Why Marketing Automation?

By integrating marketing automation as part of your marketing and sales strategy your team will have a variety of tools that can help you close more sales, whether your B2B or B2C. For B2C organizations, the ability to segment large databases provides the ability to implement sales communication tactics without having a large sales team.

One of the foundational elements to successful marketing segmenting prospects to the point where you can communicate with clients at a level that appeals to them based on where they fall in the buyer's journey. 

AUTOMATIC CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION EXAMPLE

Consider a client for whom we implemented marketing automation to segment 75,000 clients who were interested in or had been previous guests of sailing vacations around the world.

Through marketing automation, the client could track users behavior while on their website. We created dynamic lists that segmented skippers looking to rent a bareboat (without a captain) vs those looking for a crewed yacht. In addition, we could further segment those interested in 38 ft vessels vs those looking for 50 ft catamarans, for example. Using these lists, we then sent targeted emails that featured the yachts they had shown interest in, in the destinations that they were considering traveling to. 

For those web visitors who were searching but didn't reach out to one of the charter brokers, they would fall into an automated email workflow highlighting the specific destination activities and overview content relevant to the specific yacht they had previously searched. As these potential clients returned to the website, we set up triggered, automated sales communication emails from a specific charter broker designed to initiate a dialogue, relationship and ultimately a booking.  

MARKETING AUTOMATION VS. EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER

The type of customer segmentation is simply not possible when using an Email Service Provider (ESP) like Constant Contact or MailChimp. Marketing automation is designed to track user behavior “beyond the click” and provides a rules engine that enables automatic segmentation and communication with leads.

More than likely you have been targeted with this type of communications from large organizations such as Amazon, but by subscribing to SharpSpring through our agency platform even the smallest of businesses for just a few hundred dollars per month.

CONFUSED ON WHAT PLATFORMS RIGHT FOR YOU?

If you have specific questions on how marketing automation could work for you, please give us a call or reach out for more information. We're always happy to help. 

5 Forms Designed to Convert More Leads

In order to begin the process of converting a web visitor to a sale, you first must capture some key data. Webforms do that for us and as you more than likely have a Contact Us for on your website, there are a number of ways for you to increase the likelihood of lead capturing by implementing some key lead conversion strategies.

1.     Gated Content Form: Once you create valuable content as part of your inbound marketing strategy, you can restrict access to that content by gating the majority of the content behind a form submission. Through a gated content form, you are automatically qualifying these leads for future nurturing programs.

2.     Subscriber Form: With an email only form, you can capture those interested in receiving regularly scheduled content such as a blog, newsletter or special offers. As these leads come in, you can link them to the specific list of automated content.

3.     Schedule Request Form: By including a date/time picker in your form, the lead can schedule a specific time for a salesperson to follow-up with the requested information. You can then trigger time-based workflows off this time to automate the content unique to this request.

4.     Promotional / Offer Form: Whether you are offering a free assessment, discounted consultation hours, or a consumer commodity, promotional forms are a great way to have leads submit information to receive the offer. Once the lead is in your funnel we can follow-up with strategic marketing.

5.     Personas Form: Add a field to your form that includes a self-identification question to allow leads the ability to identify as demographic you are targeting, to help improve dynamic messaging.