If you would like to take your business to a whole new level, you have come to the right place. You can use marketing automation to take your results to where you have always wanted them. Doing so is much easier than you might think, and many marketing automation companies are willing to help. Marketing automation gives you a range of unbeatable benefits to which you would otherwise not have access:
· Boost Your Profit
· Save Your Time
· Expand Your Reach
In simple terms, marketing automation consists of software and systems that do the hardest parts of your marketing for you.
Boost Profit
Since your profitability is one of the most vital aspects of your business, let’s cover it first. Most businesses that fail do so because they don’t get their marketing right. They focus on the wrong things and overlook the most critical needs of their target customers.
Even when they get it right, marketing takes a lot of time and energy to implement. You can boost your profit more than you once thought possible when you use the right marketing automation plan. You can learn about your prospects and give them what they want without much additional effort, and the outcome will impress you.
Save Time
All business owners and marketing experts know that time is a limited and valuable resource. Anything that steals time away from running your business also hurts your bottom line. Some tasks that take time are essential to your bottom line, and marketing is one of them.
The good news is that the right marketing automation plan reduces the amount of time you spend on marketing. You can then use that time to work on the other areas of your business, and the rewards are exponential.
Email Funnel
An email funnel is the perfect example of marketing automation. While it can include chatbots and social media autoresponders, we are going to focus on the email funnel. In a classic funnel, you send people to an opt-in page and collect their email addresses. You then send out emails to your prospects to build relationships with them over time.
You then pitch your offer and go for the sale. You lose people at each step of your funnel, but it acts as a filter. The people who remain at the end are your most valuable customers, and they will stay with you over the long run if you treat them right.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the first step in your marketing automation plan. To automate your lead generation process, put tracking pixels on your website and social media pages.
Also, you can use web code that reads cookies on your prospect’s browser and show them benefits unique to their needs and desires. For example, imagine you sell weight loss videos and diet plans. Your lead generation page should give valuable advice and offer a free video. Require your prospects to enter their email address to access the video.
Email Automation
Most marketing automation companies that know what they are doing use email automation. Once people join your list, your marketing automation software automatically sends them emails over several days or weeks.
It can then send the sales email after building enough trust with your prospects, and you don’t need to put in any additional effort once your system is in place. You might, however, want to change a few elements to see what gives you the best results possible.
Conversion Tracking
The old way of email marketing involved sending the same content to everyone on an email list. This approach causes you to lose more sales than you can imagine. You defeat that problem with conversion tracking software, which is included with most reputable email responders.
This software tracks which of your customers buy something in your email offer and when they do it, but it also tracks the ones who don’t. Based on the system you set up, the software places your customers into different groups based on their spending habits. Knowing the different behaviours and spending habits of your prospects is a powerful way to improve your sales rate.
Upsells
Upselling is an effective tool that skyrockets your profit when you use it the right way. You upsell the people who buy your first offer right away. These are the ones who enjoy your products and have enough money to buy them. Going with the weight loss example, your first product could be a video course selling for $47.
Your upsell could be private coaching sessions with experienced fitness experts, or you could offer membership programs. As long as you offer solid advice that gets results, a lot of your past customers will pay several hundred dollars or more for your advanced products.
Downsells
If you have ever added an item to your online cart but did not buy it right away, you have seen a downsell in action. Downselling works because it helps you get sales from those who would otherwise not buy from you.
Some of these people don’t have the budget for your products, but others are not comfortable paying the asking price. To use downsells, separate the people who don’t buy your first offer into a group. You then send that group discount codes or offer them a cheaper version of your product. If you are selling digital products, you lose nothing by offering discount codes.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, marketing automation is an effective way to increase your sales and boost your bottom line. Investing the extra profit you earn back into your business lets you expand to new areas if that’s your goal. You can also use the time you save to come up with even more product or service ideas. You now have the information required to implement your own marketing automation plan.
As with most things in business and life, you go through a trial-and-error process while discovering what approach is the best fit for your business. You can skip the roadblocks by hiring a marketing automation company to do it for you, and you then enjoy the rewards much sooner. No matter the path you choose, marketing automation can do wonders for your bottom line.
San Mateo, Calif.– Marketo announced on April 18, 2012 that it has redefined marketing automation with the acquisition of Crowd Factory, Inc., a leading social campaign management platform. With its first acquisition, Marketo breaks social marketing from its usual silo, making it an integrated and integral part of every online marketing initiative. With social marketing a mandate for every company – large and small, business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) – this combined solution enables marketers to amplify and measure social-enabled campaigns to deliver more customers and gain an immediate competitive edge.
