Time seems to be the most valuable commodity to everyone I talk to. I’m sure you can relate. What you wouldn’t give for another hour, or six, in each day. I get it. That’s why marketing and sales automation have changed my life.
There’s no business that I’ve ever encountered that couldn’t benefit from automating processes at some level. Having emails, texts, follow-ups, and contact management all run itself based on customer actions is a dream come true!
Now I know a lot of trends come into the marketing world. Buzzwords come up left and right to entice business owners. It’s hard to distinguish what is being sold as snake oil and what are legitimate growth tools. Should you invest in SEO, PPC, SEM, SSM, or maybe just a pint of ice cream to binge-watch Gilmore Girls until software salesmen go away. I’ve been there, too. After my ice cream hangover, I discovered tools that really help tie my digital marketing strategy together.
Why Marketing Automation is Not Another Trend
1. Scalability
Whether you are a startup company with a marketing team of one, or a larger enterprise, you always want to optimize your efficiency. With New Vista’s software, your processes run themselves. At any given moment, we know exactly where our relationship stands with every single one of our contacts and leads. This superpower never gets old.
2. Report
I have never worked for an organization that didn’t care about return on marketing investment. Closed-end reporting was the main reason I investigated marketing automation in the first place. I use New Vista Marketing daily to evaluate marketing programs and their performance.
Some of the program metrics I look at are:
- Number of new contacts/leads
- Engagement history (Details over past 30 days and contact lifetime)
- Number of qualified leads (demographics + behavior)
- Funnel road-blocks
I also look at which content assets perform best per program or channel. I check out first-touch and multi-touch pipeline-to-cost, so I know which programs and channels are best for creating a pipeline for the respective investment. Using New Vista Marketing, I can pull this data easily. This means that I can quickly change the course of a program, or if I have extra money, I can make an informed decision about where to invest.
3. Alignment with your sales team
I run campaigns to help the sales team. With marketing automation, I greatly improve the likelihood of providing qualified leads at the right time to the sales organization. I have the ability to use lead scoring (put simply, lead scoring assigns points based on desired demographics and behaviors). With scoring, a sales rep can easily log into their CRM and sort leads based on score. They can see who is ready to pull the trigger and who needs a little more nurturing before the sale is made.
4. Communicating in a personal way
The most beautiful sound to a person’s ears is the sound of their own name. If that’s true (and it is), then why send generic, impersonal emails? No one likes receiving email that seems impersonal, ill-timed, or just completely irrelevant. As marketers, we all understand that concept — but acting on it can be a lot more challenging. Using marketing automation, you can use behavioral filters to target your audience or trigger messages based on behavior.
Not only can you pull in any information stored to the contact to personalize emails, but you can even make entire sections of your email conditional based on each contact. For example, you could show a 10% off coupon to current customers and a 20% off coupon to people that have never made a purchase – all from the same email!
5. One Message, Multiple channels
Lastly, many of us are using multiple channels to communicate with our audiences. This is good. The trick is coordinating (with consistent messaging and experiences) and measuring these efforts. With New Vista Marketing, you have the ability to run a multi-channel campaign (for example, I could run social, email, web, and SMS programs). You can then measure each channel, and track the entire customer lifecycle. This lets you know what advertising is working based on numbers, not gut feeling.
I know most of you are busy, so I hope my perspective helps you understand why marketing automation can help your business — it can do a lot more than “send emails”. Get in touch if you’re interested in learning more about marketing automation.