There are many marketing tools coming in hand today for online sellers to get their brand known to the world, such as social media, content marketing, SEO, paid advertising…. But when it comes to “close the sales” and keep customers become loyal buyers, email marketing outweighs most other tools, especially for small online businesses. Not only does it cost less than other channels but it also has leveraging power to retrieve higher customer acquisition and retention rates.
The marketing world has been evolving greatly. Email marketing firstly adopted in the mid 1990s has now turned into a new hot trend technology: marketing automation. Though traditional email marketing’s power is beyond doubt, businesses normally realize 30% higher revenue if doing it in the automated way. Many online sellers may not even know that this strategy does exist because they aren’t informed. In the meantime, big brands like Amazon.com who always take the first move have already enjoyed great revenue from marketing automation.
So, what is Marketing Automation?
In short, marketing automation refers to a marketing technology using automatic softwares and personalized strategies to nurture prospective customers into paying ones and finally loyal brand lovers. Aiming at the final goal of maximizing conversion rate and revenue, marketing automation captures the right targets at the right moment, generating the highest return on investment (ROI).
As marketing automation is now the ultimate step to turning leads into revenue, it’s high time that you started to take it into serious consideration. Let’s read through this post and get yourself well prepared to enter the marketing automation era.
Statistics has recently proven strong that marketing automation really works.
How does marketing automation work really well in driving the conversion rate?
- It all comes down to automated personalization and relevance.
In the era of booming social world, it’s critical for us to take personalization as the key to the future of our business. Marketing automation allows businesses to tailor relevant and personalized messages to each specific customer at the right time, unlike mass business emails sent to all recipients. We want to waste least efforts and convert best results, instead of delivering mass untargeted messages in hope that some will reach the right audience. The marketing automation process, on the other hand, can deliver the exact messages to the right target subject at the right moment. With established trigger campaigns, it follows customers through every step in the whole customer lifetime cycle. This makes each of the messages highly personalized, relevant and totally worth the click.
- What does it lead to finally? Rocketing conversion rate and bigger revenue.
Let’s take a look at the Automated Email Case Study of SmartPak Equine: 175% more revenue and 83% higher conversion rate. SmartPack Equine has taken an overhead step in outperforming the standards with a series of 40 automated triggered emails, receiving the average results of doubled clickthrough rate and conversion rate and nearly tripled revenue per email sent.
- How to achieve the same thing for your business
Simply put, there are mainly 4 steps in creating automated emails for your online business:
1. Segment your customers into specific types: at each trigger stage, customers have different actions and behaviours according to which you will tailor the appropriate message to deliver. Divide them into different groups such as newly acquired customers, returning customers, leaving customers before deciding what you are going to do with each group.
2. Focus on personalized content delivered to each segment of customers: Now comes the most critical part that affects whether your customers will respond to your messages as you wish. You should commit to high quality content by trying to make each message as personalized and relevant to the trigger as possible and not always bringing your sale pitch up. Customers at many stages expect sympathy, understanding and even encouragement before paying their cash out.
3. Choose the right time to deliver: Make sure you pay full attention to the time of delivery. If your business reaches international audience, be careful with the time zone. Receiving emails at appropriate time matters a lot with their action. So let’s take common sense into account at this point: customers will not register their credit card to pay if your offer comes at 4 a.m in the morning.
4. Set up the trigger campaign and send emails: now that all your segments, content and time scheduling are ready, bring them onboard with a few simple set-ups. Most marketing automation platforms optimize UX for this so you should have few difficulties with this last step.
Sounds simple, right? No, it’s not if you intend to do manual work with a customer base of hundreds to thousands. Thus, Beeketing was born to help you automate the whole process no matter how big your customer base is. You will find yourself lots of saved time on this with Beeketing solution.
At this point, you are quite well informed of marketing automation and how you can make it work. I like to think of the whole process as a funnel. Not all your customers pass through the funnel, but you can use marketing automation to drive the rightly targeted ones down to the end where revenue flows.
Pushing conversion rate up is a painful process which takes time and patience. Big brands like Amazon already started years ahead to enjoy the amazing results from marketing automation. With information shared here and successful stories from the e-commerce world, you should be way ready to head for the marketing automation world now.
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