The marketing world is constantly evolving. As a result, it's now more important than ever to keep up with marketing trends and implement the most effective marketing strategies available. Marketing automation, an incredibly useful way of managing your leads and other prospect outreach, can be used in a variety of ways for many different types of campaigns.
This blog post will teach you eight examples of marketing automation that will help increase your sales, reach new customers, and bring you closer to your goals!
How can marketing automation grow your business?
Marketing automation is a marketing tactic that involves using and automating different types of marketing strategies, including email marketing and social media marketing.
You can automate your online lead generation, brand awareness building, client engagement, customer retention programs, and sales lead nurturing by utilizing marketing automation systems. Some advantages of using marketing automation include the following:
- Increase Productivity - Marketing automation tools help business owners increase their overall efficiency by automating; you don't have to spend as much time marketing your product or service.
- Achieve Marketing Goals Faster - Marketing automation allows business owners to reach new customers, develop relationships with existing ones, and increase sales by sending relevant marketing messages at the right time, according to each segment's needs.
- Save Money - Marketing automation platforms are also beneficial because it helps you reduce your marketing costs.
Here are eight examples of marketing automation that can help you reach marketing goals and increase your sales:
1. Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation is the most widely used marketing automation technique. It's also one of the simplest to implement because it doesn't require you to build an entire marketing platform from scratch.
What does email marketing involve?
It can be a sequence of emails that are automatically sent over a period of time to nurture leads and guide them through the marketing funnel so you can easily convert them into customers, or it can be a broadcast email sent one time to a list of your subscribers.
This marketing strategy has many advantages, including the following:
- High Return on Investment (ROI) - Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels. It helps you stay in touch with your prospects and clients while keeping them interested in your business by offering valuable information.
- Increase Brand Awareness - Email marketing is a great way to stay in front of your leads which builds awareness of your brand and improves your chances of converting these leads into customers.
- More Sales from Existing Customers - Email marketing is an excellent strategy to stay in front of your existing customers and get additional sales from them regularly. This is an easy strategy to implement that can substantially increase your annual revenue each year.
Pro Tip: The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Automation: Everything You Need To Know
2. Autoresponders
Autoresponders are an automated series of emails that are sent out based on certain criteria. For example, you can create different sequences (or “flows”) for new leads, existing customers, etc., to follow when they perform certain actions on your website or in email marketing campaigns.
These flows help nurture prospects and paying customers through the buying cycle and can help drive more sales.
You can start by creating different triggers for sending emails (e.g., someone signed up for your product). Next, you would build out an email sequence that helps prospects with the corresponding stage they’re at in terms of finalizing a sale.
3. Customer Retention Emails
Customer retention emails are a great way to engage with people who have already purchased from you.
These automated messages can be sent as soon as someone becomes a customer. They can include free resources or offers for additional products and services to help them continue using what you sell.
These usually work best when the offer is something complementary to your primary product or service, as you want to give customers a way to get the most out of your business.
Customer retention emails can be an effective way to increase customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, which will help you retain customers for the long term.
Pulse is a powerful CRM and marketing automation software that brings consistency and real-time reporting to businesses, which helps companies grow smarter and faster.
Instantly get access to Pulse's powerful tools that help companies grow smarter and faster.
4. Lead Scoring and Retargeting Campaigns
By combining lead scoring with your retargeting campaigns, you can effectively increase sales.
By implementing lead scoring automation, you can retarget people with ads and send them personalized emails based on their sales pipeline stage, delivering hyper-personalized messages and ads to them.
Leads that progress through your sales pipeline faster than others are more likely to convert, so segmenting these leads can be a great way to increase conversions.
This is where lead scoring comes into play: it helps you identify the most promising leads. This allows you to properly allocate your time and resources to prospects with a high chance of converting to a customer.
You should also set up lead scoring activity based on the type of content your leads are interacting with, and you can do this by using link click triggers in your email marketing campaigns. For example, if someone clicks a link to download an eBook, you know they are interested in this topic and can be automatically segmented based on this interest.
This technique is very effective because it allows you to personalize your marketing efforts to them based on their wants and needs.
5. Engagement Tracking Automation
Using marketing automation to automatically track engagement of your email marketing and text message campaigns is a vital part of your overall strategy.
Engagement tracking allows you to automatically filter out people who haven't been opening or engaging with your emails and send them to a re-engagement campaign.
This will help with your overall email deliverability and increase your inbox placement rates because you're only sending to subscribers who are engaging with your emails.
Pro Tip: Why You Need to Track Email Engagement for a Quality Email List
6. Form Submissions
Form submissions include contact forms, webinar registrations, or any other place where someone might submit information about themselves on your site.
Once you have people's contact information submitted to one of these forms, it's often wise to have marketing automation set up in your CRM to trigger an automated email or text message campaign relevant to the form they submitted.
Form submissions are great for building a list of people who have already shown interest in what you sell and segment existing subscribers even further.
You can use marketing automation software to set up different sequences of time-released emails or text messages and move your subscribers further down your sales pipeline.
Form submissions also provide vital data on your leads and can help you convert them into customers.
7. Direct Mail Marketing Automation
Direct mail automation automates all of the back-end work in regards to sending physical mail marketing campaigns.
With today's technology, it allows you to connect to different platforms like Handwrytten.com or Thanks.io to trigger personalized handwritten cards, postcards, letters, and more.
Using marketing automation with your direct mail campaigns will help increase your sales conversion rates and save you and your team a ton of time.
You can leverage this type of automation in your CRM, thus automating the entire process for you. The system will, for example, pass over any information you wish to include on the card, such as the customer's name, address, city, state/province, and zip code.
Here at Pulse, we can assist you in getting this system set up for your business. With this method, you don't have to invest a ton of time and energy into setting up the technical details yourself. This is just one example of how we work with you so that you can focus on what matters most—building your business!
8. Sales Process Automation
Sales automation facilitates the sales process, extending through the lead’s initial point of awareness to the actual closing point of a sale.
Your sales team can use automation to send emails or text messages at specific points in the sales process, such as following up after a meeting or reaching out after someone has received a quote but hasn’t yet converted into a customer.
Your team will be able to more easily follow up with the people who are most likely to buy and move them along the sales process as quickly as possible.
Sales automation will help you close more deals by making you more efficient, allowing for higher quality conversations with prospects, and following up with leads at the right time consistently (scheduled).
Marketing automation systems ensure that your sales team can smoothly glide your leads through the sales pipeline stages.
Create email marketing campaigns that get more opens and clicks with Pulse's easy-to-use email builder and marketing automation. You'll also get access to all other great features, such as CRM, text message marketing, and much more.
Try Pulse for free today, and watch your business grow.
Conclusion
The possibilities of marketing automation are endless. You can automate anything from email campaigns, to form submissions, and more! This is all with the goal of increasing your sales and reach.
We’ve provided you with eight great examples today, but there may be others that work for your business as well. Contact us today to see how we can help you automate your marketing to work better for you!
