One of the hot new buzzwords in the B2B marketing industry is “marketing automation,” which refers loosely to all the marketing activities that can be done automatically online, without user input. With marketing automation, you can set up a campaign and forget about it, saving you lots of time and resources that you can use more productively somewhere else.
Best of all, according to Aberdeen Group, marketing automation really works. As Aberdeen points out, a company using marketing automation can expect to see conversion rates that are as much as 53 percent higher than those of their competitors. In short, marketing automation can make just about any company more efficient and productive, by spreading out available resources across more leads and more prospects.
However, have you ever stopped to think about the different types of marketing automation that exist?
You can think of marketing automation as being divided into two primary categories – the types of automated responses and messages that are designed for people who have never heard of you, and then the types of automated responses and messages that are designed for customers who already know you, and are interested in buying from you.
For good reason, the type of marketing automation that gets all the headlines is the kind that’s designed for the great mass of prospects, candidates and leads who may or may not want to interact with your company further. Instead of squandering valuable resources on people who may not be the best fit for your company, just service them by sending out the marketing bots. When they send an email message to you, instead of having the VP of marketing dash off a personal response, just have a bot auto-send a response from him.
Makes sense, right? But that also ignores the other type of marketing automation that may be far more useful in terms of leading to a final sale. That is the type of automation that’s meant to nurture a good prospect into a great prospect. You may not have the time or resources to react to each of these “good” prospects, but there are some marketing automation tips and tricks that can transform them into “great prospects,” especially if you are using some of the tools from marketing automation vendors such as LeadLiaison.
One example is the shopping cart abandonment bot. Any time a prospect abandons a potential sale (symbolized by the shopping cart of the B2C world), the goal should be to send out a shopping cart abandonment email to re-establish touch with this prospect. Obviously, there was something about the sales process that wasn’t right – maybe it was the pricing, or the lack of information, or a lack of clarity about how to bundle certain services together.
Another example is the personalized video. This is a video that has been specifically constructed for a certain prospect. Using marketing automation tools, you can insert the prospect’s name, job title and role into the video, as part of a broader personalization push. That way, when the prospect receives an email with the video inside it, he or she will be much more likely to view the video and complete the desired call-to-action.
So, marketing automation is not just about boosting your reach to potential prospects who may not know about your company, it’s also about boosting your ability to service prospects that already have relationships with your company. Putting all that together, you can boost conversion rates and also boost sales.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.