4 Ways Marketing Automation Can Increase Productivity
Marketing automation is essential for companies of all sizes. Polls have shown that 51% of companies depend on marketing automation tools to better reach their customers. When used properly, these tools can bolster the production of your marketing team by 900% or more.
Here are some ways that marketers can use different automation tools together to increase productivity.
1. Eliminating Time Spent Nurturing Unqualified Leads
Only a small portion of a marketing team’s time and resources are spent acquiring leads. Most of their resources are spent nurturing the leads they have earned. If those leads are poorly qualified, then the team will waste a lot of effort engaging with them.
Using different marketing automation tools enables you to segment your leads appropriately and make sure they are highly qualified. You can use one marketing automation tool to handle the first stage of your marketing funnel to segment your targeting.
This makes it easier to split-test the performance of different categories of users. You can see that some users may convert very well, which means that you should invest more resources in your inbound strategy to reach them. According to Mark Thomson, an inbound marketing professional I spoke with, this can cut the time you spend on leads that don’t convert by 400% or more.
“Unqualified leads are one of the biggest time sinks any marketer needs to deal with,” Thomson said. “I have found that a combination of better understanding my target customers, employing better marketing automation tools, and training my marketing team to nurture leads dramatically improves the process.”
2. Improving Customer Retention
Depending on your industry, the cost of acquiring new customers is 7-20 times higher than the cost of retaining existing customers. Also, existing customers spend nearly 70% more than new customers. Marketing automation boosts your ROI by helping you improve customer retention.
How does marketing automation help? It allows you to track the behavior of your customers and segment them accordingly. You can change your social media marketing strategy on Hootsuite based on the responses your followers have had to the content you have shared. You can segment email subscribers based on their interactions with your content. You can even use dynamic content to personalize your messages for every follower.
By improving the experience of every follower, you will have an easier time converting them into paying customers. You will also squeeze more value out of every individual customer, which minimizes the time and resources spent on your lead generation strategy.
3. Managing Multiple Clients
Most marketing automation tools make it easier to manage multiple clients. You can segregate clients into separate groups in your dashboard. Beyond that, you can serve multiple clients at once based on similarities you’ve tracked across your different groups. Group management becomes extremely easy and flexible, all you would need to do is switch between different client panels in your dashboard.
4. Automate the Entire Funnel
When used in isolation, any marketing automation tool can improve productivity. HubSpot can help brands optimize their email marketing funnels, while Hootsuite or Buffer can streamline social media content management. Workforce management tools such as Outlook can expedite communication between members of the marketing team.
However, I have yet to find a marketing automation tool that can automate the entire funnel. If you want to create a fully automated process, you need to integrate at least two or three marketing automation tools into each funnel. You may need to use different marketing automation tools for different traffic sources.
Automation offers clear benefits. It can streamline processes, ensure your time is well-spent and not wasted on tedious tasks, and make you a more efficient, more effective marketer.