Automation is considered the next major frontier in marketing and is here to stay, but are you extending your business’s automation practices far enough?
For many small businesses, the concept of automation is restricted to simple triggered email autoresponders. However, marketing automation contains many possibilities that can increase productivity, grow profits, and improve your customer experience. Many companies get overwhelmed and stuck at just the thought of getting it all set up. That is why we are sharing 5 tips to help you navigate marketing automation for your small business.
Marketing Automation Tips
It’s time for your business to move past the initial challenges of implementing marketing automation. Start by upgrading your CRM and embrace the analytics aspect of automation. By taking the big picture view of what automation marketing is, you set your business up for success.
1. Consider the Role of CRM
The biggest reason that small businesses fail at instituting marketing automation is that they don’t consider the role of their CRM, data acquisition, and data-based insights within automation. This is a problem because poor data quality, either due to lacking data or inaccurate data, can significantly damage your marketing efforts. Marketing teams suffering from poor data hygiene can’t launch appropriate marketing campaigns. They may even neglect customer relationships or even damage the quality of those relationships by making unfounded sales overtures based on false information.
Companies with CRM systems suffer from this problem on a wide scale because they don’t audit their databases regularly. If your business is still assembling client data from multiple sources and employee knowledge, imagine how many more errors you’re facing.
If you want to take advantage of the full span of marketing automation options, spend the money to invest in a powerful CRM system such as Infusionsoft. As personalized content continues to dominate the marketing environment, your CRM system will be the center of your outreach efforts.
2. Follow Your Customer Journey
Once you’ve got your CRM system in place, it’s time to review your data. Analyzing the information feeding into your CRM will allow you to see how your current marketing campaigns are working and refine them for improved performance. The most effective way to do this is by following a customer’s journey from lead optin to sales and beyond.
When you track a customer’s journey through your system, you’ll get a sense for what kind of content triggers clicks and how much time a user spends on average before purchasing. All of this information together can then allow you to estimate the cost of onboarding, how you might speed up that process, and how you can generate more high impact communications.
3. Segment Your Customers
You need to define your ideal customer or groups of customers by developing customer personas. These are templates that have a particular perspective on sales, customer needs, and that embrace a tone that’s limited to specific sales groups. Simply put, you can’t talk to all customers in the same way but you can’t write hundreds of individual emails either. These personas or segments are the middle ground. By developing these segments, you can be sure your message is tailored to the right customer.
4. Set Benchmarks
Marketing automation is a multi-phase process and you should set benchmarks that can guide you. What should you include in those benchmarks? In general, you need to evaluate the quality of your list, your level of targeting, the kind of communications you offer, and how heavily you test and optimize communications before you launch them.
There’s a big difference between having a general email list for all customers, having a well organized segmented list targeted to the specific needs of your customers, and offering them the ability to set their contact preferences. Your automation benchmarks are all about the level of detail you’ve accomplished in organizing your customer relationships.
5. Remember the Benefits
For some companies, instituting comprehensive automated marketing is a challenge because while you can see that it will benefit your bottom line, it’s hard to recognize how it will improve day-to-day operations. In fact, automation and all the data that comes with it can seem downright overwhelming and difficult to implement.
Keep in mind that embracing automation also means smoothing workflow, improving team management, and increasing employee productivity.
Marketing automation is a big picture response to daily difficulties, ranging from launching leads at the right time to breaking down data into meaningful analytics. When companies make the move to CRM and data-led marketing, however, the difference is significant.
If you feel overwhelmed about how to best utilize a CRM or just getting started, contact us for a free strategy session with one of our experts.