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How Infusionsoft Can Save Your Business

Posted on August 16, 2018November 6, 2019 by admin

Before you even start reading this article, you must ask yourself this question.

How Customer-Centric Are You?

We ask you this since you are trying to explore the true power of Infusionsoft for your business. And this clearly shows that you wish to manage customer relationships with your brand in the best way possible, which is what Infusionsoft is all about.

One of the biggest problems any business owner faces is trying to maintain better customer relations and increase conversion rates, but failing to understand the consumer base from their perspective.

You might have even tried to enhance your lead generation processes, but have not been able to achieve the desired sales targets. Well, it is the right time to leap into the future of customer relationship management.

It’s true that Infusionsoft might not be the latest tech when it comes to CRM and there a many articles that have covered this topic, Furthermore, a lot of businesses are already using Infusionsoft as their core CRM to manage their customers.

Having said that it’s been observed that even though businesses are already using the CRM, they are failing to utilize its full potential which in turn affects their marketing capabilities. In this article, we are going to cover various functionalities of Infusionsoft that are going to streamline your customer management and skyrocket the digital marketing efforts for your brand.

So let’s get started, shall we!!

Note to Self: Do Not Forget to Strategize

As mentioned above, one of the major issues that businesses face is that even though they have a CRM in place for customer management, they are not able to truly connect with the customer or prospects where it matters the most.

Before exploring various Infusionsoft functionalities you need to map out the entire customer’s life cycle with regards to your product or services.

These are the steps that you should follow which designing your CRM strategy:

Start by creating by a buyer persona if you don’t have one already. It is basically a virtual representation of your ideal buyer who would purchase your product or services.
Now keep your buyer persona in mind and design a flowchart entailing all the steps through which your ideal buyer or prospect engages with your business. Try to be as thorough as possible and start from capturing all the lead entry points, to brand engagement, to how the purchase will be made, all the way to the WOW factors your brand uses to delight the customers after purchase. We recommend you use a flowchart making tool such as Lucidchart for designing the buyer’s journey.
Now that you have created the buyer’s journey for all your established personas, the next step would be to apply tags on each and every step of the journey. We will be discussing the tagging logic more going further but for now you should know that these tags can derive useful information based on the actions taken by them on your site.
Lastly, choose the medium which is best suited to communicate with the users and apply it through the Infusionsoft CRM

Advanced Tagging Logic

All businesses keep a track of their prospects and customers in their database for various purposes such as managing logistics, remarketing or even to improve their product or service.

Implementation of Tags simply you track the common aspects of your prospects and customers and segment the contacts into very specific lists so that targeted marketing messages can be sent. But the challenge lies in figuring out the aspects that are worth tracking.

With the help of tagging logic we can not only find out what action the users have taken on the site but also deduce who they are as per the demographic profile, what is the user’s area of interest in your business, with the help of this data, we can map out the entire buyer’s journey within the Infusionsoft.

By using tagging logic you can create personalized marketing campaigns to meet the requirements of your business or brand and personalize your communications which are by far the best way to nurture your existing and potential clientele.

The Power of API Integration

Infusionsoft can help out your business by utilizing the immense degree of API customization through which you can connect your in-house software and technologies with the CRM. With this synchronization you can bridge the database of your in-house Application and Infusionsoft then you can transfer the most up to date customer back and forth between the API & CRM.

If you are still confused let’s discuss an example shall we:

Cliniko is one of the most widely used medical assistant software used doctors around the world. It assists medical practitioners with a variety of daily tasks such as keeping track of patient’s medical history, scheduling the appointments etc.

By bridging Infusionsoft and Cliniko doctors can get new appointments, patients with Infusionsoft email marketing campaigns so that you can increase the revenue for their practice. This synchronization allows businesses to launch automated email campaigns based on patient’s behaviour, appointment time, buying habits, invoice requirement and so much more.

With Infusionsoft API integration, you can manage and control your entire sales cycle with the help of standardized REST APIs and share contacts, email lists, leads, companies, inventory and other details across all of the cloud services you use for your business.

The Better The Reporting The Better Business Efficiency

This is an undeniable fact, the more thorough and streamlined your business reporting analytics are the more efficiently you will be able to modify and adapt your business strategy as per the changing analytics. Hence steering your brand towards success.

