If you own a small business, you may not be using marketing automation software. Perhaps you don’t think the cost is justified, or maybe it seems more like a luxury or convenience rather than a necessity. But marketing automation is more than just something to make your life easier.
It helps generate leads
Are you constantly monitoring your website traffic? Probably not (and if you are, seriously, what else do you have time for your in your day?). But marketing automation can do it for you. With marketing automation, you can do things like have emails automatically sent out when a customer abandons their shopping cart on your site. Or, if a customer is a repeat visitor who has given you their contact information in the past, a friendly email can be sent out whenever they visit.
You can also do things like provide forms on your site that visitors can fill out to get a content offer, or if they want more information. As soon as they hit submit, marketing automation software can send an email out to them. And if they don’t respond to that email, follow up emails can automatically be sent out to keep trying to convert them into sales.
It helps you keep track of your customers and potential customers
Your customers are not all the same – not all of them respond to the same marketing tactics, and they are always in different stages of the sales process (they could be a prospect, a lead, loyal customer, etc.). Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system keep track of all that for you?
Marketing automation can do exactly that. With systems like Hubspot’s contact database, you can keep track of the people you interact with and how you’ve reached out to them. Marketing automation can even conduct lead scoring, so you know which customers to market most aggressively to.
It incorporates social media
Social media integration is necessary for any modern business. More than 2.3 billion people use social media (basically 1 out of every 3 people alive today), and your business needs a piece of that action.
Marketing automation can provide things like automatically generated social media buttons, which allow users to easily share your content or deals with their social media friends and followers. It can also track your social media mentions, in case anyone is talking about your business on Facebook or Twitter.
As you can see, there are many benefits to marketing automation beyond simple convenience. It saves you a lot of time and effort, and it will help you be a smarter and more effective marketer. To read more on effective lead generation, download our free eBook "A Guide to Online Lead Generation for Business Owners".
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