Over the past few years, marketing automation solutions have received a lot of attention. Businesses implement such platforms in order to maintain personalized communications with customers and easily turn leads into ready-to-buy prospects. But some companies are still skeptical about these systems. They don’t actually believe that the software of the kind can grow their business.
Let us put the things right and find out if marketing automation solutions can really improve your business. Some of the benefits of such platforms are available on the official website of bpm’online – a сloud-based platform designed to satisfy the needs of large and medium businesses. This software can offer you a number of tools to maintain a constant dialogue with your buyers, to optimize your marketing campaigns, and to transform your leads into qualified opportunities. The CRM tools of bpm’online enable organizations become much more competitive and influential within a short period of time. But let us get back to the matter in hand and look at the way marketing automation solutions can improve your business.
Successful Lead Nurturing
According to the results of the study conducted in spring 2014, the number one advantage of such platforms is the possibility to manage and nurture leads. As a rule, companies have both hot and cold leads. The key objective of sales teams is to focus on the hottest leads, as they are more likely to turn into buyers. And what about the cold ones? The customers who are not ready to purchase yet should not be neglected. It’s the cold leads which demand nurturing, first of all.
This work is conducted in the following way: during a lead nurturing campaign, the company’s agents send a set of emails to the customers who downloaded a free report. They encourage the clients to request more information about the products and services offered. As soon as the customer responds to the email, the company’s reps note that he has turned into a qualified lead.
When businesses implement marketing automation platforms they get a perfect opportunity to automate the process of converting cold leads into hot ones. The sales teams do not need to spend extra time for this purpose: the software will perform this task itself, without any special help.
Marketing Automation Solutions to Improve Response Rates
It has been proven that the sooner you answer the client’s enquiry, the more likely he is to convert into a ready-to-buy prospect. If you respond within an hour, your chances to qualify a lead are seven times higher, compared to answering even 60 minutes later. Moreover, if you wait for 24 hours or longer, the probability of getting a qualified lead becomes 60 times lower. At the same time, it takes most companies about 12 hours or more to respond to clients’ enquiries. This is where marketing automation solutions will help you once again. The platforms of the kind help sales teams create automated email responses and send them within an hour after receiving a request.
Perfect Software for Saving Your Time
We often feel like having no time to catch up on so many things. In such situations, we frequently try new things: for example, implement CRM-oriented platforms to automate our routine tasks. This approach is suitable for both large and medium companies, no matter whether they have just got started or are successful, fast-growing organizations. For all types of business, time is one of the most valuable resources, which always seems hard to regain. Nevertheless, when you implement a marketing automation platform, you get a perfect opportunity to eliminate some of the most time-consuming tasks from your schedule, as the chosen software will perform them automatically. The register of such missions includes qualifying leads, sending emails, and so on. While the marketing automation system performs a variety of mindless tasks and scales personalization, your team can focus on higher-level strategies and more promising missions.
Marketing Automation Solutions for Building Your One-Stop-Shop
When you have a load of disorganized marketing tools taken from different platforms, you may lose a complete view of your customers. You will simply get lost in numerous solutions, useless functions, and pieces of unnecessary information. When you implement a single marketing automation platform, you get a chance to integrate all these disparate tools, so that you could use a comprehensive system with a number of interconnected functions. After implementing the marketing automation software you can receive data from a number of channels to build an complete picture of your clients’ interests and target your marketing campaigns more efficiently. This is a good opportunity for marketers to create, deploy, manage, and measure their resources.
Reducing Sales and Marketing Costs
It is one of the most beneficial advantages of marketing automation platforms. Nevertheless, most companies that implemented such software note that they’ve managed to scale their sales efforts without special expenses. They needed just a couple of specialists to create an automated system of interaction with customers, no matter how large the business was.
This has two crucial consequences:
- First, your marketing automation solutions can reduce your sales and marketing costs, as you won’t need any additional staff. Moreover, after a while, you will be able to reduce headcount by 10-15%.
- Secondly, your employees will have enough time to focus on valuable and creative tasks, while low-cost daily operations – like checking cold leads or answering the same questions – will be performed automatically.