However, Most of the online reporting and analytics tools lack flexibility. Analyzing and tailoring of those static data tend to consume a good amount of productive time. Well, this won’t be the case anymore if you can implement with the Infusionsoft marketing automation to create your own reporting parameters as well as for analytics and reporting tools, that can be completely customized to suit the specific requirements that your business or brand might have.

JUST A FEW FINAL WORDS…

There you go, folks! We hope you got quite a few insight on what Infusionsoft CRM can you for your business however as you might have guessed by now that implementing the above-mentioned element with respect to your business is a difficult task.

It is highly recommended you hire an Infusionsoft consultant with expertise on the CRM, such as QL Tech who is a certified Infusionsoft partner and can help you Automate and scale your repetitive marketing tasks. Our Marketing Automation services especially focused on planning, execution, automation, and measurement of digital campaigns including entire setup and implementation of the user journey within the CRM.

In case you have any questions or doubts, please feel free to contact us or book a free consultation online.

How Infusionsoft Can Benefit Your Dental Marketing Automation

Posted on March 6, 2018November 6, 2019 by admin

Each and every single product and service needs smart marketing tactic to survive and grow. Dentistry is no exception here. Are you a dentist who is struggling to grow your practice and boost your referrals? Do you want to build trust in your practice? Do you want to help out the patient pool with your treatment recommendations? Do you want to reconnect with the patients who haven’t yet started with your treatments? Have you heard anything about dental marketing automation? Then, this is for you!

A brief about Dental marketing automation

This is the modern era; gone are the traditional practice days when dentists used to sit in their clinic and treat the patients who accidentally visit them. Max to the max, advertisements were carried out via customary channels like newspapers, televisions or local magazines. Now everything is available online, including the presence of dental clinics. For any query, any doubt, be it a toothache or cleaning of teeth – first of all, a user will run a Google search. And, based on the search results, s/he will dig further.

Dentistry has adopted digital marketing practices to quite a significant extent. Here, the marketing of a dental practice is done to educate existing and prospective patients about their services. The digital marketing services are quite common in dentistry. However, apart from website development, SEO and PPC, have you also considered dental marketing automation services? How can they benefit you?

Benefits of dental marketing automation

The right digital marketing strategies will help you get the patients. But, if you want brand awareness, effectiveness in driving the right patients to the practice and securing a positive ROI, you definitely need dental marketing automation services.

Take a look at the straightforward benefits of dental marketing automation:

1. Convert your website traffic

However good, content-rich and aesthetic your website is – it is not enough to grow your dental practice. Through SEO and PPC, you would be able to drive relevant traffic to your website. But then what next? Is it enough for you? No, driving relevant traffic to your website is just one step towards great ROI on your dental marketing efforts. You, now, need to convert this traffic into your actual customers (here, service consumers i.e. patients).

First of all, you need to analyse who all are coming to your website, what all pages and content they are looking for. What kind of information they access or download from your website. You also need to check whether they are booking any appointments.

All these activities become super easy when you have marketing automation in place. Marketing automation platforms, inThe healthcare sector, open avenues for you to drive your potential patients to take real action.

2. Customised and more targeted responses

You have enough visitors visiting your website. And, based on your analysis, you have also figured out that they are hot leads. It means they can effortlessly be converted into your real patients. But, the real challenge falls now. The only truth you know at this point of time is everyone needs a dentist. How will you tackle each one of them? This is because not everyone would like to avail the same treatment from your dental practice.

For instance, some might want basic treatments like teeth cleaning or teeth whitening. Whereas, some might need advanced treatments like dental implants or dentures.Based on the data and analytics,

you can segment your leads in the following manner:
Segment A: People who need a dentist now for teeth whitening
Segment B: People who need a dentist now for dentures and dental implants
Segment C: People who might need to see a dentist in the future but not now
Segment D: People who are not at all thinking about visiting a dentist

If you fail to attract the hot leads with the right content, your game is over! You need to address their requirements differently. For instance, if your lead is a senior adult looking for dental implants, your message should be appropriate to him/her. And, if your lead is a young girl looking for cosmetic dentistry, your message should be customised and different from the former. How can you use this segmentation to grow your dental practice? Dental marketing automation services are inevitable here. These services help you segment your leads based on their needs and deliver them relevant, right and more targeted messages.

