Who Needs Marketing Automation?

Asking whether or not your business should implement an automated marketing solution is almost the same as asking whether your business should be using a horse and buggy or an automobile. Automated marketing is a reality; it streamlines and improves nearly every aspect of marketing. If your company isn’t using automated marketing, you can bet that your competition is.

Every business that currently has customers or that is seeking to attract more customers can benefit in some way from the implementation of an automated marketing solution. Whether you’re a tailor, a chemist or a rock star, automated marketing is the way that your business and brand should be interacting with the public.

Which Industries Need Marketing Automation?

Business who need to stay in communication with their customers on a regular basis will see major improvements in productivity by automating this process. Marketing automation provides a simple way to quickly attract visitors, convert these visitors into leads, and finally, to convert these leads into sales. Of course, all of this can be done the old fashioned way; marketing automation saves time and frees up resources to be used elsewhere within a business..

When it comes to capturing leads, an automated marketing solution can be a painless way to integrate sophisticated lead-capturing techniques into an existing workflow. An automated solution offers customizable lead capture forms that can be used with a standalone website or from within the most popular social media platforms. Successful integration with evolving social media site standards can be tricky and time consuming for even an advanced programmer. Having the ability to automate this process in particular can be an invaluable asset to both your company and your employees.

Communication and Organization

Email marketing is a tricky business; too many emails and your communications end up being filtered directly to the spam folder, too few and you’ll never achieve your sales goals. Ideally, you’ll want to send emails out to your general customer list at a steady pace. You’ll also want to send follow up emails based on the specific customer reactions to your mailings. Automated marketing solutions from Soffront give your business the ability to craft your email marketing campaigns with this degree of precision.

Businesses and the people who work for them tend to look at marketing as those processes which are used to acquire leads and to make sales. While this is true, these steps are only one part of marketing. For a marketing department to be truly successful, it must be able to interpret and respond to the reactions generated by its marketing campaigns. Soffront is a trusted automated marketing solution provider and one of the earliest companies to offer these advanced business services.

A powerful feature of automated marketing is the ability to automatically filter customers into specific marketing categories based upon their behaviors. All successful businesses do this sort of filtering to some degree; even if this means keeping a list of customers who make large purchases separate from the rest of the customer base. The problem lies in the fact that sorting data manually this way is a time-consuming process. Soffront’s automated solution can do all of this data filtering with just a few simple rules in place for it to follow.

The holy grail of business marketing is being able to predict customer actions and spend your marketing efforts where they are most likely to be successful. This kind of bespoke marketing work has usually been reserved for large corporations with almost unlimited marketing budgets. Soffront’s automated marketing now makes it possible for businesses of any size to rank their customers based on the likelihood of them making a purchase and to market to those customer groups accordingly.

Tracking and Responding

Everyone knows that website visitors and their actions should be tracked in order to improve sales and increase profits. Most businesses however, only pay lip-service to the idea of website visitor data. Some sites use a simple hit counter; others use expensive analytics software that provides much more information. Each of these solutions provides some data that may be useful, neither of them provides any meaningful way to react to this data in a timely fashion.

With Marketing Automation software, it is possible to setup a system that instantaneously responds to incoming website visitors in real time. Simple alerts can be sent out to the responsible departments in a business or a more robust, and completely hands off, marketing solution can be implemented.

Email newsletters are a proven method of generating interest and sales. The problem with these types of communications is that most businesses only track them in a binary manner; either a sale was made or one wasn’t. This leaves a very significant amount of useful data uncollected.

Automated marketing solutions simplify the email newsletter process by sending newsletters to targeted subscriber groups, tracking their response rate and reacting appropriately in subsequent interactions. Simply setting up a system with these capabilities is an expensive and time consuming prospect for most marketing departments. Implementing Soffront for your marketing automation makes it possible to carry out a successful newsletter marketing plan painlessly.

Testing

Another useful feature of email marketing is that of split-testing. Put simply, split testing means presenting different pieces of marketing to small groups of customers. The marketing that achieves the best and most desired responses ‘wins’ the split-test. Theoretically, split-testing can be used continuously to achieve greater and greater sales rates. The problems lies in the fact that the results of split tests may not always immediately justify dedicating a great deal of effort to them.

The answer to the dilemma of split-testing lies in the marketing automation tool. Soffront’s Marketing Automation can create tests, analyze the results, and quickly send the best material to the remaining customers needing to be reached. Automation allows the implementation of tests that previously took day days and weeks to conduct, to be carried out in a number of hours.

Social media is undeniably a driving force in the world of online sales. Millions of users login to social media for things such as news, entertainment or just staying in touch with their friends and loved ones. These dedicated users are all potential customers for your business.

The major problem with social media is the ever increasing number of social platforms. Creating content and posting to any one of these platforms can be a full-time job; cultivating a following on all of the major social media sites is almost impossible and growing more difficult every day.

The Soffront Marketing Automation solution allows you to manage all of your social media accounts from one location. Using Soffront you can create content, schedule posts for a later date, see who viewed your content and when and interact with your customers via comments. By putting all of the power of social media in a single convenient location Soffront has revolutionized marketing in the the social niche.

For more information on automated marketing, please visit our CRM and automated marketing resources.