If you’ve recently started your business, you need to think about a whole list of things, with acquiring clients and staying afloat being the two most important ones. Startups frequently decide to limit expenses, especially at the early stage of development. But there is a big question to answer: Should you save money on marketing automation? Or perhaps it’s a vital aspect of your startup business, and you should invest in it. Let’s have a look.
Startups usually need to consider many aspects of their business and have limited resources, which is especially challenging if they haven’t received any funding and are paying out of their own pocket.
If that’s your situation, your obvious first goal is to acquire (and retain) first clients or users. And most likely, the vast majority of what you’re doing revolves around this issue. All the other things, like scaling your team or getting a nice office need to wait until you can actually afford these things.
Many startups end up cutting costs, which is reasonable. With no clients or just a few, costs are dragging you down. But you need to be smart—if you cut too many costs or quit too many services, your business will struggle to get off the ground. Some things, and acquiring and retaining clients is certainly one of them, require investments.
Is marketing automation one of those things? We are 100% certain the answer is yes. But we’re not saying that just because this is what we do; we have some solid evidence to back our statement up.
How marketing automation helps startups
The answer comprises four elements. Let’s have a look at them:
STREAMLINED CUSTOMER JOURNEY
With a good marketing automation platform, you can plan and streamline the whole customer journey in your company and assist your customers at different stages of it. In other words, your company can cater to the needs of new customers/users much better with marketing automation in place.
Some time ago, Ascend2 published their The State of Marketing Automation 2023 report in which respondents (75%) agreed that MA makes it easy for them to build effective customer journeys:
This is very important – with the lack of a well-designed customer journey, retaining clients will be extremely difficult! You simply need this part of your startup business to work flawlessly, especially at the beginning when you’re trying to get your first buyers’ trust and engagement.
Marketing automation scenarios
With MA scenarios, you can plan and optimize the entire communication flow between your company and its clients. Thanks to this solution, you can respond in a specific way to actions taken by both current and potential clients, even when they visit your website anonymously! This way turning first-time visitors into leads is much easier.
MASSIVE TIME SAVINGS
There is no other way to say this – marketing takes time. Lead generation takes time. Maintaining good relations with your clients takes time. Put all those elements together, and you end up spending dozens of hours each month doing just marketing-related assignments.
With marketing automation, you can cut this time in half (and sometimes even more!). That’s because, nowadays, marketing automation can help you with almost anything related to your business, from sending newsletters to managing Google Ads accounts. Here at iPresso, we help our clients with 20+ elements of their marketing, and we automate them either partially or fully.
This translates to hundreds of hours each year saved! Why not spend all this time doing more strategic work that will help you grow and scale your startup? Of course, you could send hundreds of emails manually each week, but is it the best use of your time? Or is it a good idea to hire someone to do that for you?
If you’re treating marketing automation as an expense, the same is true with employees you don’t really need at the moment (and they are even more expensive!). In a different report, respondents mention time savings as the number-one benefit of introducing marketing automation to their business:
Source: https://instapage.com/blog/automation-statistics/
GOOD FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE
Marketing automation can help you with marketing and lead generation at every stage of your company’s development. Even huge multimillion-dollar corporations use marketing automation to stay on top of their game and keep attracting new leads to their business.
That’s the way we treat marketing automation here at iPresso. We give you access to tools like CDP (customer data platform) in order to allow you to manage your contact effectively and holistically from day one.
Even a startup needs to manage its customers/users effectively to keep them engaged. With such a tool, you can do it effortlessly and make sure each customer/user is well taken care of. Moreover, because CDP is just one of many features in our portfolio, this tool can also give you more insight into your customers, namely, their activities within your company or website and the history of communication.
SUPPORT FOR OTHER MARKETING CHANNELS
As we mentioned before, with marketing automation, you can make the most of diverse marketing and communication channels in your startup. This way, you can stay in touch with your customers regardless of what device they use or how they came to your business.
With iPresso, you can automate various aspects of the following channels and tools:
- Email marketing
- Text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp)
- Google Ads
- Push notifications
Thus allowing you to cover all bases and maintain active communication with your target audience.
Should you invest in marketing automation at the early stage of development?
Let’s go back to the question we asked in the introduction. You run a startup – should you invest in marketing automation? We believe so, primarily because it allows you to:
- Save a lot of time
- Retain current clients/users
- Streamline acquiring new ones
- Lay foundation for the future development of your company
However, we get that you’re very cautious with your marketing budget. That’s why we invite you to start a free 30-day trial that will allow you to understand how marketing automation can make your life easier. After this period, you will be able to make an informed decision on whether you need our platform or not.
All you need to do is send this short contact form, and our team will take care of the rest!
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