Automations To Jump Start Your Business
Before we get to the juicy part on automations to jump start your business, let’s take a few moments to cover off a little bit about what marketing and sales automation is and can do for your business!
What is Marketing and Sales Automation?
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation uses software to automate monotonous marketing work. Businesses and marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns – not just for the sake of efficiency, but also to provide a more personalised experience for their customers.
At its best, marketing automation is a combination of software, strategy, and customer-centricity. It allows you to nurture prospects with highly personalised, useful content that helps convert prospects to delighted customers, and customers to loyal advocates.
The bottom line is Marketing Automation allows you to be more efficient and increase your revenue.
Here’s a quick test to give you an idea of what marketing automation can do for you. Answer the following questions honestly about your own organization:
Marketing automation may just be the answer to all your marketing woes. No, really. Here’s a quick test:
- Can you identify, track and, engage individual buyers online?
- Can you look at a list of customers and prioritize them based on fit and likelihood to buy?
- Are you filtering leads based on level of engagement and interest?
- Can you measure the revenue contribution of every single one of your marketing campaigns?
- Can you do all of these things without wanting to tear your hair out?
If you can relate to any — or all — of the above, you might just need marketing automation.
Sales Automation
The centerpiece of any sales automation platform is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, which helps organise, track, and nurture leads. When this crucial sales backbone is managed automatically with minimal human intervention (and errors), it introduces a wide range of benefits.
Sales automation may just be the answer to all your selling woes. No, really.
Have you ever:
- Lost a deal because you forgot to follow up?
- Spent precious minutes adding opportunities or leads to your CRM?
- Overlooked an issue in your sales process for a dangerously long time?
- Called leads in alphabetical order rather than best fit?
- Went back and forth with a prospect figuring out a good time to meet?
- Wasted half an hour digging through your files to find the specific deck or customer testimonial you needed?
If you can relate to any — or all — of the above, you might just need sales automation.
How will automations benefit my business
Marketing automation isn’t just about what it can do for your business. It also pays off for your customers by solving common pain points that have arisen in the digital-first, omnichannel era. Your customers are overwhelmed with information, which makes it tough to find the answers they need. When they do manage to contact your company, they frequently have a disjointed experience as they move from team to team, across channels, and between platforms. Marketing automation can reduce this friction by connecting teams, gathering data in a usable format, and prioritizing behind-the-scenes tasks.
Here are some of the things marketing automation allows you to do more effectively:
- Email marketing
- Retargeting and Paid Ads
- Social Media Scheduling
- Landing page creation
- Cross-channel marketing campaigns
- Lead generation
- Segmentation
- Lead nurturing and scoring
- Cross-sell and up-sell
- Retention
- Measuring ROI
- Website personalisation
- Online Chat or Chatbots
- Creating an omni-channel experience
Sales automation uses software to eliminate repetitive, manual tasks and automates them to allow you and your sales team to focus more on closing sales and getting paid.
With sales automation tools, you can:
- Automate follow-ups
- Manage your sales pipeline
- Easily train new sales team members with a repeatable and scalable system
- Send invoices and payment reminders to clients to get paid without the awkward conversations
- Send subscription/service renewals
When combined with marketing automation, your sales automation software becomes an even more powerful tool that allows you to win more time back while growing your business.
Boost Your Business with These Easy Automations
Welcome Series
A classic use of a welcome email series is when someone fills out a form on your website and becomes a subscriber or a customer purchase is made.
A welcome series should begin promptly after someone subscribes to your list. A welcome email series should provide helpful, relevant, and personalised information to get someone started with your business.
For subscribers/prospects/customers who open or don’t open your first welcome email, you can trigger a second email based on their behaviour. For example, if they open it, your second email could have a delay of one week and then send them a ‘next steps’ email…if they didn’t open it, send them a reminder welcome email again!
7 Day Drip Series
It can be a struggle for businesses to follow up with every new contact on your list!
One automation tactic to use is the 7-day drip. A drip series is a sequence of emails sent out to new contacts, leads, or prospects at specific dates and times. Once a lead subscribes to your email list, they will receive each email in the series at the intervals you choose. This automation will help you send out one email per day for 7 days, but you can adjust the wait steps so that the emails send as far apart as you’d like….can be x amount of emails over y duration!
