It doesn’t come as a surprise that the internet and social media as well as the recent COVID-19 pandemic have changed the way in which we buy products/services. This has led to many businesses having to adapt their marketing and selling strategies to these changes. The ever-growing wealth of information now available at the fingertips of buyers has shifted the buying power back to them. Therefore, expectations have become much higher with customers expecting businesses to deliver to them a whole host of relevant, tailored and timely communications.
This opens the doors of opportunity for businesses to both connect and engage with prospects and customers to build long term relationships, however it does come with its own trials and tribulations. The question you need to then ask yourself is ‘how can marketing teams find the time and have the tools at their disposal to build the experience buyers of today seek?’. This is where marketing automation comes in to save the day as it can offer a whole host of benefits to businesses particularly when compared to email marketing.
The ability to nurture prospects
In the perfect world, we would all love every customer to become a paying one from the outset as soon as an interest is generated. However, the reality is that businesses are hardly ever in that position and often have to educate and inform consumers rather than using the hard sell approach. This can easily be achieved through the use of marketing automation where they are able to nurture prospects through a number of different channels until they are ready to convert rather than risk losing them as they go through their buying journey. You could be fooled into thinking that popular email marketing providers can aid with the use of automation, however many of these have limited features and to email individually, rather than offering up a multi-channel approach.
The ability to engage with your customers
It is important to quash the rumour that marketing automation is just for marketing teams. It is a vital cog in the wheel for both engaging customers and building customer loyalty. This is where customer service and account management teams will have to be on hand to deliver tailored communications to their customers through a wide variety of different channels and have a firm understanding of the needs of their customers at all times. Despite the fact that email is the preferred form of communications for businesses and customers, the overall customer experience can be further improved through the use of other channels such as SMS messaging, social marketing as well as through subscription management and many, many more.
Ramp up your overall efficiency
As marketers already know, time is limited nowadays so marketing automation is a great way to maximise your use of it. By using marketing automation, you can speed up the creation, scheduling and sending of emails as well as other communications. This will mean that you can shift the focus from tedious day to day tasks more towards strategy. Better still, marketing automation can be an absolute gamechanger for sales teams by allowing them to focus on the leads that are ready to make a purchase rather than those that need to be nurtured more.
Bring together both sales & marketing
It can be safely assumed that technology can help businesses to launch a whole host of business initiatives and bring together both sales & marketing. Making use of a marketing automation solution alongside a CRM solution such as Dynamics 365 is the perfect way to achieve better alignment. By having these two technologies combined will allow both teams to have access to the same data which will help to create more effective sales and marketing activities. Taking this one step further, this will help to increase the collaboration on campaigns between the two teams to make sure that prospects receive the right message and attention at the right stage of their buying process.
Increase the profitability of the business
It is great that email marketing platforms give you a whole host of statistics such as open and click rates to help determine whether a campaign is successful or not. However, these are only useful to help you plan out future email campaigns and don’t really break these statistics down further to show how these efforts are generating revenue for your business. This is where marketing automation goes one step further by enabling you to track prospects and customers at every stage of the buying process, which paints a much more reliable picture of how the business is doing. This will enable you to showcase how individual marketing programs are contributing to the profits of the business.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that is looking to transform the way that you work through a tailored marketing automation solution such as ClickDimensions paired with a leading CRM solution such as Dynamics 365 then get in touch with our team of marketing automation specialists today to discuss your specific needs.
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