Small Business Tips
As a small business owner, you probably already know how important it is to have a great website and active social media presence. But updating social media, growing your audience, and staying in touch with customers can be time-consuming. To ease the pain, this is where marketing automation software comes in.
What is marketing automation?
According to digital marketing expert Neil Patel, "Marketing automation is the process of using software and technology to optimize, automate and measure repetitive online marketing tasks." There are virtually thousands of applications and websites that can help you automate various operations, including e-mail and social media marketing. Marketing automation exists to help you build a relationship with your clients so that you can make more sales. But, with so many apps on the market, it makes it hard to know which ones to use. In this article, we will review how marketing automation software can serve you, and provide examples of what some of the most popular applications can do. Hopefully, this will help you narrow down which strategies might be of use for your business. Accordingly, you should be able to spend more time generating actual revenue and less time writing e-mails and trying to grow your social media following!
How to automate e-mail advertising campaigns
Imagine you have a website that gets 500 visitors per day. Some of these visitors are very interested in your services, while others are not. Some may spend hours reading every blog post you've ever published, while others leave your site as soon as they've landed on it. In other words, different visitors will have different levels of engagement. In most cases, it's not possible for you to communicate with customers who visit your website and leave almost right away. Hence, you need to create some type of opt-in that will make prospective clients want to give you their e-mail address. Most companies today do this by creating a newsletter you can sign up for on their website. If you've tried this without having a plan for what you will send your subscribers, you might already know that this strategy doesn't work too well. We all get so many sales pitches and newsletters we don't read … who in their right mind would sign up for more? This is an opportunity to get creative. The best way to engage with prospective customers is to create a free product that readers will receive in exchange for giving you their e-mail address. Don't be vague with this step. Tell people exactly what you plan on sending them.
Here are a few ideas for free gifts you can send your subscribers:
- A free e-book (you'll need to write one first, which can be time-consuming, but e-books don't need to be that long. Plus, once the e-book exists, you can send it to people over and over again)
- An informative PDF that will help customers better understand your services or provide a taste of what you're selling or examples of your work
- Registration to a free webinar
- A free course (a few popular course ideas include those that can help subscribers make more money, get motivated to do something, or learn a new skill), OR
- A special introductory discount on their first purchase.
Although, you'll need to put work into creating your initial offering, remember that you can use this same offering to reach out to hundreds of prospective clients. And once you have a client's e-mail address, you can reach out to them again and again until you make a sale. That doesn't mean you should spam your subscribers! A competent marketing automation tool will help you to build a relationship with your prospective customers over time. Remember those 500 daily website visitors mentioned earlier? Even if one percent of those people subscribe to your newsletter or react to your opt-in, that's five people a day you could be targeted. That adds up to 1,825 people per year.
How to use marketing automation to generate repeat business
Marketing automation tools can also help you turn first-time customers into repeat customers. How does marketing automation do this? Here are a few ways:
- Upselling. This practice targets prior customers with information on how useful your next-level product might be for them
- Cross-selling. This practice can help you keep the customer by offering complementary accessories
- Cycle-based selling. If you sell a product or service that doesn't last, you can generate repeat customers by offering them a deal a few months after the initial sale. This rule applies to service-based businesses, but it can also work for perishable products or anything that is bound to be used up after a season.
