Is your email marketing taking up too much of your time? Is it too manual and are you missing out on opportunities as a result? Does this sound all too familiar to you? If not, then it should be. The statistics don’t lie, a recent study by McKinsey found that 28% of the average working week is spent responding to emails. As well as this, 19% is spent finding information and data with 14% spent on communication and collaboration which leaves just a paltry 39% left to focus on a person’s specific role-based activity. Many of us will be able to relate to this!
As marketers, we are often working between different systems to pull data and build reports that we then go onto present to our key stakeholders within the business. You may find that these sorts of tasks are repetitive and mundane but a necessary part of many businesses. Given how much time it takes to produce these reports, we should always been on the lookout for ways of improving the way that we work to maximise our time. This is where automation can help transform the way we work.
The move towards automating these types of tasks aren’t solely based on a desire to reduce the number of repetitive tasks and save time but to also help to improve reliability and reduce the levels of human errors involved. From the most basic automations to the most advanced, it turns out there are many things out there that can help you to become more productive on a daily basis.
Here are just some of the ways that you can start automating your most repetitive tasks:
Automate Your Daily Emails
You will find that emails are one of the easiest tasks to automate that can help to completely transform your productivity. At the simplest possible stage you can add filters to manage your inbox, you can highlight what needs to be read and what can wait. An example of this is by funneling emails from white-list domains into one folder and other less important domains into another, you will instantly see the benefits of such an approach.
Taking this one step further, you are able to automate your most frequent email responses as well. You can achieve this by making use of advanced filters and then managing the process through automation software such as Dynamics 365 for Marketing or ClickDimensions. Furthermore, you can also link in a to-do-list tool such as Microsoft Teams with your email so that highlighted emails are automatically added to your to-do-list or even your CRM (Dynamics 365) to make sure that you never forget to reply to an urgent email.
Automating Data and Information Collection (Analysis as well)
In a situation when you are looking to help an executive team automate access to their most important key performance indicators and make it easily available for those that need to see it. In this particular case you can set up custom dashboards to help pull statistics directly out of Dynamics 365. You are able to achieve the same result by using some visualisation tools such as PowerBI which easily integrate into your CRM, spreadsheets or databases. From here, you can also send automated notification emails to key stakeholders with links to be able to access the latest dashboards.
The automation of a repetitive task such as this can help to save so many hours for employees in both collating and presenting information to key stakeholders within a business.
Automating Sales and Marketing Lead Management
As marketers a significant part of our day to day role is to make use of marketing automation to give the best possible experience to leads through the use of automated email campaigns, ad-retargeting and on-site experiences, another part of a marketer’s role is to manage the day to day internal lead management. An example of this is to work out how leads are scored and managed between the relevant people in marketing and sales. There are so many opportunities within these activities to use automation.
In order to be able to automate lead management within your business such as the handover process from marketing to sales once a lead has been qualified by marketing largely consists of making sure that sales know about the lead and have a set of actions to complete for it. Despite the fact that CRMs such as Dynamics 365 are fantastic for presenting data, the use of automation through a tool such as Dynamics 365 for Marketing can help to notify sales about critical information about the lead & also to provide an evaluation. This evaluation can then be sent back to marketing to show the quality of the lead and the result of the sales call which can be handled in Dynamics 365.
You will find that more and more businesses are turning to automation to simplify the way they work right up to the decision making processes. With the growing trends around AI, key decision makers in businesses are making use of automation to enable them to make better decisions based on complex data and less human errors. Therefore it is clear from this that automation is becoming a truly integral part of the business landscape.
If you are looking to transform the way you work through marketing automation, then please get in touch with our team of experts today by calling us on 020 3004 4600 or by filling in our contact form.
If you want to receive articles like this straight into your inbox then please sign up to our mailing list.
