How Marketing Automation Works: Making More Sales

Marketing automation isn’t a software gimmick or a fancy way of saving time. It is a proven way of generating leads and turning them into profitable customers. Beyond this, marketing automation can help you retain customers and increase their lifetime value. Put simply, marketing automation is a way of making more sales – and a powerful one at that.

Let’s take a look at the sales potential of marketing automation in this article. We want to show you some of the ways marketing automation can deliver more sales for your business, and how it can assist you at every stage of the buyer journey.

6 Ways Marketing Automation Boosts Sales:

1) Content Scheduling

Creating great content is only half the story of successful marketing. To maximise engagement, you also need to use that content at the right time. Marketing automation can help you do this. You can set up multi-layered campaigns, so the different buyer types receive appropriate content in response to behavioural triggers. This could be a prospect clicking a link or visiting a certain page of your site.

2) Build A Conversation

People rarely make immediate sales decisions. There is usually a process of deliberation involved, in which the prospect progressively engages with your content. This two-way interaction is a conversation between your business and the prospective customer. Manually following up multiple leads can easily lead to some getting forgotten, or to them forgetting you. Marketing automation can prevent conversations going cold by automatically sending responses and email sequences. These can be configured in advance to help save time while the campaign is in progress.

3) Focus On The Really Important Tasks

Sales is a matter of relationship building and real-time responses to customer needs. Every hour spent on data entry and other repetitive tasks is time that could be spent on more profitable activities. One of the main appeals of marketing automation is the time it saves, and this shouldn’t be underestimated.

4) Better Lead Scoring & Segmentation

Not all leads that come to you through your website are the same. Marketing automation lets you segment your leads database into different types of customer. Leads can then be scored according to their likelihood of converting, their potential value, or other factors. Each segment can be assigned custom workflows and content that addresses their needs. This strategy will also let you identify and segment non-leads – people who are very unlikely to buy from you – without wasting time following them up manually.

Marketing automation also helps you send appropriate communications at the right time, recognising that each lead is at a different stage of their buyer journey. Some may be eager to invest straight away, and require a different type of content to those who are just making preliminary enquiries or scoping out the market.

5) Re-Engage Lost Prospects

Every day, e-commerce businesses lose thousands of pounds worth of potential sales through abandoned shopping carts. Automated reminder emails to people who have abandoned their cart keep you on their radar, and make it more likely that the prospect will return to complete their sale.

6) Evaluate Your Efforts

Reduce your cost per sale by tracking the ROI associated with all your sales efforts. Learn what works and what doesn’t, where you can make efficiencies, and how your time and money can be better spent.

Find Out More

There isn’t always a straightforward formula for making sales and so much depends on a correct assessment of the market need and the motivations behind purchase decisions. Nevertheless, marketing automation software can help focus and organise your sales workflow, while freeing your sales team to spend more time on relationship building and one-to-one business development.

To find out more about how to use marketing automation as a sales tool, please get in touch with one of our experts today.

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