How Is Automated Marketing Useful?
Let’s break it down a little.
The key to any successful business is customer satisfaction. The mistake a lot of business owners make is they focus too much on the product or service itself and not enough on the customer experience—so you have an amazing product, but customers simply don’t know about it or they’re turned off from it by poor marketing techniques.
Of course, existing customers are not the only ones that you want to satisfy. You also need to be communicating with new leads that you receive as well. These are people who may have clicked the subscribe button on your website and joined your company’s newsletter so they could receive regular updates about your business.
You could send out marketing emails manually, and spend your time and effort doing so. But automated email marketing is the way to go. This gives you a real opportunity to send out tailored newsletters to large groups of subscribers at once, and to schedule future newsletters too.
Automated Follow-up Sequence
Marketing automation can also help by making it easier to send follow-up sequences of emails for customers at various points in the sales funnel. In other words, you need to follow-up with your customers and leads by regularly getting in touch and bringing them back to your site, and continuing building a positive relationship with them. Certain kinds of CRM software can send automatically personalised emails any time you like: a week after somebody signs up, a week after they buy a product, the day after they leave their basket full without buying anything… Just think of how much effort that would take if you did it manually!
To execute a follow-up sequence successfully, your business needs a customer relationship management team to manage it. Customer relationship management will focus entirely on the relationship that your business has with its customers and leads. But, it is not enough to just have customer relationship management if there is no automation integrated into it. Many companies collect data on their customers and only use it to send out packages and a weekly newsletter- that’s just not good enough from a marketing perspective. What you have to realise is that you need to actually do something with this information and not let it go to waste.
Since you’ll likely have hundreds or even thousands of contacts on your list, the only way you’re going to reach them all is through automated communication. There is no way you would have time to manually email each individual contact. Automated email marketing will take care of everything for you using predetermined templates and personalising them with customer data. And remember, it’s still GDPR compliant if you contact people who have willingly signed up or agreed to receive communication from your company—no matter whether you send one, two or three follow up emails.
The Power of Email Marketing Sequences
There are still so many businesses that do not conduct automated email marketing, even though it could save them time, money, and resources on their marketing efforts. The reason for this is that they think it’s far more complicated than it really is. Some business owners might not be too familiar with the technological side of automation, while others might not understand what type of content to send their customers and leads.
What you have to appreciate if you fall into either of these two groups is that you only take the time to write these templates once onboarding emails, welcome emails, follow-up emails—just like you would for a regular newsletter… But you make sure that it’s a template you can use again, and again, and again. You’re saving time.
To give you an example, let’s say your company website has a blog which regularly posts new information related to your industry and the products that are sold in it. You could set up an automated email to get sent out to your customers and leads whenever a new blog post is made.
It’s so easy to create a template for whatever scenario you like. Welcome emails, for example: all you have to do is include their name (Welcome, Steve!) in a generic template. The same goes for customers who haven’t logged on in months (Where have you been, Steve?). You can set up whichever capable CRM software you’re using to send these emails automatically once you set up your template, which is going to save your business time and money, as well as bringing in new sales from existing customers.
Conclusion
If you haven’t yet gotten started with email marketing, you’ll have plenty to learn, but so much opportunity ahead. Marketing automation is the key to improving your company’s customer experience, saving time and money, and gaining more sales from loyal customers. What’s not to love about that?