If you want to streamline and simplify the marketing processes for your retail business, automated marketing software is a wise choice.
Marketing departments and organizations everywhere are using this technology to more easily and effectively market across channels from email to social media, and to manage repetitive tasks that eat up time and manpower.
Here’s what the software can do for your business:
Spend less time on mundane tasks
Businesses today need to utilize original content and social media to engage with customers, but when you are short on time or employees, they can be the first areas that get short shrift as priority initiatives dominate focus. Other small but essential tasks also devour time and keep you from focusing on more essential tasks and important endeavors.
With marketing automation, you minimize the need to manage such tasks on a daily basis. For example, you can create multiple campaigns or weeks’ worth of social media content at once and schedule it to go out over a specific period.
When you don’t have to create content daily, productivity increases. Because the software is simple and comprehensive, a single employee can create and execute even complex campaigns, so you can reach more customers and generate more sales. The less time spent on repetitive, mundane tasks, the more time you have for generating next level creative ideas and fresh approaches that will have a measurable impact on sales.
Engage customers more effectively
Automation allows you to do many things you otherwise would not have the time or ability to do. For example, you can automatically send follow-up emails to customers who abandon their carts, increasing chances they follow through with the sale. Or you can automatically send a quick personal email and special offer when a customer signs up to receive email updates from you.
Automation makes it easy for you to create a consistent brand message across all your channels. Scheduling posts on social media keeps you connected with customers on a regular basis, keeping your business in their minds, so they more easily identify with and remember you.
Segment lists without pain and frustration
Most marketing software programs allow you to set parameters and restrictions to automatically separate customers. For example, you could send a highly personalized discount email to any customer who shopped online for women’s clothing during the month of March.
Perhaps you’ve identified promotions that customers are more likely to act on, increasing sales conversions. Couple this with pulled data and freshly built profiles to gain a fuller understanding of which customers are most important to your business. Learn about purchase histories, preferences, email opens, social media engagement and more, so you can more effectively identify, target, predict buying patterns and stay connected to your most valuable customers.
Get up and running in no time
Even without technical, coding or design skills, almost anyone can create beautiful, sophisticated campaigns. Most automated marketing software comes equipped with a range of templates and easy-to-use editors, and if a problem does pop up, a solution is just a quick customer service call away.
Monitor your efforts more closely
Easily track each piece of marketing material—whether an email, text message or social media post—to determine its performance. Automated marketing solutions offer the ability to quickly generate reports, graphs, statistical analysis and more so you can quickly see which tactics are most successful. They offer real-time data on which to make decisions about future approaches, rather than relying on assumptions and guesswork.
Streamline and improve work processes
Marketing software is a hub for all things sales-related, putting all the information needed at our fingertips. Every team member—and any other stakeholder—has full visibility into how various campaigns and the team as a whole are performing. You can clearly see where campaigns are falling short in order to make improvements.
Marketing software helps you manage critical processes, including planning, scheduling, budgeting, and gaining final approval; and makes it much easier for teams to work together and collaborate on content.
Reduce costs—and make more money
Perhaps the most important reason to invest in automated marketing software is financial. Because it automates so many processes, you can operate more efficiently with fewer staffers, and do more with the staff you do have, creating substantial savings.
Marketing software also offers the capability to more easily follow up with customers, send upsell and cross-sell offers, and grab their attention soon after they have abandoned your cart or left your website—all opportunities to generate revenue.
Automated marketing software allows you to more efficiently generate quality leads precisely target customers. There are loads of great options to choose from, and many companies offer full demos or trial periods so you can test before you invest.
nearly a decade’s worth of experience developing newsletters, blogs, e-letters,
training tools and webinars for business professionals. She contributes to both
The Intuit Small Business Blog and Docstoc.com. She also serves as editor-in-chief of Sales
Mastery, a digital magazine written
specifically for sales professionals.
