Marketing is something that every business not only has to be aware of but needs to understand sufficiently to effectively use as a tool, whether they compete for business in an online or physical setting. Businesses are now employing whole marketing teams to take care of promoting their business. However, with marketing automation, we can achieve similar results without a whole team of people to have to pay for. This is where marketing automation can prove useful to a business. To better understand retail marketing automation we shall look into what it is and what it can mean for a business.
Defining Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can be described as having a full-time member of staff working for you in a marketing capacity. Its software will take care of many marketing processes automatically, setting online promotions off at the right time and taking care of a bulk of emails and communications that can be sent to a loyal customer base and potential customers.
Loyalty
Apart from taking some of the work away from a company, marketing automation will make sure that regular promotion campaigns are triggered at a time that will entice customers to order. For example, ones that are linked to a birthday. Also, the communications can be produced effortlessly and regularly so that customers do not forget that a company exists as the supplier of their previous product. New products can be promoted as much as a company’s existing ones can be re-promoted. Some products will not need replacing for a while, whereas others will be more consumable and so ideal for loyal customer digital marketing approaches.
Other Benefits of Marketing Automation
Apart from improving or holding on to brand loyalty, marketing automation provides a means of increasing conversion rates, personalizing a marketing strategy, managing data, and reporting accurately. It will provide a platform for a business to work with that is scalable. It does not matter how many customers you need to communicate with regularly, marketing automation can take care of the volumes. It can send the same communication to lots of interesting parties or target a campaign to those that satisfy certain criteria.
Marketing automation offers companies the opportunity to offer rewards to customers. For instance, on their birthday, a voucher could be sent to a previous customer offering a discount incentive for them to place another order. Many people receive birthday money instead of presents and will be looking for ways they can spend it. A company using marketing automation can time their marketing email just right to coincide with a birthday.
Depending on the data collected, a voucher promotion could also extend to a wedding anniversary. At the very least, it could take account of special occasions that we all know about, such as Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Christmas. Marketing Automation can also take a seasonal approach, whereby it automatically sends emails promoting certain products at certain times of the year. This can be because they are busy or quiet times for the product.
Customer shopping carts can be monitored so that, for example, where someone has not completed a purchase, a reminder is sent. The email response could offer to answer questions a potential customer might have that might be stopping them complete their purchase.
Promotional campaigns can be run with Marketing Automation that will offer online users a certain discount on a product. These can be triggered off at a time when sales have slackened off, perhaps because of the time of the year or through added competition. Companies can, for example, encourage their customers to buy a product in advance of the winter period because it will be cheaper to buy then. This is a good way of clearing stock that is taking up warehouse space and affecting cash flow by not earning a business any money at all.
The possibilities for Market Automation are only limited to what a business has ideas for. However, online marketing companies can help with that. We hope that this article has given you some ideas as to how you can make use of this revolutionary tool available to businesses looking to market their products and services efficiently and effectively at less cost.