If you’ve been researching how to best market your company in today’s day and age, you’ve likely heard - several times over - that you need a marketing automation platform (MAP) to create a digital, inbound marketing program, such as SharpSpring, Hubspot, or Email Automation.
Doing so allows you to create a marketing funnel for your leads per the stage they are at and provides you with the tools you need to build trust, create awareness and by that quickly convert them into paid customers, and even increase retention. But what does all this mean for you and your business?
Well, we’re here to break it down for you.
Continue reading to learn about the top 7 features of MAPs that convert leads into loyal customers.
1. Marketing Automation Platforms Provide You with a Complete Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
Marketing automation platforms do more than provide you with a way to create digital engagements and awareness. They’re actually including a CRM for you to use from the first time a Contact engages with you, to well after they’ve become a paid customer and you keep nurturing them with blogs, email for trust builder, features update and even thank you or birthday emails.
When you use a MAP, you don’t need a separate CRM. The marketing automation platform completely incorporates a customer relationship management system in it and connects all the engagements the Contacts have made on every marketing channel into the opportunity on the CRM so your sales guys will have full insight about this opportunity.
"According to HubSpot, 99% of consumers check their email every day."
2. Marketing Automation Platforms Help with Demand Generation Management
There are several marketing channels that you can deploy for your business. The new wave of marketing in 2020 is demand generation. With all of the available digital tools and social media marketing options available today, demand generation enables you to create interest for your products or services from buyers who may not even know they need you or that you even exist!
One of the most effective forms of demand generation today is content marketing, which means that you create blogs, landing pages, and videos that are optimized for search engine results to drive people to your website who weren’t even thinking about you, or maybe didn’t even know about you until they found your content! And if you’re in the information technology sector, content creation is even more important for you. According to MAP HubSpot, 43% of information technology companies consider content creation a top investment in their overall marketing activities.
But how do you know what content to serve up to your leads, and when? Well, MAPs help with that, too.
SharpSpring, for example, has a Sales Optimizer. This tool recommends content for your leads based on where they are in your marketing funnel to increase their engagement with your brand, and ultimately, convert them to a paid lead.
3. Marketing Automation Programs Manage Leads Over Their Entire Life
As you already know, your marketing funnel doesn’t end when your lead converts into a customer or had a demo meeting (MQL). You want them to remain a loyal, continuing customer who not only buys more of your products and services but also recommends them to others.
This is exactly what MAPs are designed to do. They help you manage customer relationships from their very first touchpoint, to well after they’ve become a customer who is loyal to your brand and by that to reduce churn rate while increase retention. They’re end-to-end solutions to help you manage your customer relationships indefinitely.
The MAP’s modules (Click to see the image), designating to deal with any stage on your prospects and customers’ life cycle in a different way, different messages (and PoT) and based his behavior and reactions, sound crazy? Yes, it can work like that as long as you will infrastructure the sequences and workflow on the MAP in the right way.
4. MAPs Assign Your Anonymous Website Visitors a VisitorID So You Can Track Their Interaction on Your Website and With Your Digital Marketing Program
Marketing Automation Platform SharpSpring says that less than 3% of website visitors fill out an online form. But they’ve still visited your website and may visit again. To convert them to customers quickly, you need to know how they are interacting with your website which pages and for how long and when.
The key to identifying the bulk of your website visitors is for your Marketing Automation Platform to assign them a VisitorID. This feature of MAPs helps to identify who these visitors really are, including providing you with contact information so your sales team can reach out to them.
According to MAP HubSpot, 43% of information technology companies consider content creation a top investment in their overall marketing activities.
5. MAPs Help You Score Your Leads So You Know Who’s Most Likely to Convert into a Sale the Fastest
Once Your Marketing Automation Platform starts helping you obtain more leads, you may become overwhelmed with the volume of people you have to follow up with. MAPs help you score - or rank - your leads so that you know who is most likely to convert, and who is potentially the most valuable to your firm. This helps you know which leads you need to be spending the most time nurturing, so you’ll close that deal with them.
Furthermore, because the MAP is an overall platform, a score can open opportunity on your CRM and create tasks and with the sales optimizer to help your sales to increase conversion to sales.
6. You Can Manage All Your Email Campaigns with Your Marketing Automation Platform
According to HubSpot, 99% of consumers check their email every day. This means that email marketing campaigns are an effective way to reach your leads and existing customers to let them know about your product, services, and support.
SharpSpring makes email marketing even more effective with Action Groups and Automation Workflows. In this MAP, an Action Group is a set of actions grouped together to accomplish a desired result – such as opening up an email and then clicking a Call to Action Link – which may be taking your lead to a blog post, a video on your YouTube channel, or to a social media post about a contest you have going on.
Action Groups can be saved independently and attached to one or more triggers in an Automation Workflow. An Automation Workflow is a set of triggers and filters that is attached to one or more action groups. An example of a trigger is your lead filling out an online form. In SharpSpring, an Automation Workflow includes at least one trigger, and can also include filters and actions.
All that being said, these two features of SharpSpring allow you to carefully plan out your sales funnel, then rapidly pour leads into it while SharpSpring serves up the best possible content for your leads, tracks their interactions with your brand, and automatically moves leads to the next best step based on their interactions with you and your content.
7. Marketing Automation Platforms Can Perform Call Recording So You Can Track Offline Leads
While you’ll likely find that most of the leads in your marketing funnel will come from digital sources, businesses and consumers still come in as leads from incoming phone calls. A MAP allows you to track calls from leads, so you can see this extra touchpoint you have with them. And, if you notice that specific leads prefer phone communication to email, call tracking enables you to know the best way to reach them with information about your brand.
Your Next Steps to Setting Using a Marketing Automation Platform
Marketing Automation today can be affordable (SharpSpring License start as low as $425/month), month-month and no commitment, and you can enjoy and leverage all the benefits.
As marketing experts, we’re well equipped to help you evaluate your current needs, review different MAPs, and select and implement a marketing automation platform for your inbound marketing campaigns.
"Marketing Automation Platform SharpSpring says that less than 3% of website visitors fill out an online form. But they’ve still visited your website and may visit again."
And we’re happy to help! Simply Click here to Get your free Demo Marketing Automation Platform License to get started.
Kiefer Hazaz, Managing Director
THE RiCH.agecny
800-815-1522