Save Time, Grow Fast, and Build Loyal Customers with a Marketing Automation Solution
Managing a small business is tough. Business owners are inundated with tasks to do every day. With such a busy schedule, who has the time to do marketing and customer service?
You have 2 options. You could either hire more people or use a marketing automation solution. Hiring more workers can get expensive, so let’s consider the marketing automation solution.
What Can a Market Automation Solution Do?
By using a marketing automation solution, small businesses can save lots of time by automating certain marketing and customer service tasks. For example, you can automatically send follow-up messages to your prospects and automatically send personalized follow-up messages to customers after they have made a purchase.
Here is a summary of what a marketing automation solution can do for your business:
- Lead Nurturing – Not all prospects who visit your website or meet you at a tradeshow for the first time are ready to do business with you. They may be at the early stage of the buying cycle and are still in the process of doing their research. This is especially true if you sell an expensive or complicated product or service. A market automation solution helps you to nurture these leads through a series of drip emails. The email message may contain an offer to attend a webinar, see a demo, or download an educational content. By nurturing the relationship and keeping in touch with your prospects, your prospects would more likely to consider you at the moment they are ready to buy.
- Qualify and Assign Leads – Most marketing automation software allows you to qualify leads based on their demographic info (size of company, revenue, etc) as well as behavioral activities (attend webinar, visit price page, etc). Leads that meet the “sales ready” criteria can be automatically forwarded to a sales associate. This allow your sales people to focus their valuable time on high quality leads.
- Post Sales Customer Service – To impress your customers and earn their loyalty, you can set up a post-sale follow up series of messages. Your post follow up sales messages could start with a “thank you” message to thank them for their orders. Next, you could send additional follow up messages to promote other offers.
A marketing automation tool can be quite useful and has the potential to convert more leads into customers without costing you a lot of time.
What are the Marketing Automation options for Small Businesses?
Small businesses looking for a marketing automation solution has many choices, with different price points, features and functionalities. I will list them from basic to the more advanced solutions below:
1. Autoresponder and Email Marketing Solution
The most basic marketing automation solution such as Aweber and Vertical Response includes email signup forms & autoresponder services to help you build your email list and stay in touch with prospects. Here are the main features and benefits of using an email/autoresponder service such as Aweber or Vertical Response:
- Forms creation – Create professional looking forms to collect prospects’ contact info on your website or blog.
- Autoresponder – Deliver a sequence of messages automatically to your prospects. With each message, you build trust and rapport by delivering useful information to your prospects. Once your prospects warm up to you, it becomes easier for you to sell to them. Additionally, with an autoresponder, you can blast out an email to your list of subscribers at any given time to share news, offer a special promotion, or just to stay in touch.
- List segmentation – Managing and segmenting your subscribers is easy using Aweber.
In addition, Aweber also contains analytics that provide you useful data such as who opened your messages (and who didn’t) and who clicked certain links in your messages.
For most solo entrepreneurs and small businesses, an email marketing/autoresponder solution such as Aweber or Vertical Response works quite well. The price usually runs around $10-20/month. I am using Aweber and I am very happy with their service so far. Aweber makes is easy to create professional looking forms and set up your email automation.
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2. Marketing Automation Solution for Small Businesses
For businesses with revenue in the $1-$5 million range, a popular marketing automation solution to consider is Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is actually quite powerful. It combines email marketing, a CRM, and ecommerce into an integrated system. With Infusionsoft, you can nurture leads, generate repeat sales, grow your business, while saving you lots of time. Additionally, you can do advanced things like trigger an email campaign based on your customer’s actions such as completing a purchase checkout or clicking on a link in an email.
Infusionsoft’s price is around $300/month.
3. Advanced Marketing Automation Solution for Small Businesses
If you are looking for an advanced marketing solution, your options include Hubspot, Marketo Sparks, and Pardot. These solutions allow you to perform much more sophisticated marketing automation.
In addition to email marketing, they include advanced features such as analytics, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and event marketing. These advanced marketing automation solutions cost around $700-$1,000/month and are ideal for B2B businesses with revenue greater than $5 million/year.
Get Your Business Automated Now!
Whether you sell to consumers or to businesses, having a marketing automation solution can help you nurture prospects, build trust, and increase customer satisfaction while saving your lots of time. Check out any of the solutions above today!