Now that you know some of the tools that can be used for marketing automation, let’s take a look at a basic scenario in which automating the marketing process can help you.
Without automating the process other than lead capture and standard email marketing (delivering a lead magnet and sending basic marketing messages), your sales funnel will basically be:
Customer opts in
Customer receives lead magnet
Customer receives marketing email
Customer either buys or doesn’t
If they buy, they receive other emails later
If they don’t buy, they receive the same emails later
It’s all terribly inefficient.
What if that person bought something and you don’t immediately deliver an offer that matches what they just bought? You’ve lost a shot at an additional sale.
What if that person did NOT buy something and you didn’t segment them into a list of non-buyers so you could try different offers to them? You’d just keep sending them the same type of offers over and over, and they’d likely never buy.
Now, let’s take a look at how the process might look with marketing automation:
Customer opts in
Customer receives lead magnet
Customer receives marketing message
Customer does not buy, so is segmented
Customer is retargeted with a Facebook ad for a second chance at the initial sale
Customer buys the product upon second view
Customer is moved to a segment of buyers from Facebook
Customer can be targeted with similar offers, using Facebook as one of the methods of marketing
Customer buys another offer
Customer is sorted into a “regular buyer” list and receives special offers that are reserved for those customers
Customer feels appreciated and buys even more
All those later sales would not have happened without marketing automation, because the initial sale would have been lost simply because the user was never retargeted on Facebook.
This is just one basic example of the process, but it applies to so many scenarios. No matter what type of marketing you’re doing, you can fine-tune the system and dramatically increase the average lifetime value of each customer by delivering targeted, personalized marketing based on their buying habits and interests!
This is the kind of powerful stuff that many people seem to think is reserved for mega-corporations like Amazon, but anyone can do these things! With the right tools, you can easily set up funnels that guide customers along a particular path that increases the likelihood that they will buy something, and that will even increase the amount of the money they spend when they do buy something!
You can use automation to deliver completely personalized results this way, which can boost sales considerably. For example, if a customer clicks a link in an email about marketing on Twitter, it shows an interest in Twitter marketing and you can then deliver custom marketing that puts products related to Twitter marketing right in front of them!
You can also automate all of your social media by putting a series of posts into your automation program and setting it to post at specific times or intervals.
This will let you market your website or products and grow your social media presence without having to be on social media all day, freeing up valuable time for other things!