In our previous article on this matter, we told you that marketing automation starts with selecting the right platform, getting to know its dashboard, and integrating it with other tools in your IT ecosystem (e.g., an e-commerce platform or a CRM system). Today, we want to focus on what’s next.
Suppose you’re precisely at this moment – you’ve selected iPresso, you understand our dashboard (it’s really intuitive, we promise!), and you’ve integrated other tools and IT platforms with iPresso. So, what’s next? The answer to this question depends on your goals. You see, marketing automation can help you achieve three major goals:
- Run more effective marketing/sales campaigns
- Save time on conducting repetitive tasks
- Automate communication with customers
Of course, you can pursue all three goals, but each goal comes with its own set of tools you can use to achieve it. Let’s have a closer look at what tools you can use to get there. Once you know this, figuring out what your next step should be is a breeze. Usually, it’s best to concentrate on one or two tasks that offer the biggest potential to change how your company works.
Let’s use an example – if you run an online store and every month you receive hundreds of order-related questions, your company would most likely benefit from automating this area of your business. You can do so by creating specific MA scenarios. Once these scenarios are in place, your team can focus on more strategic assignments. All the “Where’s my order?” questions are now being answered on auto-pilot. And that’s just one example of what you can do with marketing automation.
Let’s have a look at some other options.
Run more effective marketing/sales campaigns
Today, everything marketing and sales-related is data-driven. You need to know your customers and their needs in order to reach them successfully. Everything starts with a worthy solution to gather, store, and analyze customer data. When you understand who your customers are, what their needs are, and what they are interested in, you can get in front of them with a tailor-made offer that checks all the right boxes.
Next, you can use this data to create better advertising campaigns (think Google Ads), better push notifications and text messages, and better email marketing campaigns. Lastly, you can also use some surveying tools to find out what customers think about your business and whether they would recommend your company.
Lastly, knowing your customers is a prerequisite to creating effective loyalty programs encouraging people to stick to your brand and buy more products.
Some of the tools you should consider if you’re interested in running better marketing comprise:
- Contact database management
- Email marketing
- Advanced customer segmentation
- Google Ads integration
- NPS surveys
- Persona creator
Save time on repetitive tasks
On a day-to-day basis, running a company consists of hundreds of tasks and actions, many of which are repetitive and, therefore, can be automated. Think of product recommendations. In the e-commerce times, recommending products to every visitor to your store manually is simply impossible. What if you have 200 visitors at the time? You must have a way to automate this part of your work.
It’s a similar story with responding to abandoned processes. Unfinished orders or contact forms are a big problem for every online company. Automating this area of your company would save your company a lot of time and perhaps even get you some new business.
And what about your website’s content? Sometimes, showing a specific text or link to a specific person can be very effective. Again, that’s something you cannot do manually – it simply has to happen on auto-pilot.
Of course, these are just some of the examples of what you can automate and, in turn, save precious time. What if you want to automate something else? In many instances, MA scenarios are the answer. They help you create a set of actions (from your customers) and responses (from your company), so that the whole process can happen with no involvement from your staff. Actually, our MA scenarios are perfect for a whole list of things, and you’re mostly limited by your imagination and the data you possess.
If you want to save time, focus on these tools on our platform:
- Product recommendation frames
- Scenarios of marketing automation
- Responding to abandoned processes
- Website content automation
Automate communication with customers
Lastly, you may want to use marketing automation to automate communication with your customers. Depending on the channels you use, you have several options here. Marketing automation can be used to send mass messages (although please keep in mind they can still be personalized; when we say “mass messages,” we simply mean you won’t have to send out each message manually) and to design whole communication scenarios (again, that’s where MA scenarios come in).
At iPresso, we continually strive to provide users with access to many different communication channels, from email to WhatsApp and text messages (SMS). Order status updates, technical information (e.g., password retrieval), and the latest offers and discounts – all of that can be automated. And as a result, your customers are always up to speed with what’s going on in your company, and they don’t have to waste time asking about order status. It’s a clear win-win situation – you save time, and your customers get what they need without asking for it.
Take a look at some of the tools you should be interested in if you want to automate communication with customers:
Summary
To sum up, once your marketing automation platform is in place, you should first think about what you want to achieve. The answer will determine your next steps. In this article, we showed you several options and ways you can choose to make your company more effective and profitable. Start with things that aren’t too complicated and will allow you to quickly see the first results. This will give you the motivation to try more tools and dig deeper. Usually, the best starting point revolves around the things that take too much time in your company. If you spend hundreds of hours annually sending emails, start right there. If you want to keep all of your customers up to date, start with push notifications or email marketing.
Implementing MA doesn’t have to be difficult. Well, at least not with iPresso 🙂
If you still haven’t started your free trial, now is a good time! Just send us this short contact form, and we’ll do the rest!
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