As your business grows, you might find that you and your staff are spending more and more time on monotonous daily tasks. You send out hundreds of lead-generating emails. You try to keep a steady flow of content on your blog and social media. You try to turn sales data into visually useful information. There is so much to do and not enough time and people with which to get it done. If this is the case for you, it might be time to invest in Marketing Automation software.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is the use of technology to automate often repetitive and time-consuming marketing tasks. These tasks can include sending drip campaign emails and welcome emails or scheduling posts to your blog or social media pages. This is far from a comprehensive list, and each of these, while necessary and important, take time away from you and your staff, time that could be used elsewhere to grow your business.
Types of Automation:
- Emails:
- Abandon Carts: Abandon Cart emails are emails automatically sent out to potential customers who have added items to their carts and then left the site without finishing their purchase. These emails can serve as reminders that they had considered buying those items or an incentive to come back and finish the purchase—maybe by offering a small discount.
- Welcome Emails: Welcome Emails are a series of emails sent to new subscribers (which is to say, customers and potential customers) and can be used to introduce them to you and your business, your products or services, your ongoing sales or promotions, and generally welcome them to your organization. With Marketing Automation, these emails can be automatically sent out to any new subscriber to your email list.
- Transactional Emails: Transactional Emails are emails that are automatically sent out based on certain behaviors or events. Common uses of Transactional Emails are confirmation emails, receipts, and user account updates or requests. Your customers will often be waiting for these emails, so having software that can automatically send them out is crucial to your customers having a good experience. Without them, customers may not be able to, say, reset their password, know if their order went through, or get that eBook they bought.
- Drip Campaigns: Drip Campaigns are a series of emails sent out based on specific actions or events. For example, if a person attended an online class, you could automatically send follow-up emails. While the email templates themselves are written by your marketing team, the emails can be personalized to each recipient based on data you have gathered in your system. This makes them more pertinent to that recipient, and so it makes them more likely to be a return customer.
- Win-Back emails: Win-Back emails are emails that are automatically sent out to inactive users to reengage them as customers. For example, if a person hasn’t logged into their account for over a year, you can automatically send an email with a reminder or a promotion to get them to become return customers.
- Segmentation: Segmentation is the dividing of email subscribers into smaller groups based on any number of criteria. This could be geographic location, personal demographics like age, their interests, or previous orders. This is used to automatically send more personalized and relevant emails. This tactic can help increase sales by, for example, showing customers clothes that are more appropriate to the weather in their location.
- Lead Magnets: A Lead Magnet is a free product, content, or resource you can offer as an incentive to sign up to your email list. Marketing Automation can help with the Lead Magnet process by automating the process. If the customer signs up to receive, for instance, a free how-to guide, then an email can be automatically sent to them after they sign up for your email list.
- Blogs: While Marketing Automation software can’t write your blog content for you, you can use it to schedule your blogs to post at a specific time and date. You won’t have to worry about posting Monday at 7am; the software can do that for you.
- Social Media: Similar to automating blog posting schedules, marketing automation can be used to schedule out your social media posts. Plus, it can also send one post across all your social media platforms. If you have a presence on multiple platforms, this can save you a lot of time and effort.
Why is it important?
Marketing Automation can save you time and money by reducing the number of repetitive tasks that you and your staff do daily, leaving time for the host of other tasks that need to be done, too. It can also keep your customers engaged, and it can start the relationship building process to bring in new customers. In short, it can save time and money, while helping to bring in new sales revenue.
How can SOULO help?
SOULO and our certified staff are here to help. Using industry leading software and a dedicated team of marketing, graphic, and video experts, we can take over full management of your email automation and digital marketing needs. This leaves you more time to run the many other aspects of your business.
SOULO is a full-service marketing and communications agency that helps client partners get the most from their projects through signage, printing, and digital marketing. Ready to get started? Contact us today!
