Marketing automation can offer tremendous work simplification and a lot of time savings. However, not every company is ready to implement or fully benefit from this technology. In this post, we’ll show you five signs that clearly indicate that you’re ready to go with marketing automation. We’ll also share some insights on what to do if you’re not.
The truth is that marketing automation requires a few things to be ready before you start utilizing this technology. Of course, the scope of changes and improvements will differ depending on what you intend to automate.
Here’s an example. If you just want to start sending web push notifications from your website, all you need to do is add an appropriate consent box to your website, and that’s pretty much it. Next, you can use the push notifications tool to start conducting push notifications campaigns.
Things get a little more complicated if you want to personalize communication with your customers. In that case, you need to start collecting accurate behavior and purchasing data to even think about implementing a personalization engine in your company.
So, while marketing automation can take many different shapes and forms, there are five quite universal signs clearly indicating that you should consider implementing MA in your business rather sooner than later. Let’s have a look at them.
Your productivity levels go down
If you find your company being less and less productive, one of the most common reasons is that you’re drowning in repetitive, mundane tasks. The larger your business gets, the more emails you have to send, the more invoices you need to issue, the more orders you need to ship, etc.
If you don’t stay on top of things, you will find yourself (or your team) dealing with mundane but necessary tasks that take a lot of time but don’t really contribute to the revenue. If that’s the case in your business, think about automating as many of those tasks as possible.
With iPresso, you can automate:
- Communication with potential clients, starting with the first website visit
- E-mail communication (both marketing emails and tech notifications)
- SMS & WhatsApp communication
- Product recommendations
- Customer surveys
- Managing your customer database and adding new customers to it
Implementing those and other automation features can help you save a lot of time and restore high productivity levels.
The number of your customers goes up
When you had just 10 or even 50 customers, you probably managed to do everything yourself (or with a small team). As your company starts to grow, you have more and more customers to serve. Each customer requires some attention and communication throughout the month.
If you can automate communication and customer service, at least to some extent, you will find it easier to serve even a large number of customers. As a result, your company can grow even further, because MA is a scalable solution that works regardless of whether you have 100, 1,000, or 100,000 customers.
You send so many emails!
A high number of customers/users equals a high number of emails. If you operate in the e-commerce sector, every order requires at least 3 emails:
- Order confirmation
- Shipping status
- Order delivery confirmation with a follow-up message or CTA
If you get around 1,000 orders per month, that’s at least 3,000 emails right off the bat! And if you want to create more advanced sales funnels and communication scenarios, this number can easily breach 10,000! Sending those emails by hand would make zero sense. You simply need to automate this aspect of your work, and that’s what marketing automation is for.
You struggle with inconsistent lead follow-up
When was the last time you lost a lead because you simply forgot about it or the message was lying around and no one opened it? For large companies, that’s a serious issue that costs you money. If that’s what you’re struggling with, you need to implement an automated process that will take care of every incoming lead on auto-pilot without the involvement of your team.
You can set up marketing automation scenarios to automatically react to every interaction with a prospective client, whether via the website or email. This way, you minimize the risk of losing such a lead and implement lead nurturing at the same time!
You struggle with measuring key metrics and KPIs
Do you know which marketing campaigns are effective in your business? Do you know where your leads are coming from? One of the biggest challenges for growing companies is understanding which marketing activities are delivering the actual results. Without clear marketing data, you may find yourself pouring resources into campaigns that aren’t generating leads or revenue. If that’s the case and you struggle with measuring marketing and sales-related metrics and KPIs, you should consider marketing automation. How so?
Marketing automation tools come with extensive analytics and reporting features that give you access to the information you need to improve your marketing and focus on the things that bring in new customers. Here at iPresso, almost every feature we offer comes with an analytics module that allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns and other activities.
What if you’re not ready?
Marketing automation usually requires well-organized data to work with. If you’re not ready to implement marketing automation, start by organizing and collecting more customer and process-related data in your business. If streamlined client acquisition is your goal, you should focus on all measurable activities that your customers take:
- Sent contact forms
- Placed orders
- Send inquiries and free trial requests, etc.
You should know who made such a request (you need to keep an updated database of your customers and leads), when, and as a result of what marketing activity.
If you don’t know how to measure these things, you need to hire or collaborate with someone proficient in marketing analytics. Such a person/company will also come in handy when implementing marketing automation in the future.
If you have these things working well in your business, the next step is to select the marketing automation platform that checks all the right boxes and starts the implementation process. A good MA provider will help you with the implementation and onboarding so that you can make the most of the offered service. That’s what we do here at iPresso!
Wrapping up
Marketing automation can be a true game-changer in your business, but you need to be ready for this change in the way you operate. If you’re thinking about implementing MA, start by updating and organizing your customer database. Tracking customer-related processes is also immensely important.
If you’re looking for an MA platform for your company, we recommend ourselves! 🙂 You can start for free with 30-day trial access to iPresso. Just send us this form, and our team will take care of the rest.
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