1marketingMost probably, you started the New Year with the resolution to become familiar with marketing automation, since it is one of the hottest topic right now, due to its ability of helping businesses store and maintain digital data records. Not to mention that the growing popularity of marketing automation software solutions increases the adoption of cloud-based solutions enormously. Now, in order to avoid letting your interest fizzle out and to keep you up on your intent of implementation, I decided to present a list of marketing automation processes that any kind of business can put into execution:

1. Automate the basic messages of your email marketing

Are you still only sending out your monthly newsletters and that’s it? Often the first step in marketing automation is the automation of the complete email marketing, turning it into an effective news channel in its entirety. Maintain close contact with your best clients, remind all potential prospects of upcoming events, reactivate your passive customers, and say goodbye to unprofitable activities. Try, for example, to welcome new newsletter subscribers with an automatic message.

2. Warm up the cold calls and turn site visitors into leads

The role of marketing in achieving concrete goals is constantly growing, hence; better make sure that your marketing processes are up-to-date. Marketing automation allows turning site visitors and newsletter subscribers into potential leads as well as moving automatically forward to the sales process at the right time. For the buyer, your cold calls seem to be immediately a bit warmer.

3. Reach your goal step-by-step with drip campaigns

You can play out the strengths of marketing automation at its best in complex, time-limited campaigns. As soon as you have defined them, you can automatically respond to customer rebates and repeat the campaign automatically, too. Drip campaigns attract customers from message to message, step-by-step, to the desired purpose - whether it is the registration for an event or the download of a whitepaper. Just define all messages of the campaign and their criteria once to enjoy the numerous benefits. Send, for instance, invitations to events and reminders only to those who have not registered for it yet.

4. Connect existing customer information

Customer data on the same customer is often located in different systems, making it more complicated to gain new customers. Surprisingly, existing customer data is often not used for the benefit of another system, because of the fact that it is not interconnected, although e.g. the desired newsletter subscriber or new customer can be found already in the CRM system or vice versa. The solution is putting the contents of various systems together for richer customer data, so you can draw benefits for marketing and sales in an easy way. Today, that is not really a major integration problem anymore; instead, it is often very easy to do and just often forgotten. For example, simply try to include new customers automatically in the newsletter mailing list from the CRM system.

5. Update your social media channels all at once

Automate blog publications, such as RSS feeds on Google+ or LinkedIn, Facebook posts also on Twitter, or even Instagram pictures as Facebook posts. In some applications, even an automatic update setting can be turned on, or you can make use of social media managing tools or applications that connect these services. Many are even available for free. Anyway, do not forget the channels on which your messages are automatically posted. To be on the save side you may want to get help from SoMeMonitor.

In a nutshell, marketing automation includes the following processes that help to achieve successful marketing results and close leads,

• Customer Database that refers to the list of prospective clients created and maintained prior to running a campaign;

• Email and web-based campaign that are created and launched for the target customer group;

• Responses coming in through emails and other campaign sites are measured. It also studies website behavior and web activity of customers;

• Leads can be classified as high and low potential, with the high-quality leads being transferred to the CRM system;

• Prospective leads are converted into sales through appropriate sales techniques;

• The success or failure of the sales and marketing teams can be analyzed depending on the total leads generated and their overall conversion.

By Daniela La Marca