Significant time (and money) savings

When you automate something, you save time. It’s obvious.

In short, automated marketing frees up your team’s time for higher value-added projects.

For example, instead of spending hours sending the same prospecting message to each prospect, changing only the recipient’s name, your automated marketing tool can do it for you. Faster and without mistakes.

Better lead engagement

Automated interaction with your leads through workflows provides you with valuable insights about them. Furthermore, in this regard, it is possible to automate a large part of your prospect qualification. This is also known as lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a scoring system that allows you to evaluate the quality of the leads you generate. It allows you to assign “points” to each lead generated based on the actions they decide to take within a workflow. Based on this “score”, you can trigger a new scenario, adapted to the profile of this same lead.

Therefore, lead scoring promotes better segmentation of your leads. The more your leads interact with your automated marketing system, the more you will learn about their preferences. And the more qualified prospects you will get.

These processes – automatic, of course – will have a (very) positive effect on your conversion and sales rates.

Better conversion and sales rates

Numbers don’t lie. Automated marketing is responsible for a 14.5% increase in sales team productivity and a 12.2% decrease in marketing expenses.

Another study on SMEs observed a 451% increase in the number of qualified leads, thanks to automated lead nurturing operations. Furthermore, the same study showed that these nurtured leads bought 47% more products and services than un-nurtured ones.

There are several reasons why these performances are so interesting:

• More precise and accurate reporting, allowing marketing teams to detect where they are failing in their marketing operations, and make early adjustments
• The ability for teams to better analyze their data, thanks to the time saved by automating tasks
• The ability to track and re-engage prospects more quickly, systematically, and efficiently, and to more easily recover leads that might be lost

In summary, marketing automation favors better coordination between marketing and sales teams. As a result, not only do conversion rates increase, but the customer relationship is consolidated in the long term. Thus, your sales representatives will be able to bring more repeat purchases into the company’s customer portfolio.

Effective segmentation: hit your target audience

Automated marketing can be very powerful, although it is also true that it can be useless if you don’t know who you are targeting beforehand. Who exactly have you created your product or service for? This is the essential question you must ask yourself before you start.

Certainly, marketing automation can help you a lot when it comes to qualifying your leads. You can program and obtain a segmentation of your leads based on their behavior within your workflows.

However, poor segmentation of your leads beforehand – bad segmentation – can make any segmentation you want to do later, in your marketing automation software, useless.

Choosing acquisition channels

Once your target audience is defined, you need to know where to find them. You need to ask yourself what content your customers read, which social networks they visit, in which groups or communities they participate, etc. Acquisition channels are the places where you first come into contact with your prospects. They constitute the top of your marketing funnel, i.e., the place where your leads are generated.

This stage should not be taken lightly. Just like incorrect segmentation, a wrong choice of channels can damage your entire automated marketing strategy.

For example, there’s no point in using TikTok if you’re targeting a professional audience over 40. Similarly, it wouldn’t be wise to spend hours creating posts for LinkedIn if you want to sell a product aimed at housewives.

Establishing tracking

Once your leads enter your automated marketing system, you need to track them. It is very important to observe how they interact with you. And more specifically, how they behave within your website.

Installing tracking software on your website has several advantages. You can find out, for example:

• the most visited pages on your website
• the average time visitors spend on each page
• the acquisition channels that generate the most traffic
• the call-to-action buttons and sales pages that perform best
• etc.

As you can see, the choice of the right tracking software will largely determine the quality of lead scoring.

The most popular lead tracking tool is Google Analytics. Free and full of features, it largely meets the needs of a large number of small and medium-sized businesses.

That said, there are increasingly alternative or complementary tracking solutions to Google’s that offer more detailed data analysis. These offer even more detailed data analysis tailored to your clients’ needs.

Ultimately, the right choice of tracking software will always depend on the specific needs and the market in which your company operates.

Choosing your automated marketing tools

Once you have defined your objective, chosen your channels, and established a tracking system, you must – finally – choose an automated marketing program.

To ensure you choose wisely, you need to consider a number of parameters, namely:

• Price

Most automated marketing tools offer pricing based on free basic versions that may include paid additional extensions. To avoid this becoming too expensive, you need to look long-term. Ask yourself what features you will need in three years, taking into account the customers you are targeting and your acquisition channels.

• Ease of use

To make our lives easier, we often need machines. But sometimes these machines are too complex for what we really need. Unfortunately, this is the case for many automated marketing tools. Opt for an intuitive computer tool. The less time you spend trying to understand them, the more time you will save for truly important projects. And the less money you will spend on training your teams.

• Integration with other software

An extremely important and, unfortunately, often overlooked aspect.

A typical example: many companies that use a marketing automation tool adopt it without checking if it can integrate with their CRM. Therefore, communication between the Marketing and Sales departments, respectively, becomes much less fluid.

Hubspot

This tool, which is a key reference in the market, has the advantage of being a truly complete platform. It is essentially a CRM system integrated with prospecting channels.

Hubspot allows its users to very comprehensively track all the work of your teams, between the Marketing and Sales departments.

This program has a free version. That said, it can quickly become a rather expensive tool once you want to add certain essential but paid functionalities. Therefore, this tool is often preferred by companies of a certain size.

Active Campaign

Active Campaign is another very complete and essential marketing solution, with many functionalities between marketing and sales automation. Although this software does not have a free version, its upgrade options remain relatively affordable given its number of functionalities and its use. Considered very intuitive and very popular among many SMEs of a certain size, it is also very popular in certain VSE circles that are very demanding about marketing automation. For example, in the infopreneurship sector.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an excellent email marketing tool, known for its ease of use and affordable price.

In French, this software can be particularly interesting for small businesses with limited budgets. This way, they can have a first experience of the benefits of marketing automation – especially regarding email marketing – before opting to adopt a more sophisticated solution one day.

LaGrowthMachine

Created by the French company Deux.io, La Growth Machine is an automated marketing solution that stands out, among other things, for its multi-channel approach. Fully personalized, this solution allows you to carry out marketing operations via Linkedin, Twitter, and/or email.

With this tool, you only need to drag and drop to create a multi-channel prospecting workflow. The idea is to probe on one channel, call on another, and, why not, follow up on a third. The multi-channel approach allows, among other things, to give a more “natural” and personalized tone to commercial prospecting. According to its founder, Brice Maurin, the results are 3.3 times better than with a more conventional approach.