“Social marketing campaigns and marketing automation have been like the proverbial two ships passing in the night, with most social marketing tools sitting in silos disconnected from mainstream marketing processes. Today we have changed that game,” said Phil Fernandez, president and CEO of Marketo. “By combining Crowd Factory with Marketo, marketing professionals can finally use integrated social campaigns to boost the reach and impact of every marketing initiative they undertake – at every step in the customer lifecycle. Since releasing our first products four years ago, Marketo’s innovation has repeatedly reset the standard for marketing solutions, and we’re thrilled to do it again with this revolutionary development in social marketing automation.”
Crowd Factory is a complete social campaign management platform that helps marketers accelerate social and word-of-mouth marketing, grow their marketing databases with unique social profiles and attract new customers. The platform allows marketers to add social applications and messages quickly to every channel – Facebook Pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, landing pages, websites, banner ads and emails. These applications encourage social sharing, supercharging the results of every multi-channel marketing campaign. Then, Crowd Factory automatically tracks the reach and impact of this social sharing, providing direct feedback on the return on investment (ROI) of social marketing. Companies of all sizes, including Molson Coors, Sony Music, Jive Software, Quickoffice and British Telecom use Crowd Factory’s social marketing software to drive real business results every day.
Now, marketers have a breakthrough solution that unifies Marketo’s broad platform for marketing automation, sales effectiveness, and analytical reporting with Crowd Factory’s platform for rapidly creating and deploying social campaigns like customer referrals or sweepstakes.
Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of Crowd Factory commented the following:
“Crowd Factory pioneered the idea of Social ROI by empowering marketers to push viral campaigns throughout the social web, and then track that valuable social activity back to individual influencers and conversions, this fits perfectly into the vision of marketing automation that Marketo has led: that all marketing activity matters and can be measured against the bottom line. We are excited to join the Marketo team and help companies of any size in any market segment generate more campaigns, more leads and, ultimately, more customers.”
“I like this combination a lot,” said Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm. “A 21st-century multichannel marketing strategy has to incorporate social channels as well as traditional or it’s going to fail. To succeed at that, there needs to be a technological underpinning that can handle all channels in conjunction with the increasingly demanding requirements from customers. The combination of Marketo and Crowd Factory is as close to the complete package for this as you’ll see for a long while.”
“The prospect of combining Crowd Factory’s social capabilities and platform with Marketo’s marketing automation platform – especially lead scoring – is a really exciting and innovative development,” said Christine Poirier, Manager, Digital and Relationship Marketing at Molson Coors. “Our reach with email campaigns is limited to the consumers in our database. However, with Crowd Factory we are able to easily give our consumers a way to share our brands and our content with their friends, in an authentic way. This helps us amplify our reach, while also giving our consumers a fun way to engage with our brands and with their social networks.”
“As a customer of both companies, this is terrific news – it’s all about reducing friction in the marketing funnel and scaling our ability to effectively reach, educate and nurture our target customers,” said David Karel, VP of Marketing at Bizo. “Our revenue growth is accelerating and Marketo has played a big role as we’ve ramped our marketing effort from ‘zero to 100 mph’ these past couple of years; in fact, our marketing programs contributed almost as much business in Q1 as they did all of last year. We just signed up with Crowd Factory to continue our growth by giving a social lift to all of our content and campaigns. Integrating this power with Marketo will help us drive better results at each stage of the sales and marketing funnel.”
Marketo will continue to support and invest in all current products and customers of both companies. And with combined innovation from both companies, Marketo expects to introduce an exciting new unified product family soon, one in which social campaign management comes to life, where every marketing campaign is a social-enabled marketing campaign. Customers will get an inside view at the Marketo User Summit, May 22-24 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square.
About Marketo
Marketo is the fastest growing provider in Revenue Performance Management. Marketo’s powerful yet easy-to-use marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions transform how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work — and work together — to drive dramatically increased revenue performance and fuel business growth. The company’s proven technology, comprehensive services and expert guidance are helping more than 1,800 enterprise and mid-market companies around the world to turn marketing from a cost center to a business-building revenue driver. Marketo also offers Spark by Marketo™, a new brand of marketing automation tailored specifically for small businesses – the fastest-growing and largest segment of today’s economy.
Marketo, Spark by Marketo and the respective logos are trademarks of Marketo, Inc.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