3. No burden on small team size

Unless you have a grand corporate dental setup, you need a helping hand to avoid burdens of your small team size. A single person cannot handle everything, starting right from explaining treatment requirements and procedures, booking appointments to sending them after-treatment patient care advises. Neither can you afford a big team to handle tasks individually.

To avoid this hosted and bustle and make processes more streamlined, you need to have marketing automation in place.

Recommended CRM – InfusionSoft services in your dental practice marketing

By now, you are aware that dental marketing automation services are must for the growth of your dental practice. And, there are many marketing automation tools and CRM available in the market. The immediate question falls here is which one is the best for you and why.

We recommend none other than Infusionsoft services for your dental practice. Take a quick look at the benefits of employing Infusionsoft services as a dental marketing automation tool to promote your dental practice.

benifites of infusionsoft dental marketing automation

1. AUTOMATION OF SCHEDULING

You can integrate AppointmentCore with Infusionsoft and enable patients to set up their consultation. You can create various time slots depending on your availability and buffer time between two back to back appointments. Your prospects (patients) can select a time slot and practitioner (if any) and book an appointment online. That’s how you can easily create an appointment in InfusionSoft. Hence, when someone schedules with you using AppointmentCore, the appointment will be automatically created in Infusionsoft for you. Using this appointment information, you can create automated processes that will help optimize and grow your dentistry practice.

Important note: Each Infusionsoft user can track their tasks and appointments through Infusionsoft.

2. Send appointment reminders

appointment reminders dental marketing automation

Once the appointment is booked and entered into the system, the real game starts. Infusionsoft will send appointment reminders to the person who has booked a consultation. It will also send a copy of the same email or text to the staff members so that they are also updated. Just take care that the length of your reminder message is as crisp and clear as possible.

3. Request feedback and reviews

feedback and reviews dental marketing automation

It’s tough for any business to request feedback and reviews. Infusionsoft services ease your pain with almost zero effort. You can build a lead nurturing campaign wherein add a stage that shoots an email for feedback and reviews once the patient avails treatment or visits your clinic. You can redirect them either to your Facebook page or Google page. Remember, word-to-mouth is the best strategy for any practitioner. And these social proofs act as word-of-mouth in dental digital marketing.

4. SEND CONTENT-ORIENTED FOLLOW UP SEQUENTIAL EMAILS

At times, for any dental practitioner, it is challenging to control the drop-out ratio. For instance, your patient visits you to ask for an opinion about teeth whitening treatments. You recommended zoom teeth whitening based on his/her dental health and hygiene. However, if the patient does not schedule to start, you can send follow up email reminders to start with the treatment, how it is beneficial, and what all can go wrong if the treatment is not done on a timely basis.

This all can be easily managed by updating your patient data in the practice management system. Infusionsoft can monitor overall appointments, treatment stage of the patient and detect the patients who are still idle and haven’t started with any treatments.

5. Ask for referrals: referrals are an essential part of building your dental practice. It can be earned by delivering services that patients are thrilled about. Further, you need to send reminders and offer incentives for those treatments. By making sure this happens every time for every patient, the number of referrals can only increase in your practice.

6. RECONNECT WITH PATIENTS

Along with growth, survival is also important. Similarly, along with treating new patients reconnecting with the old patients is equally important. Infusionsoft services help you out in reaching your old patients who haven’t turned up for a while. You can send them health tips, newsletters, or even festival greetings. Not necessarily they have to get treated from you all the time. But good relationships are a must. They can help you get the referrals and contribute indirectly to the growth of your dental practice. Not to forget – it also helps in upselling and cross-selling.

Closing thoughts..!

Hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Given that Infusionsoft has so much potential to transform online businesses, there’s a lot of benefit to putting your money on the line as an incentive to make it work. If you still have some confusions in your mind or would like to learn more about how you can grow your dental practice using lifecycle marketing and dental marketing automation services, connect with us.

Are you ready to earn better ROI, more and better patients in your clinic? Get started now and schedule your first and FREE Practice Discovery Session. This session will help on both the ends to find out how best we can provide value to your practice and how best you can overcome your hurdles . This FREE session can be carried out over the phone or face to face depending on your preference and location. The session is completely private and confidential.
BOOK NOW
(THIS IS NOT A CALL FOR SALE! THIS SESSION IS COMPLETELY FREE!!)

