So… You’ve heard the buzz about marketing automation but after checking out two or three different software providers you’re still lost. Either that, or you’ve just adopted a marketing automation platform and perhaps you’re struggling to put it all (the bigger picture) together.
You my friend are a “noob,” which is a popular online gaming term for being a newbie, rookie or beginner.
Don’t worry, it’s nothing to be ashamed of; in fact, it means you’re in an exciting new time regarding the growth of your business! Once you’ve optimized a few key areas or made some changes in direction regarding previous practices, you’re going to see how much more efficient & streamlined your business processes have become.
FYI…Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. (Gartner Research) Tweet this stat!
Not bad, huh? In an effort to get up and running with your brand-spankin’ new marketing automation software we recommend getting started with the following 5 easy-to-implement processes or, “baby steps” to ensure that the highest possible ROI is yielded.
5 Marketing Automation Baby Steps:
1. Activating your Web Monitor
Think of your eMarketeer web monitor as your digital eye in the sky that links your known contacts to their digital footprints on your company’s website. Your software should facilitate the ability to implement a Google Analytics style tracking system on your website and landing pages; if not, it might be time to take a look around at what the competition is offering.
At eMarketeer, our Web Monitor comes standard with all Basic & Pro versions and activating it is as simple as copy & pasting a snippet of code into your website’s html.
Activating this kind of “eye in the sky” means a few things for your business. Taking this small step allows you to:
- track behavior and habits as a result of that newsletter campaign you just sent out
- gain a better understandings regarding what landing pages perform better than others as well as what email campaigns work better than others
- give your sales teams better insight into prospect and lead behavior
- optimize sales enablement via “Hottest Prospect” ratings, aka, the flame icons next to your leads’ names.
- find out where your leads are coming from
- find out what pages perform best & how long individual visits were to different pages
2. Implementing Smart Forms onto your website
Placing smart forms onto your website is one of the easiest ways to streamline your marketing efforts and optimize sales enablement. Your business’ website is essentially its flagship retail location; you have digital visitors entering your “store” and engaging with your “products” over the net.
If you plan on scaling your business (which I would venture to guess that you are) then being able to efficiently track, respond to & store the information submitted via forms on your website is a must.
Smart forms can easily (and should be able to) be adapted to channel the look and feel of your website. We use them ourselves on emarketeer.com; an easy example to showcase is our “contact us” form.
As you can see, the form looks great and doesn’t stand out against the theme of our website. By implementing this smart form, each time a new inquiry has been sent off, we automatically have a new contact card created (if it’s an unknown contact). What’s more, any data we feel is relevant can easily be synced to said contact card so that we can later segment or target certain contacts for campaigns, offers, promotions and the likes.
3. Get started with Facebook marketing
“Get Love, Not Just Likes!”
Did you know that over 755 million people login to Facebook daily? In Europe alone, there are over 223 million people on Facebook (Search Engine Journal). If your business isn’t an active member of the Facebook community then you need to saddle-up and get going!
Building and managing your company’s Facebook page is a lot easier than you think. Utilizing a marketing automation platform that’s optimized for social media management makes the job a lot easier by allowing you to easily create forms, surveys and campaigns, which can then be broadcasted directly to your company’s profile all while having just one tab open in your web browser.
A great way to get started is to make sure that the marketing automation software provider you select sets you up with a plethora of professionally designed and enhanced templates. For many businesses, especially those that lack certain in-house marketing resources, this will drastically reduce your workload and allow you to easily create landing pages, mobile responsive email campaigns, Facebook surveys, event invitations and even mobile web apps!
Here’s an example of a template we provide our eMarketeer clients with so that they can easily drag & drop their way to publishing an event invitation that channels the Facebook look and feel:
On top of other capabilities, you can easily set automation triggers that will react to predefined rules whereby you begin driving interest from Facebook to email, across mobile and then to landing pages. This is what “the bigger picture” is all about: getting your marketing channels to work together so that leads begin driving themselves down the pipe towards the finish line.
4. Ramp up your Sales Enablement!
Bringing your sales and marketing teams closer together is a key element and benefit of adopting marketing automation software. Sales enablement is a term that describes this process of unification; it allows you to fine tune your business processes, save time and prevent leads from falling through the cracks.
For those that don’t know, CRM is an acronym for, “Customer Relationship Management.” If you’d like to know more, we recommend checking out SuperOffice, which does a great job of explaining what a CRM is and how it works.
By utilizing a great leads machine tailored specifically towards SuperOffice or even other CRM actors such as Salesforce, you’re able to take “sales enablement” to the next level.
For those of you with limited resources or who happen to be small business owner’s forced between selecting one or the other (marketing automation software vs CRM tool), fear not; there’s a work around!
You can easily set automations on a multitude of actions that will trigger-send emails or SMS notifications directly to staff immediately, or when you prefer these notifications to be sent.
Here are some examples:
- Contact us form submitted -> Customer service rep receives email & SMS with details
- Prospect clicks specific link -> Barbara from sales is notified immediately
- Negative response from survey -> Contact’s designated rep is notified immediately
5. Make your emails Mobile Responsive
With stats like this, it’s difficult for many of us to get our head around the fact that some 89% of emails being sent are still, “mobile unfriendly” (Equinox). At this point in time, if your business isn’t sending mobile responsive emails then you shouldn’t be sending emails at all; don’t be that business!
Making sure that your emails and newsletter campaigns look great on all mobile devices isn’t a difficult task so long as your marketing automation software offers this to you.
At eMarketeer we provide our clients with full access to our professional template library, which allows them to browse a number of mobile responsive templates and design options for their next content marketing creation. Whether you’re an eMarketeer user or not, selecting a software that gives you the freedom of (mobile responsive) choice is only going to save you time and money in the long run.
69% of mobile users delete emails that aren’t optimized for mobile (Litmus). Tweet This Stat!
Well there you have it… You’re not a rookie anymore!
By making sure you that you cover these 5 areas you’ll be off and running with your marketing automation software. Big or small, marketing automation is for businesses of all sizes. Make sure to take your time and select the software that suits you best!
If you’d like a free demo to see first hand how easy it is to get started with marketing automation for your business, give us a shout and an eMarketeer specialist will gladly set aside the time to give you a virtual tour of our software.
If you have any other questions regarding getting started with marketing automation software drop us a comment below and we’d be happy to offer our advice!
On the contrary, do you have any great tips or advice? Do share!