6 Reasons Marketing Automation Software is a MUST For Small Businesses

At its most fundamental level, marketing automation software is all about optimization. It helps you optimize your employees time, optimize the focus and efforts of your sales team, optimize your digital marketing campaigns and so much more.

The scope of a marketing software goes far beyond automating your marketing departments repetitive tasks. It can help you measure your marketing activities and campaigns, which will ensure that you beat your competitors, understand your customers and increase sales.

If you’re not using a marketing automation software in 2018, you are missing out on a great tool that can help you enhance your digital marketing efforts.

Here are 6 benefits for your small business:

1. It will help you generate targeted leads

There are many marketing strategies that can help you get people interested in your business and products. But will these prospects convert to paying customers?

Getting leads through inbound and traditional marketing methods is great, but it does your business no good if these leads do not become real customers.

This is one of the main reasons marketing automation software is recommended by many experts. It will help you target leads at every point of your sales funnel. What this essentially means is that the prospects you target will likely become customers.

A good marketing automation software can generate better and high-quality leads. For example, a marketing automation software like HubSpot can help you segment your leads into varying stages of a buying cycle.

HubSpot will deliver critical data so that you can have a clear idea about the specific interests of your prospects. You will know how long your prospects have been looking for the solution, what their expectations are and what it’ll take to convert them.

With this kind of information, you can make actionable decisions with the marketing data you have at hand.

2. Reduce conversion time and increase revenue

Marketing automation software will make your sales process more efficient and effective. It will reduce the time required for a prospect to transition to an actual customer.

Let’s look at Thomson Reuters 2013 case study. When the company integrated an automation software into their marketing processes, Thomson Reuters discovered that its lead conversion time dropped by a whopping 72%. This is a huge number and produced a 175% increase in revenue.

Increasing revenue is what most businesses strive for. So why do so many people ignore marketing automation?

The results always justifies the upfront investment. You can increase conversions, sales, improve revenue and hit your bottom line faster than if you hadn’t used a marketing automation software.

3. Loyalty and Customer retention

For continuous growth, there must be a balance between customer acquisition and retention. The reason most first-timers become return customers is simply out of loyalty.

While the idea of converting new leads is an exciting one, keeping them loyal can get tricky.

Marketing automation software is an effective tool used by many fortune 500 companies to retain customers. It usually comes with some type of marketing intelligence feature that provides insight into your customers.

With the data, you can assess the needs of your customers and make decisions that will help retain them.

4. Improve customer relations

One of the most common mistakes made by marketers today is that they overlook the importance of customer relations. In order to increase conversions, you must know your customers and prospects better.

Customer relation strategies will help your small business improve its customer retention rate. By focusing on customer satisfaction, your customer retention rate will go higher.

With customer satisfaction high, you will get enough repeat business and word of mouth publicity, which is a powerful marketing tool.

Marketing automation software can be personalized to boost your relationship with customers and prospects. It will help you implement effective marketing strategies that include lead scoring models, customer nurturing, lead qualification, digital footprint analysis and so much more.

5. Maximize email marketing

Being connected to your leads and customers is vital to the longevity of your small business. One of the most commonly used tools for business connectivity is emails.

Digital marketers realized this decades ago and users were flooded with spam from cold calling and even businesses they were interested in. That is why today, email marketing efforts need to be strategic to produce any viable results. Massive emailing does not work and can actually be counterproductive.

For example, a tool like ActiveCampaign can help you create behavioral based system automation. It is a gem for automating your email campaigns because it triggers when a customer updates their contact details, unsubscribes from your newsletter, when a message is opened, when a link is clicked and so much more.

With this type of data, you can personalize your emails and design a campaign that will not spam your users. It will create a system that will fit the recipient’s interests. By segmenting your lists based on user’s behavioral data, you will maximize the reach and power of your email campaign.

For instance, if a user never opened your emails you can program your automation software to email the user less frequently. If some users open the emails at a certain time of the day, you can program your automation software to send out emails at given times when it will most likely be read and not drowned out by other emails.

6. Improve your social media activities

An effective marketing automation software will include a social media component that will help you automate your social media activities.

No need to use a different social media scheduling tool that will be separate from your marketing system. With this feature, you will save time as all your key marketing tools will be in one place.

It will help you monitor all your social accounts with ease. When it comes to insight and analysis, you can get a bird’s eye view of how well your brand is performing in your social communities. This will enable you to create campaigns that align with your business goals.

Marketing automation software is the future of marketing. It provides huge productivity gains for small businesses and is a MUST-HAVE tool for digital marketing.

Integrating your existing CRM and marketing systems with a marketing automation software like HubSpot is necessary to rip the full power of its automated processes. If you need help getting setup, send us a mail and we will be glad to help.