In this session, we will help you identify how can you boost your ROI by identifying opportunities in the areas of development, automation and growth

Know the best marketing automation tools for your business

Posted on April 12, 2017October 16, 2019 by admin

According to HubSpot, “Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions.”

Many marketing departments perform various repetitive and monotonous tasks. These tasks include, but are not limited to emails, social media, and other website actions. The marketing automation tools make these everyday jobs easier. In nonprofessional terms, marketing automation is all about optimisation. The scope of marketing automation is beyond simply automating the marketing department’s repetitive tasks. In addition, it optimises the time of your staff. It can even hint on which customers your sales team concentrates their endeavours.

Digital marketing automation has its bloodline in email marketing. However, it is way beyond email marketing. Marketing automation aids marketers to restructure various actions like generating, scoring, and nurturing leads, managing link selling, cross-selling and up-selling, customer lifecycle marketing, and others. The efficient implementation of marketing automation technology can effectively increase operational efficiency. The technology helps to grow revenue quicker by cutting your sales cycle, recovering your lead aptitude, and saving you time to focus on other important areas. However, unfortunately, these paybacks can be availed at a giant cost.

1. Infusionsoft

Clate Mask and his brother Eric Martineau, Scott jointly established Infusionsoft in 2001 at Mesa, Arizona. It caters to more than 25,000 customers. Infusionsoft is one of the most successful marketing automation tools for small businesses that already have a strong customer base and a turnover above $100,000.

Infusionsoft, a leading sales and marketing software, supports small business in getting structured, building sales, and saving time. Its user interface is very well designed. Very few marketing automation tools offer order forms, payment processing, execution, and inventory tracking directly inside the tool. Infusionsoft is one of those automation tools. In addition, it allows worldwide tracking, which makes it easy to keep a track of a contact’s behaviour across multiple marketing channels. Besides, a lot of bloggers use this software for email marketing and creating marketing campaigns & funnels.

Infusionsoft expedites the creation and execution of a sales and marketing strategy. It centralizes customer interactions, attracts new leads, meets sales quicker, and automates recurring tasks like a follow-up, contact management, billing, and payment—all from one place.

Infusionsoft charge a unique mandatory launch fee of $1999.

2. ActiveCampaign

Again, this automation tool is the best-fit solution for small businesses having the strength of less than 100. This tool is very reasonable compared to others. You would be amazed to know that it costs a maximum $150 per month. ActiveCampaign provides services like unlimited email sending, CRM and sales automation, onboarding, and unrestricted access to social data.

Though it is very affordable, the automation features that ActiveCampaign provides are robust. The features include sales team notification, cart and form abandonment, visual workflow editor, and web traffic analysis. The interface of this software is so straightforward that anyone can operate it with ease. The reason why ActiveCampaign should be preferred by small businesses is pretty obvious. The platform makes lead generation and warm lead nurturing effortless by excellent CRM and mailing solutions.

ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation Tool

3. Hubspot

In 2006, HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was launched in December 2007. Since ages, HubSpot is one of the pioneers in automated digital marketing. It is an inbound marketing software company that helps businesses in modifying their marketing from outbound lead generation to inbound lead generation. It does it by allowing them to “get noticed” by more potential customers in the usual course of the way they shop and learn.

They “get” content marketing.

It provides a full suite of integrated marketing tools that comprise blogging, content management, search engine optimization, social media publishing and monitoring, email marketing, and more. HubSpot is a complete platform for developing marketing effectiveness and marketing competence.

Hubspot does have monthly packages of $200. However, their offerings cost $800/month package for marketing automation and CRM integration that includes only 1,000 contacts. The further cost grows based on the user’s contract requirements.

4. Marketo

Marketo, founded in 2006, launched its first product “Lead Management.” In 2012, Marketo acquired “Crowd Factory.” This acquisition resulted in the benefits of social media marketing capabilities. Finally, the company went public in 2013.

Marketo is easy and influential marketing software that suits an organization having the strength of 100+. It helps marketing and sales professionals drive revenue and develop marketing engagement. Most of the users usually compare this software with Pardot owing to their similar functionality.

