Growing a business is hard. As your customer base starts to grow, you need to find ways to keep up with demand without eating into your profit margins. Tools like marketing automation can help you do more with less. This means you can scale your marketing efforts without hiring more staff. Keep reading to learn how marketing automation can help small businesses grow with these 5 key benefits:
How Marketing Automation Can Help Small Businesses Grow
1. Personalized Communications
Sending bulk emails to your entire contact list can easily annoy people or come out less sincere. However, when you create and send targeted communications to your prospects based on their behavior, you can seamlessly align your offers, products, and services to their interests.
Whereas your customers are possibly looking for similar products/services, they are all different people with unique needs, desires, and motivations. And, when you send them impersonal communications like monthly newsletters, you treat them as if they are all the same.
Marketing automation platforms help you to send the right messages to the right people at the perfect timing. This enables you to personalize your communications and create messages that resonate with your audience.
2. Increased Productivity and Efficiency
Automating some of the repetitive tasks associated with traditional marketing will help boost morale for employees who are otherwise bogged down with administrative work. This will allow your marketing team to focus on more important aspects of marketing strategy, content creation, and campaign planning. Automation will also increase your company’s efficiency by reducing the number of people required to perform repetitive tasks.
In addition, marketing automation leverages the CRM (customer relationship management) system. This provides you with a wealth of useful data by building customer profiles on your entire contacts list. The end result is more qualified leads and better insights on which prospects or customers to prioritize.
3. Tracking and Monitoring with Marketing Automation
Marketing automation gives you valuable data that you can use to evaluate and monitor the behavior of the different contacts. You can then get a sneak peek of how they are interacting with your brand online. For instance, you will be able to identify which pages your customers view most, how long they stay on each page, which call-to-actions they click, and so forth.
A careful evaluation of these interactions will help you improve your email marketing, create better landing pages, craft a compelling call-to-action, and determine which of your marketing channels generate the most traffic.
You can also prompt actions as users view a specific page, allowing you to seamlessly reach out to your audience as they interact with your website.
4. Customer Retention
A marketing automation platform gives you actionable insight into your customers’ intent, allowing you to predict their desires and needs accurately. Once you understand what makes your customers tick, you can send them more relevant information, thus fostering trust and improving brand credibility.
For example, an insurance company can send emails to customers who may require to renew their policies. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it can make the audience feel like more of a valued customer.
5. Up-Selling
Most companies deal with a range of products and services that complement each other. When you identify these products, marketing automation helps you target customers based on their previous purchases and automatically send them offers and discounts for an additional product or service that will complement what they already purchased.
Getting Started With Marketing Automation
Marketing automation has a lot of important benefits for businesses and marketing departments. If you are interested in exploring these tools but don’t know where to start, consider partnering with an inbound marketing agency for assistance. An agency will have specialized experience with specific tools and tactics that can elevate your inbound marketing efforts.
Download our free Growth Stack guide today to learn more about our award winning approach to inbound marketing and sales enablement.