Today’s business environment is very rough. To survive in highly competitive environment you need to use every opportunity to improve your results and be at the top of game. One of the most effective ways to do it is marketing automation.
A company has to constantly grow to stay profitable. However, to manage large amount of work you do not have necessarily hire more people, you can make your existing staff more efficient. Marketing automation software can easily solve this problem. However, today there is an impressive amount of various marketing automation tools. How to choose the best one? First of all, it has to be something designed specifically for marketing.
Before making a decision regarding marketing automation you need specify – “what do you expect it to do?” You need to prioritise your business objectives and start from there. The first quesion you need to ask yourself: “Will this tool speed up my work and help me achieve my goals faster?” After you made a list of your requirements to marketing automation programs you can simply compare the existing offers and see what fits you better.
Choosing best marketing automation software
I am going to use https://www.bpmonline.com/marketing as an example because it is the best CRM marketing automation solution. For those who are not familiar with CRM – it stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a common term for software designed to help you to manage your relationship with clients:
- Creating/deleting client account
- Recording the history of interactions
- Linking social media profiles
- Changing client status within the company
- Indicating level of interest
Communication history is very important especially when you have a huge company where one client can talk to several employees. If you had a conversation with your customer before you don’t want to stress him/her again with the same questions. This irritates your customer and most likely, you will lose a client. All your customer data has to be recorded and available at any time. You need to create a full-life cycle of communication from the very beginning when your customer comes to your company for the very first time.
Your goal is to determine your client’s preferences and make your marketing activities more personalized. Your customer needs to feel that he is special. Personalized approach is the key to a successful sale and the most successful companies are using it. Your marketing automation software needs to have tools to make your marketing activity personalized. This is one of the strongest parts of bpm’online CRM.
It is very important to remember that most of your employees will have a marketing background, not a technical one. The idea is that your automation solution has to be simple enough for a person without programming skills. User-friendly interface is a feature that will save you a lot of time because you and your employees will adopt it much faster. Marketing automation is built for simplifying processes and work of your employees. A complicated system can only increase the number of human factor related mistakes. This is why I recommend bpm’online. It is a simple yet effective system.
Marketing automation is not simply a powerful email tool. The key to successful integration and use is multichannel marketing. The potential of automation software is gigantic when you integrate social media into your marketing campaign. A good software will let you skip the technical part and get creative in your job. Bpm’online helps you to provide your customer with relevant and attractive content.
Planning tools
Before planning any marketing campaign, you need to set up your goals. To do that you need to answer some simple questions:
- Where are you now?
- What are you trying to achieve?
- What are the obstacles?
- How to achieve your goals?
We need to determine what we expect from a marketing automation tool. First, when you plan a marketing campaign you need your system to have a powerful visualizing tool. When you implement your campaign, you expect your marketing automation software to provide you with the possibility to monitor your campaign progress. And when your campaign is finished you need to be able to analyze every step. In bpm’online you have all these tools built-in by default. Planning with bpm’online is much faster.
Analysis
Analysis and work on the mistakes is a important part of your job. You need to constantly search for a way to improve your workflow and eliminate the most common mistakes. Your marketing automation system needs to be able to analyze your customer’s behavior. With bpm’ online you can track the entire customer journey to your web site. This powerful tool gives you a lot of additional information about your clients. You can analyze their reaction on your marketing activities and correct your strategy if the results are lower than expected.
You can use lead scoring to see if your marketing activity is successful. Lead scoring is finding out how to score certain activities. How do determine a proper lead scoring system? Look at your closed sales and lost sales for the last 100 conversations. The goal is to give your sales team as much really “warm leads”, so you can increase their results. If the results are very low this means that, your lead indicators aren’t working correctly. Your sales team doesn’t get proper leads and this stops them from closing a deal. A sophisticated system like bpm’online will help you to collect only relevant information about your customers. This way you can improve the results of both sales and marketing departments.