Marketo overpowers Pardot in terms of implementation, usability, and design of their platform. Marketo provides the foremost cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to develop and maintain engaging customer relationships. It has an outstanding integration with Salesforce. These two tools work effortlessly together through their syncing takes a considerable amount of time.

The packages of Marketo include three standard pricing tiers, at $895, $1,795, and $3,175 per month. Under each tier, various new features are available which may come at hefty prices of an additional $900 – $1,400 per month.

5. Ontraport

Ontraport is again very good for SMBs, the affordability factor is just as important as a feature. It allows accessing the full suite, along with a money-back guarantee only at $600/month. The topmost features of Ontraport include but not limited to two way SMS automation, Landing page A/B testing, ROI tracking, custom reporting dashboard, video hosting, API access for third-party development, task management automation, and lead scoring and routing.

Ontraport holds a wide range of inspiring shopping cart features. These features comprise automatic credit card payment collections and the ability to add cross-sells, upsells, and cart rejection orders.

Ontraport allows storing 25K contacts, managing 100K contacts, and sending 100K emails per month.

Do Not Miss: to Read About Important 5 Essential Marketing Automation Tips for Successful Start-ups

6. Pardot

Pardot belongs to Salesforce. It was jointly founded by Adam Blitzer and David Cummings in 2007. In 2012, Exact Target acquired it for a reported $95 million. Later, Salesforce acquired Exact Target in 2013.

It is a full-featured and user-friendly marketing automation tool. It helps pipelines to pick up the pace and drive sales through social marketing, sales intelligence, email marketing, lead generation, lead management, and more. Other prominent features include segmentation wizard, ROI reporting, email marketing with complete branded templates, real-time sales alerts and CRM integration. It maximizes the efficiency of the sales and marketing teams and ultimately increases revenue.

The standard package provided by Pardot comes at a cost of $1000 per month. The other packages related to advanced analytics, A/B testing, dynamic content costs around $2000 per month. The ultimate package related to API access and custom user roles is of $3000 approx per month.

7. GetResponse

GetResponse Marketing Automation facilitates you to devise flexible processes that sustain your unique business style. Also, can transform your marketing database into a lead scoring activist. It is highly efficient in optimizing the sales funnel. The top features of GetResponse include but not limited to drag and drop visual workflow editor, post-purchase communication, loyalty and reward programs, tracking online activities of subscribers, cutting-edge customer scoring, and others. This platform is very simple to operate; you need to have a full-time CRM manager. Its monthly payment plans are sectioned by list size which starts at $15 per month for unlimited messages to up to 1,000 subscribers.

8. MailChimp

As an email marketing automation tool, MailChimp is a preferred choice for many SMBs.

MailChimp provides enterprise-level automation tools without any hurdles. Its prominent features include but not limited to trigger emails when customers abandon shopping carts, conversion of interested subscribers into customers, re-engaging with existing customers, integration of web services with apps, and others.

There are three pricing plans offers of Mailchimp: Forever Free, Monthly, and Pay As You Go. They also have an alternative designed to fit users’ needs.

9. AWeber

AWeber is an ideal autoresponder platform for small businesses, bloggers, and entrepreneurs. This marketing automation tool is a comfortable process to automate your emails. Its new drag and drop editor is capable to support your email automation requirements. Its prominent features include lead segmentation, web activity tracking, creating invoices, split testing, generating sales reports, and others. AWeber enables you to assemble your list with their opt-in forms. It sends out automated emails to your subscribers. If you want to get started with email marketing, AWeber is the perfect key.

10. Zoho CRM

Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing automation product that helps you create, send, track, and share your email campaigns. Its free services include 12000 emails/month, 2000 subscribers, pre-designed templates, real-time visitor tracking, template library, A/B testing, social sharing, merge tags, sign-up forms, and many more.

Zoho CRM provides a complete view of your sales cycle and pipeline. Zoho. Thereby it enables you to spot trends, marking opportunities, and further, lock more deals. Zoho’s shaped customer relationship management and marketing effectiveness procedures help you build your company into a customer-centric business. Its campaigns are integrated with internal services like Zoho Survey, Zoho CRM, Zoho Forms, Zoho Docs & Zoho Sites, Zoho Creator, and other services like LinkedIn, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, Facebook, Twitter, Eventbrite, Google Analytics, WordPress, Google Apps, and others.

