Wouldn’t it be nice to have a marketing system that was working 24/7 to develop leads and make it easier to sell in your business? Marketing Automation might be for you.
Marketing automation is not well known by many business owners/marketers. But it is around us every day. Done correctly, these tools are invisible to the marketplace as they do their job of making marketing easier.
A key concept of marketing automation is the ‘workflow’. Workflows are simply a series of events that happen according to a predetermined pattern. The real power of workflows are that they can typically respond ‘on the fly’ to customer actions. The other amazing thing about workflows is that they happen on their own when you are doing other things. Kind of like a Minion just hanging out, waiting to do this one important task for you.
For instance, let’s say you have some work done on your website by my company, Affinigent. One of our business objectives is follow up with you after the work is done. We have 3 main goals for the follow up. First is to thank you for your business. Second is to ask you if you are satisfied with the work. Finally, we want to get a testimonial and maybe even a referral.
In our workflow, step one is to send out a ‘Thank You’ email. Getting this message to you is critically important so we set up automation to make sure you open the email. If you have not read the email in 3 business days, we create an internal task to have a team member give you a call to personally thank you for your business. At the same time we will check to see if our emails are getting to you.
If we send you the ‘Thank You’ email and you read it right away, our automation will kick in to send you another email with a brief survey asking how we did on your job. In our experience, we sometimes have to remind you a few times to get you to respond to our survey. In our world the response rates are first request, 32%, second request, 8%, and then final request, 28%.
If your survey response reveals any dissatisfaction with our services, a new internal task is created to trigger a personal follow up. If we get a positive survey response, the automation moves on to request a testimonial. We vary this part to sometime request that you post to Facebook, sometimes we request a tweet and sometimes we provide a simple form to send us a testimonial.
My point is that the automation makes this all really easy to do. The details of what you do and when you do it will most likely change depending on the business and the product. The idea of creating an automated system that makes your process happen every time is the real power of marketing automation.
I like to describe marketing as the stuff we do to make selling easier. In my mind, automating some of those tasks in a ‘no brainer’ for most businesses. For some ideas related to your business, click here to get our free
