Even small offline business can benefit from automation
Small businesses are often pressed for time and money. SMB marketers have to wear many hats and cope with too many tasks at once. It doesn’t have to look that way.
Introducing automation tools and techniques to your company will allow for streamlining tedious work and improving personalization efforts.
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Benefits of Marketing Automation for small businesses
- reduction of human error
- boosting marketers’ efficiency: the system takes over repetitive, mundane tasks, giving marketers more time to focus on creative and analytical work
- streamlining and simplifying operations: you need fewer tools to manage multiple tasks, channels and relationships
- collecting customer data, which allows for advanced personalization and real time marketing
- building regular processes and planning
- measurement and optimization: finally, you have tools to track effects of every action.
1. Get to know your customers better with behavior tracking
With Marketing Automation software, you track their behavior and monitor their interaction with your content. You see when they visit your website, how they use your app, how often they come to your brick and mortar store. All that data is stored in the system and adds up to the compound user profile. In the end, such practice improves the level of personalization.
2. Easy email and landing page creators
Email marketing is essential for most SMB as a cost-effective way to communicate with the audience. Marketing Automation platforms offer you super-easy wizards for creating emails and landing pages along will templates and themes. Thanks to that you save hours per week – and don’t need any technological knowledge.
3. Abandoned cart rescue email
If ecommerce owners were to name their favorite automation feature, they’d surely pick this one. With as many as 68% of shopping carts being left behind in e-stores, one needs a tool to address such a leakage.
4. Post-purchase drip campaign
Marketing doesn’t end at the moment of sale! Afterward you can do a lot to show your engagement and willingness to continue the relationship. Share tips (for maintenance, how to become a power user), invite the customer to the community, ask for a product review (it will increase your credibility to new potential buyers).
You can either send one automated message after the purchase or even create a post-purchase workflow.
5. Segment offers for loyal customers
Loyal customers are the lifeblood of the business. That’s why it’s a terrifiv idea to segment them and devote some special offers or messages for them only. Make sure they feel spoiled rotten by your care and attention.
Neglecting loyal customers is an awful mistake: many marketers just chase new leads and opportunities while ignoring existing ones. People who already are with you can spend more if approached skillfully – and in lack of being treated in a unique way, they will leave you when a better offer appears on the horizon. In such way you lose not only the future revenue from that customer, but also the resources invested in acquiring it.
In other words: if you devote so much to get a customer, keep her with you afterward!
6. Welcome emails
74,4% of customers expect welcome message after opting in – just like they expect that salesperson will say hello in brick and mortar store. Such message frames the relationship and helps to start it on the right foot. Besides, it shows 86% higher OR and 196% higher CTR when compared to traditional emails (according to Social Mouths). You can also use it for a preliminary segmentation: ask customers in the email to choose a type of offer they want to receive, what are they interested in.
7. Personalized contact forms
A lot of SMB owners confuse Marketing Automation with email marketing. It’s not the same!
Email marketing vs Marketing Automation
Shortly speaking, Marketing Automation not only enriches your email marketing, but also offers completely new features. One of these is personalized contact form. Basing on user behavior, the form is filled with customized content to increase the probability of subscription.
Our client Rainbow Tours increased the amount of leads generated from the website by 45% thanks to implementing that feature.
8. Reactivation campaigns to scrub your database clean
Take care of your list quality: SMB often have a small list and are scared of removing inactive contacts from it. Nonetheless, database hygiene is vital: you can use segmentation tools to sort out contacts that haven’t responded to your marketing for a long time, then send them special reactivation offers and messages. Contact who still doesn’t respond (don’t even open the email) can be delated. Really. No point in sending people messages they don’t want.
9. Restart the nurturing process with inactive leads
Probably you have leads who used to be active, read your blog and your newsletter, and then something happened – and it wasn’t a purchase. Now they live in the lead limbo, neither customer or strangers, forgotten and left behind.
Our idea? Prepare a special workflow for such audience: check out what happened and let them now they’re missed.
10. Segment promotions based on purchase behavior
How do you shape your offers? Do you send the same set of products or features to every single recipient? If so, how about trying dynamic emails with content tailored to users:
- activity history (previously viewed and bought items, ratings and opinions shared)
- personal information (gender, age)
- context (time and place, for example where the user is right now)
In other words, tailor the message to the recipient. Send the right offer to the right person at the right time. With Marketing Automation software it’s a matter of setting a rule that will send such customized messages automatically.
11. Content personalization
Learn which content your user engages in and present her with further content she will find relevant. Such way of distribution will ensure that your content finds the most suitable readers.
12. Monitor the performance of each campaign
What gets measured gets managed, as Drucker said. You can’t optimize campaigns without tracking their results – otherwise you just make random changes and have no clue why your sales ebb and flow. SMB also needs a systematic approach to tests.
Final tips: smart automation
- Find labor-intensive and repetitive tasks and try to find a way of optimizing them
- Identify bottlenecks in your buyer’s journey and address them
- Personalize your emails. You can try all types of 1-on-1 messages like post-purchase email, welcome message, etc.
- Personalize your content
- Monitor and optimize.
Sources:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247235
https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/marketing-automation-small-business/
http://pointtakenpr.com/marketing-tips/marketing-automation-small-business-nonprofits/
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