Its service packages are in affordable ranges. $12/user/month package provides services of sales forecasting, reports, and dashboards. A professional package worth $20/user/month provides services of Email integration and social CRM. An enterprise package worth $35/user/month provides services of territory management and custom modules. Further, its CRM Plus package worth $50/user/month provides services of email marketing, help desk, and customer surveys.

11 Marketing Automation Basics to Boost Your Business Growth

Posted on January 9, 2017November 6, 2019 by admin

Congratulate yourself if this is probably the first time you are hearing of Marketing Automation and you own an online venture or blog. Marketing is increasingly integrating with technology and as experts advice; marketers will soon be spending more on technology than Tech specialists. Marketing automation, with the help of platforms and technologies, helps marketers reach the relevant audience, analyze activation performance and deliver measurable results.

One of the biggest trends for businesses this year, marketing automation can help your online business analyze the impact and manages your marketing campaigns. It can also collate customer data to help further leads conversion. And the greatest advantage that you can gain over your competition is implementing this before them.

A Dose of Insight: Less than 5% of non-tech companies are currently using marketing automation software which opens up a wide opportunity for your business. (Source: venturebeat.com)

Here are the basics of marketing automation to get you started

Part I: Understand your customer

what-are-the-criteria-for-coustmer-tracking

Track Users with Cookies

One of the widest used marketing automation features is tracking the user across websites to nurture, qualify and finally convert a lead.

Study What Customers Do on Your Website

With predictive tools rooted in real-time data analysis, you can gather data on your customer’s purchases and habits. With a clear emerging pattern, you can act on such insights to increase conversion and subsequently sales.

Understand How Your Consumers are Different

Traditional marketers also use segmentation as a tool to understand their consumer base. This aspect of traditional marketing is equally important to consider for online marketing. With intelligence from segmentation, you know the products which might be more pertinent to a particular segment of your customers.

Reach Your Customers at the Best Time and Day

Marketing automation software can even deliver your e-mail campaigns to you customers’ inbox the time of day and day of the week when they are most likely to check their e-mails.

Part II: Engage With the Customer

Use intelligent and personalized contact forms

Marketing automation platforms enable you to collect a lot of information about the visitor on your page. Converting them or gathering the most relevant information such as their phone numbers can be easy with a customized call to action highlighting the product or service they are interested in (already clicked on).

Remarket with Customer Data

Use ad networks to talk to your customers and further your engagement with the customer. You may remind them of their last action on your website and further your lead to conversion.

Don’t Forget Offline Online Integration

If you have an offline store, to make your online pitch you must customize your online content and ads to your customer. The data from your CRM can help you segment and better advertise to the same customer online.

Never Ask Twice for the Same Information

You must never ask your customers for any information that you have. For instance, if you already have a visitor’s contact details from your marketing automation tool, make sure that the contact form does not pop up in this case.

Part III: Close the Deal with Marketing Automation

how-to-close-the-deal-in-marketing-automation

Reminders about Abandoned Transactions

The average abandonment rate for online shopping carts is at a high 67%. You can recover these lost leads and potential revenue by automating you’re tracking and setting up visual reminders on other websites or through e-mail. An automated follow-up e-mail receives a higher open, click-through and conversion rate. The conversion rate using abandoned cart e-mails can go up to 40%.

Update Customers about the Price Drops

A few of your customers may abandon cart due to the price. Automating a personalized e-mail to such customers increases the chances of conversion up to 6 times. They have already established the purchase intent and you could capitalize on it by sending them emails whenever there is a price drop on the products they inquired for.

Reward the Engaged Customer with Discounts

A new format of loyalty programs being used by online portals is adjusting discounts based on user activity on their website. For instance, a website may offer an engaged active customer who regularly visits a website. Leaves reviews and feedback with a special additional discount. Web sites may also want to e-mail discount codes, marketing offers to engage and make active some accounts which have been dormant for a long time.