These can be great for nurturing new sales leads or onboarding new customers by sharing tips over the course of a week or other timeline. Also great for sending out a 7-day training course with new content/module each day!
In fact, there are many scenarios where the drip automation can be useful, you can build excitement to a new product launch, or follow up from meeting someone at events…. the ideas are endless for 7-day drips.
Opt-in Incentive Delivery Email
Sometimes it’s vital to offer incentives to get new subscribers to your mailing list and one of the tactics most of us use, is the free giveaway e.g. eBook, webinar, template, discount, industry reports or some other lead magnet. These are vital for growing your list and business. People don’t mind giving something up (email address) for something in return.
Once you have someone showing interesting in your lead magnet, you have to deliver it to them, this is where you first email comes into play. The beauty of the incentive approach is you are able to segment / tag the interests of the prospect and can then serve up other more targeted information automatically over time and keep pushing them through your funnel.
Send New Blog Posts Automatically
At Autus we are big fans of the power of blog writing and the benefits to our business. With our own automation platform, we send out a monthly campaign to our subscribers and we share our weekly blogs since the previous email blog…it works a treat. There’s nothing we need to do, other than keep writing our weekly blog with fresh and value-added content.
The beauty of this is we don’t need to write a new email every time we create a new blog…it just all happens automagically! 🪄
All you need to do is integrate your RSS feed from your blogging platform with your marketing automation platform and let the automation begin!
Webinar Reminder and Follow Up Drip
Gone are the days when you should be fumbling around with a spreadsheet and working out who signed up for your webinar and reminding them manually about making sure to attend and then not only that, following up with those that might have attended, did attend, didn’t attend…yes, you get the picture!
You can automate this entire process from pre-event to post-event follow up and make sure to add more value and convert those prospects to customers.
Targeted Product and Service Interest Follow-up
One of the most time-consuming tasks for businesses and invariably they end up not doing it, is to leverage any product and service interest categories of their prospects and customers.
For example, if you know a customer has purchase Product A you can use targeted follow-ups for repeat purchases based on their interest on this product category. Or you can send out offers if a prospect has shown interest in Product B, first email could be more information and then follow it up with a promotion.
You can also use digital behavioural tracking and other data insight to segment your prospects and customers and then automatically send them a series of emails over the course of a specific period.
The email could contain content, recommended products, an offer, a discount, or some other incentive for your customers to make a purchase.
Post-Purchase Follow Up
After a contact purchases a product from you, you can begin an automated follow up sequence that increases satisfaction by helping a new customer gain as much value as possible from their purchase.
Also known as an onboarding sequence, you can make the new customer aware of resources available to them, such as help documents and support channels. You can give them tips and tricks for getting started, and then send advanced suggestions for getting the most out of it.
Another thing that I’m very much a big fan of, obtain feedback from your customers and get them to submit a nice customer testimonial, so that you build up your online business reputation further…it then adds more credibility to what you do and the great products and services you provide and that leads to more sales!
Abandoned Cart Reminder
We can all relate to the classic historical Amazon approach…at least I think they were the leaders in this space when their business model first arrived on the scene many years ago.
Basically, what happens when a contact is shopping on your ecommerce site. They fill their cart; they go to look at their cart. And then, they disappear without purchasing what was in their cart. What happened?? A classic case of an online abandoned cart.
This can happen for many and varied reasons – they were interrupted by something, your product is too expensive, they were comparing competitors…the key thing is they did show purchase intent and it makes it vital to use this to go back to them and get them back to make that purchase!
All you have to do is integrate your ecommerce platform with your automation platform e.g. you might be using Woocommerce or Shopify ecommerce platforms on your website.
Once this is in place, all you have to do is setup an automation that fires based on an abandoned cart trigger and send after a specific period of time a follow up with the customer and remind them they forgot to purchase the specific product in their abandoned cart. You can even wait so many days and send them a reminder or incentive to purchase or future emails about said product as you now know what they are interested in.
How to get started
See side-by-side comparisons of the top 6 marketing and sales automation vendors in one convenient guide. Compare costs, both upfront and ongoing, and get insight into contract terms. See a roll-up of ratings from the most popular review sites to hear what real users like you think of the various platforms out there.
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About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
