or to make the provision of an email address one of the first steps in the purchasing process, so that even if a customer fails to complete a sales transaction, you will still have captured their email address. This is why email verification is important – as well as being best practice, it ensures the validity of the email address that has been provided. You can also buy lots of data for suspects to fill the funnel of the sales pipeline.

DEEP UNDERSTANDING

The bottom line is that you really need an in-depth understanding of the various potential customer journeys for your business, both before and after sale, to make sure that the marketing automation processes you have in place are right for your business.

Marketing automation strategies can be as simple or as detailed as the business plan, sales forecast and related strategy requires. At the most basic level, for many B2B organisations, significant benefits to the sales pipeline process can be made by putting in place a structure that sends out systematic and sustained emails to prospects on their customer relationship management (CRM) system with links to relevant content at regular intervals. This is likely to reduce churn and increase conversion, as long as you gauge the frequency correctly and have a high-quality content strategy in place.

More sophisticated business models, especially in the B2C marketplace, with high volume eCommerce business models, need to create more complex marketing automation solutions that will lead to higher levels of conversion, followed by regular opportunities for repeat purchase, cross-selling, up-selling, referrals, feedback, recommendations, and so on.