During this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses are forced to close and work from home. With the loss in revenue, business owners are forced to cut their staff strengths to reduce costs. You might be one of such business owner stuck at home now at a loss, without much business activities. But fret not, make use of this time to explore digital tools and implement them. One thing you should explore are Marketing Automation tools. There are many out there and it can help you automate your marketing processes, gives you greater insights into your customers purchasing behavior, make your marketing team more efficient and effective and essentially achieving a more lean and productive manpower enterprise.
What is Marketing Automation?
According to Jeff Bullas, he defined it as : “It is software that allows you to automate repetitive tasks, reduce human error, manage complexity and measure and optimize your efforts.”
For example, your company may have a website. When visitors visit your website, they see the contact form and drop a message. Your admin picks up the enquiry and forward to the sales department. As the boss of the company, you may want to know how many new enquiries come in per month. So you ask your receptionist to record down such activities. Meanwhile, your sales team may keep data on their sales funnel — new enquiries, follow-up visits, interested but no purchase yet, and closed deals. The sales manager may want to track how the sales team are engaging the “to-be” customers. There might not be any tracking now, and some potential clients may soon forget about your products and drawn to competitors who have been engaging them. Or there might be some clients who had made the purchase some years ago and no one is reaching out to these clients to engage them or upsell other products to them. Such clients may not know you have launched new products and might may made purchases from your competitors. As you can see from this scenario, there are a lot of lost business opportunities, a lot of manpower resource needed if you are or wish to do the tracking. What if I tell you that there are tools out there that can help you automate all these marketing processes. These are Marketing Automation tools.
One such tool is Hubspot CRM. With the Hubspot CRM, they provide a plugin (essentially a software code) to be placed in your website. When clients fill up the enquiry contact form, the relevant personnel will receive the email immediately. When he replies, all these activities are recorded in the CRM. As the boss, you can readily access to such data and know how many enquiries for what products, what the market demand are and how your sales team are handling them. From the data, your marketing department may decide to run a seminar to invite potential clients to understand more about your products’ benefits. Or they may send regular newsletter or promotions to potential and existing clients. In other words, you can achieve a more efficient and effective marketing!
Marketing Automation Platforms
Here’s some of the more popular marketing automation platforms:
- Hubspot Marketing
- MailChimp
- Zoho
- GetResponse
- Bitrix24
If you are interested to implement Marketing Automation, you can approach Passion Digital (S) Pte Ltd. Their chief business consultant, Esther Goh Tok Mui, will be able to provide you an analysis on how your business can improve with marketing automation.
Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
