Digital marketing automation
Automating your marketing and sales pipeline can free up value time for your team, while ensuring your customers receive the attention they deserve.
What is marketing automation?
The objective for most organisations is to treat each customer with love and respect you’d like to receive yourself, but the problem is that this kind of attention is very time consuming and costly if you need to do it in volume.
The answer lies in understanding the journey and the needs of your potential customers and then pre-empting this with thoughtful and personalised automated responses and a tailored journey. Not only does it give a better experience for the customer, but it also saves time and resources, allowing you to focus on the critical stages of the journey which may actually require a personal, human response.
Whether you are looking to build an entirely automated sales funnel on an ecommerce store from scratch, or just looking for ways in which repetitive tasks can be automated in order to give a better quality of response, automation can really help. It doesn’t just stop at a sale either, from customer retention through to recommendations, a thoughtful journey can turn a happy customer into an evangelist for your brand, all with little daily effort from you.
Icebreaker
In order to find out if we’re the right kind of fit for each other, I ask all clients to fill out my icebreaker. This allows me to follow up with meaningful responses so that we can get down to roots of where you need help.
What are the benefits of marketing automation?
Efficiency
This has to be one of the top benefits or goals. Good automation should increase customer satisfaction at the same time as decreasing the amount of time required to achieve this, leaving your team more free to focus on the critical processes in your business that need human involvement.
Lead generation
Coupled with a lead generation campaign, automation can build a pipeline of prospects and nurture these into new customers, without the involvement of a sales team. This works particularly well for businesses with digital products or those offering ecommerce.
Reduce waste
Not everyone who is interested will buy from you, but you can use automation to retarget those prospects who showed an interest but never committed. Turning an existing prospect into a customer is often far cheaper than generating a new one from scratch.
Long sales cycle
Have you got one of those long sales cycles where customers take 6 months to decide? Marketing automation can help you stay in touch with meaningful and helpful follow ups without the effort, so you don’t lose out to your competitors, who may be more attentive.
First line of support
Run off your feet with support – automated chatbots and AI can help reduce the need for human contact by solving simple problems before customers even get on the phone.
Reduce Cart abandonment
Ecommerce customers who leave stuff in their baskets and just disappear can be automatically tempted back, to pick up their purchase and complete the transaction.
Be recommended
Happy customers are often more than willing to recommend you to others, but if you automate this and provide an incentive for them, those recommendations can just roll right in with no work at all.
Reviews
Reviews are linked with SEO and offer social proof that you’re good at what you do, but they can take time to get. Automating the asking process at the right stage in the customer journey will have google, trust pilot and feefo reviews rolling in.
Evangelists
Building a beautiful customer service process with intelligent and personalised responses can help turn help customers into evangelists for your brand. And we all like those customers that rave about us.
“I have no hesitation in recommending Steve as an expert in digital marketing. He is also just ‘one of life’s good guys’.”
Chris Elliott
“Steve took the time upfront to understand our business and translate that understanding into a digital strategy focused on delivering sales growth.
Russell Fraser
“Steve is approachable, thoughtful and dedicated. He sets his bar high and is always thinking ahead and coming up with creative and practical ways to approach digital marketing.”
Anna Lewin
“Steve has superb skills in digital growth strategy and digital marketing. He is a delight to deal with and I would wholeheartedly recommend him”
Nigel May
“Steve is creative, fun and consistently produces great results. I have worked with him many times over ten+ years and have no hesitation in recommending him.”
Simon Hook
“If you want help with digital strategies for growth or to generate sales via digital, I absolutely recommend Steve”
Tim Ollerenshaw
“Steve is truly passionate about understanding not just the goals of a campaign, but the business behind it.”
Stephen Emery
“I’ve worked with Steve for a number of years now, and he has a near unique ability to make the mystical world of digital make complete sense.”
Pete Freeman
How to plan a marketing automation project?
There are loads of ways automation can work and add value to your current customer journey, but I find using the following process really helpful in planning an automation project.
Define your goals and outcomes
Your goals could include; improving customer experience, reducing sales cycle time, reducing cart abandonment, getting better customer reviews or referrals, reducing sales team effort – the list goes on. What does your organisation need to do better? Define your objectives.
Understand customers needs
Understanding what your customers’ needs are in the process is key. If your objective is to reduce the decision time in a sales cycle, then find out why customers are not making decisions quickly – speak to them and ask them what would help them make this easier? Getting feedback from customers at the start is absolutely crucial to the process.
Choose your tools
Depending on what your goals are, you’ll need to choose the tools to do the job. This may be as simple as a chatbot plugin for your website, an email marketing tool – or a CRM platform with these tools built-in. If you are new to automation, it’s probably best to pick just one area and a single tool – focus on this and get it right before expanding it out
Create the campaign
This involves planning the journey that a customer takes, and all the touchpoints to make it work. What assets will you need, what content needs to be written, what’s the right tone of voice and what’s the correct timing? Consider as well how this impacts people’s current roles and who will need to be involved in the project.
Test and feedback
Depending on the volume and impact, it’s normally best to test this on a few customers first. Testing on a small set of data or customers will help you iron out issues, it will also allow you to get qualitative feedback. Ask them how they found the process and experience and tweak the campaign based on the feedback before putting live.
Explore how I help
If you’re looking for a trustworthy, experienced and jargon free approach that delivers the results, then you’ve come to the right place. Kick off your shoes and put your feet up, I’m going to put the kettle on.
Frequently asked questions
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How I can help
If you’re looking for some independent advice about marketing automation and how to use it within your organisation, or perhaps you want to find out how I help people, or just want to pick my brain – drop me a line, i’d be delighted to have a chat.