Marketing automation after all this may sound like a magic wand however, these can’t be one magic glove fits all as a solution. Before you decide to buy a Marketing Automation Tool, research and understand the features you need and the features you don’t. Have a plan in place and understand both its’ strong points and limitations. From your selected vendors (each of which will have their own advantages and disadvantages), ask for free trials and plan to launch accordingly to see what works for your business. Some of the known brands in market automation include Oracle (formerly Eloqua), Pardot, Infusionsoft services, Marketo, Hubspot, and Sales manager.

Read More On: What is Marketing Automation

What is Marketing Automation?

Posted on August 1, 2016November 6, 2019 by admin

All internet users must have experienced marketing automation, even if they are not aware of the term specifically. Think about Infusionsoft, Salesforce.com, Hubspot, MailChimp, Act-on, Marketo to name a few; these extremely popular services can be classified as examples of marketing automation.

Marketing automation, as the name implies, is the use of IT-based tools to automate aspects of marketing, such as e-mail campaigns, social media posts, polling contests, offers, etc. Automation tools can help you in lead management, conversions, retention and feedback as well as provide insights for evaluation and future planning.

Industry Insight

Marketing automation services are plentiful! There exist offerings to suit

All budgets- Services ranging from 100$ a month to 5000$ a month
All marketing requirements- inbound, e-mail campaigns, social media
All business sizes- serving a target base of a few hundred to a few hundred thousand customers

While it may appear to be the ultimate weapon in tackling all your online marketing woes, one needs to realize that it is simply the contemporary toolkit for a marketer functioning in the internet era. At its core, it still abides by fundamental marketing principles.

What do we mean by that? We mean that having an automation software alone will not help you in achieving your marketing goals. As a marketer, one needs to have a defined game plan, which can be accomplished with greater ease and effectiveness using a marketing software/service.

Remember, marketing automation is a mean and not an end!

What brought about the advent of marketing automation?

Tracing the evolution of the internet in a very general way, we can see why marketing automation became a norm, a necessity:

The internet became a new landscape of interaction, with hitherto unseen capabilities that were bound to be leveraged by both producers and consumers.
The ubiquity of the internet made it essential for brands to have an online avatar to remain credible.
As it went from ‘a virtual place that we visited’ to ‘a virtual space we live in’, brands had to adopt social media and other interactive platforms to be where customers are.
Extensive user behaviour tracking enabled greater insights and more sophisticated methods for conducting planned and targeted marketing activities.

With each step of the internet evolution, one can notice the corresponding evolution in the scope and focus of the marketing automation tools.

In fact, some companies in this space might object to their offerings being referred to as tools, and would be keen on emphasizing how they can be considered as platforms with comprehensive capabilities to execute marketing strategies, and not just complete marketing tasks.

What does marketing automation look like?

The best way to bring out the essence of marketing automation is to compare how a standard marketing objective would be accomplished with and without the use of an automation tool/platform.

Objective	Non-automated	Automated Marketing
Targeting	Buying bulk e-mail lists-mail blasts and push strategy	Inbound marketing attracting the right audience through content, social media
Data Gathering	Unsystematic and infrequentUsers need to be pushed to provide data	Subtle and incentivized accumulation of dataSystematized and regular to enable analysis
Campaign tracking/management	Control predominantly over marketers actions without adequate information about the target’s response	Detailed behavioural information available, allowing for better analysis and modification if needed
Closing the sale	Strong and overt promptsMultiple calls to actionPushing for sale irrespective of the prospect’s level of readiness	A gentle experience with the prospect being taken through stages of awareness, persuasion and then a smart call to action
CR M	Feedback generated haphazardly follow on based on generic conventions (events/occasions)Prospect sees the effort as another sales tactic	Engaged customers (through a web portal, social media, etc.) who can be targeted based on insights to deliver customized messagesProspect sees effort as a value addition
Marketing integration	Extensive effort required to coordinate and synchronize multiple objectives and campaigns might result in a confusing clutter of activities	Automation services provide a wholistic perspective of the campaign and allow multiple activities/campaigns to be managed using a centralized system

Conclusion

If you are still not sure about adopting marketing automation for your business, here are some statistics:

According to Infusionsoft, nearly 80% of top companies have incorporated marketing automation in their business.
Investing in conversion rate optimization (CRO) solutions are guaranteed to deliver high ROI, as much as 223.7 %, according to VentureBeat.

Arm yourself with the tools of today and guide your marketing the right way with marketing automation.