What if I told you that I could help you increase the number of leads coming from your website? Big deal.

How about if those leads were much better quality and more likely to lead to sales or new clients.

Sounds good?

What would you say if told you these amazing new leads would actually cost you less than you were paying for the small number of mediocre leads you were getting before?

All that sounds pretty good right?

How about in addition to all these great leads you were able to follow up with past customers or clients so that you could re-engage them for further business and build loyalty and it wasn’t going to require more staff or longer hours?

Welcome to the future …

Cheesy 1970’s flying car ads aside, what I’ve described here is actually just a small portion of what can be achieved with marketing automation.

Marketing automation is simple in many respects but has the potential to transform a business. I’m not using hyperbole; it literally can take a mediocre business who’s doing the same old marketing things and getting the same old results and transform those marketing activities into an efficient lead/sale generating machine.

Answering the BIG questions and Lifting the Heavy Things.

The best way to understand marketing automation is probably to use some examples of how it can be used.

Staying in Touch without the heavy lifting

If you’re serving more than 1 customer a month, you’d probably benefit from customer relationship management (CRM) software. If you’re managing your clients on a spreadsheet, you definitely need a CRM.

Most marketing automation software integrates with a CRM or has one built in.

Put these two platforms together and you can do a lot of heavy lifting that would otherwise take hours:

• Easily remind you to follow up on proposals to help close sales. You can even automate emails to follow up for you at set intervals.
• Automate emails to ask for reviews from clients to build your reviews online. Even automate these emails to remind them again in a week or two if they haven’t left you a review.
• Quickly send clients documentation they need to engage with your business and track whether they have downloaded the documents you have sent them.
• Easily remind you or automate an email to reach out to a client to see how they are going after a certain period of time. This builds stronger relationships and increases the likelihood that they will use your business again and refer others to you.
• Send offers or sales emails to previous customers who have been visiting your website recently or even engaging with your social media accounts.

These are just a handful of effective automations that you can use to do heavy lifting that would take you many more hours or a whole other staff member.

Once you grasp the potential you can find so many other aspects of your business communications to automate that you’ll wonder how and what you ever did before.

Planting and Watering New Customers

You know yourself if you’ve ever shopped online or enquired about a service that you don’t generally go with the first option you find when searching.

Most website conversion rates are around 3% – 5% depending on the industry. That means that 97% – 95% of people visiting a website aren’t buying something or getting in touch with your business when they’re visiting your website.

This is why having lead nurturing in place makes so much sense.

In short, you need to offer something that will encourage some of the 95%+ of visitors who don’t convert when coming to your website to at least give you a way to keep in touch with them. (Hint – subscribe to my email list isn’t it).

Then you need to deliver and keep delivering value to plant, water and grow these prospects into new customers.

Dwyer Homes Lead Nurturing Case Study

Dwyer Homes is a home builder and they are reaching out to first home
buyers who are on their website dreaming about getting Dwyer Homes to build
them their dream home. Dwyer Homes is hip to marketing automation and have
taken the time to plan and execute an “email nurture” journey for first home
buyers.

Dwyer Homes offers first home buyers a downloadable help sheet of 20
tips and tricks for saving for their deposit. All they need to do is give them
their email and name in return. But they don’t stop there and send them monthly
newsletters, once they have the eBook 7-days later their marketing automation software
sends them a helpful email with a further 5 tips – actual good tips – to save
for their first home. Two weeks later Dwyer Homes sends through a helpful email
about buying land and what to be aware of when looking.

The pre-prepared nurture journey goes on for the next 10 – 12 weeks
every two weeks with helpful and compelling emails which have been carefully
put together to help nurture that potential customer. After the 12 weeks are up
Dwyer Homes sends these potential clients an email about a First Home Buyers information
session with a trusted local financial adviser, completely FREE and no
obligation, which they can attend to find out if they are in a position to buy
or to help them get in a position to buy.

Because these emails have been so helpful and Dwyer Homes seems so much
more genuine than the other builder’s websites and display homes they have
visited, 10 of the 30 potential clients who are receiving these emails attend
the session and 3 of those actually discover that they are probably eligible to
buy and are completely sold on building with Dwyer Homes.

The power of this example is not only the nurturing to sale process but
the fact that these 3 potential clients weren’t aware that they were actually
in a position to buy. What the nurture journey has done is dramatically shorten
the length of time to sale. This effectively increases the number of sales
Dwyer Homes is getting every month because of a well-planned nurture journey.

Is my marketing working? Who should I give my money to?

The last thing I want to mention, and we’re really only scratching the surface in this post on marketing automation, is the same question you and I ask when it comes to marketing:

“If I do this marketing and invest this sack full of money what will I get in return and what is working?”

Marketing automation software can help answer this question.

Without getting into the minutia, any marketing automation software worth its salt should be able to track clicks from paid ads, organic traffic or social media etc. and then connect online purchases and form enquiries with those ads. With a little bit of jiggery-pokery, you can even track and attribute phone calls too.

Once you have the contact’s details you can then track their journey both to sale and beyond to find out helpful information like:

• How much revenue did a particular advertising
  campaign generate?
• Which marketing activities result in the most
  revenue?
• What is the life time value of customers and how
  did they find you?
• What marketing activities drive high value
  clients/customers?

These are answers to the real questions that businesses should be asking if they want to grow and thrive. These are but 4 questions marketing automation can answer and the answers to these questions alone could transform a business.

So much more to tell you.

As I said, we’ve really only scratched the surface on
marketing automation in this post but hopefully that is enough to get you
thinking about how marketing automation could fit into your marketing
activities and business processes.

If you’d like to find out more about marketing automation and how to implement it in your business with actionable tips, advice and software recommendations we are holding a Marketing Automation education event on the 20^th June at our offices from 6pm – 7:30pm.

Find out more by going to the event registration page.