It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? The idea that spending money can save you money. When you balance labour hours and the cost of marketing, implementing a marketing automation system can seem like a luxury rather than a basic necessity. But we’re here to tell you: you can save money with marketing automation. It’s true. By reducing the hours your employees dedicate to repetitive tasks, you can optimise their time and redirect them to more productive tasks.
We’re here to explore that with you today. But first…
Let’s Talk Money
“You could potentially save the cost of a full-time wage by investing in marketing automation.”
Automated marketing systems streamline your marketing processes to save money by reducing the hours your employees dedicate to marketing.
But let’s be clear – we’re not talking about using marketing automation to cut back your staff. Firstly, your human workers are vital to your business. Secondly, you’ll need them to support your marketing automation system.
What we’re talking about is using technology to bolster your staff. Marketing automation systems can save them hours of repetitive manual labour. With those spare hours, they can then complete the tasks you can’t automate. In that way, you could save the cost of a full-time wage by investing in marketing automation.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation combines software and strategy to create a better marketing campaign for your business and customers. What’s more, there are so many aspects of your marketing that you can automate, including:
- lead and follow-up emails
- social media posts
- customer service,
- content management.
It gives you the tools to implement and monitor your marketing data so that you can track your performance and take note of what’s working.
Plenty of people understand the fundamentals of marketing. But they may not understand how vital some of the seemingly more minor aspects of marketing are and what a difference it can make to your business. For example:
- Can you identify which leads to nurture and prioritise?
- Are you following up with warm leads more than once? More than twice?
- Are you keeping track of your communications?
- Are you engaging prospective customers by showing them the content they want to see?
If not, you could be wasting resources when you market using generalised or outdated techniques – and your business will suffer.
Save Money With Marketing Automation
Still not convinced you can save money with marketing automation? Here are five ways that marketing automation systems can enhance your marketing strategies and reap more revenue than they cost.
Lead Nurturing
A clever marketing automation tool simplifies many aspects of marketing, the first of which is connecting with your leads. However you bring in those leads, you’ll need to touch base with them and nurture them to convert them into paying customers.
“With an automated marketing system, you can set and forget!”
Did you know that most significant sales occur after four or more follow-ups? Personal follow-ups – that is, not generic sales emails. Which employees have the time to write and send four follow-up emails?
For that reason, sales teams often forget to nurture their leads.
With an automated marketing system, you can set and forget! Moreover, you can write up your well-thought-out follow-up emails and let your marketing automation system send them out at specific intervals that cleverly correlate with your product’s life cycle. You will structure your follow-up emails to answer critical questions about your product and build trust with your customers without lifting a finger. Beautiful.
How Can You Save Money With Marketing Automation Through Lead Nurturing?
Marketing automation tools can automate lead nurturing – a time-consuming task. When you take this task off your employee’s hands, you can redirect them to other marketing tasks, saving employee hours. But, more importantly, it means you’ll never forget to follow up on a lead again, ultimately leading to more converted leads.
Nurture Your Existing Customers
Here’s some food for thought. Within the next two years, more than 80% of customer relationships could easily be managed without human input. Amazing! That’s all down to clever business automation. When automated marketing campaigns run in the background, your business will continue building customer relationships through your key touchpoints:
- emails (EDMs)
- your website
- social channels.
When your name keeps popping up attached to relevant, stimulating content, you’ll build trust and satisfaction with your current customer base. Plus, you may even score a few more customers through word of mouth or social media sharing!
How Can You Save Money With Marketing Automation Through Your Existing Customers?
Retaining old customers is much cheaper than onboarding new ones. So, marketing automation that nurtures your existing relationships will have them back for your business time and time again!
Make Use Of Automated Personalisation
Are you an Amazon shopper? If you are, you’ll know how the platform shows you deals and specials based on your ordering or browsing history. And, good news, you can use the same technology to connect with your existing and potential customers to showcase the goods and services they are already interested in. It’s called using “dynamic content”, a technology that stores information about a customer’s history to show them relevant content.
How Can You Save Money With Marketing Automation Through Automated Personalisation?
You’ll be pinpointing your marketing to give you the best chance of targeting the right person with the right product at the right time.
Keep Your Social Content Active
We looked at a study conducted by Sprout Social and found some interesting data. It seems:
- 57% of consumers will follow a brand to learn about new services
- 47% will continue to engage with a brand after they have followed it on social media
- 89% of those followers will commit to a purchase.
But that won’t be your story if you aren’t producing consistent and valuable content for your followers. By automating your social media marketing, you’ll be able to schedule your posts in advance of any offers or sales, keep your followers informed of any industry-relevant news and keep your brand in front of them. The more they see you, the more they’ll want you. It’s true.
How Can You Save Money With Marketing Automation Through Active Social Media Channels
Scheduling all your posts in one go has saved businesses up to six labour hours a week.
Automate Your Lead Scoring
When you use a marketing automation system for your business, you can set up triggers that update a lead’s lifecycle and send out automated communications. It depends on how they interact with your marketing content (or website). From there, your automated marketing system can send out specifically targeted follow-ups from these triggers.
So, not only does marketing automation nurture leads for your business but it also helps you determine which leads are approaching a conclusive stage of the buyer’s journey. It can even help you identify which leads could benefit from a personal reach out from you or your team.
How Can You Save Money With Marketing Automation Through Lead Scoring?
By getting to know your leads, the system will highlight your most engaged prospects, saving you the time of going through them manually. You’ll also save time knowing which leads are good prospects and which are likely tyre-kickers.
Invest In Your Growth Potential
Save money with marketing automation, no matter what business you’re in. It’s there to help you get organised and to direct your human workforce into more productive tasks.
Yes, it is an investment. But it is an investment in your business’s growth potential.
So, there you have it. Not convinced? No problem. We’re here for a chat. Head here to book a free consultation with one of our team members to learn more about marketing automation.
