Do more with your Marketing Automation Tool

A Marketing Automation tool such as Act-On is not limited to only being able to drive interest to your business, by using the tool effectively you can ensure that you keep customers interested.

Marketing Automation is widely known for its demand generation focus, while this drives awareness and interest to your businesses products and/or services which is highly valuable, it does not only have to be used for that purpose. Users of the tool do not realise how much they are missing out on and they aren’t aware of all the benefits of what the tool can actually do!!

There are three elements to the Marketing Automation journey with Act-On, these are Brand Awareness, Demand Generation and Customer Marketing. By utilising all three of these elements you will not ony attract new business but retain current business.

Businesses are relying heavily on marketers to promote their brand in the right way. The marketers are in control of how the outside world views the company and they want to be viewed as reliable, trustworthy and consistently productive as this will not only help with bringing in new business but will also help with customer retention.

Marketing Automation allows you to achieve your branding objectives by ensuring that your brand is consistent across all marketing channels. Act-On allows you to control the look of your logo and font usage as well as allowing you to create approved templates that are available for use. With templates being available for all users this will then eliminate the need for individual templates to be created thereby ensuring that the brand is seen as consistent and not varied depending on who created the template.

Demand Generation tasks can include marketing activities such as lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, sales alignment and content and field marketing. Marketing Automation can be used to effectively increase all of these. Some examples of how to do this with Act-On are that you will have the ability to run SEO on all of your web pages including landing pages and forms this will ensure that they rank highly with search engines which will ultimately mean that you can capture more leads. Another way to effectively market with Act-On would be to use AB testing to see which landing pages/forms etc work best and which ones bring in the most valuable leads, thereby increasing the number of qualified leads you can capture. Finally, it’s best practice to ensure that your Marketing Automation tool is integrated with your CRM, such as SugarCRM, this will then mean that as soon as a lead is captured it can go straight into the CRM and the sales team can continue to work with that lead. It’s a good idea to use the lead scoring function within Act-On and sync this information over to SugarCRM,  the sales team can identify by looking at the Act-On score which leads they should prioritise to following up with.

Marketing Automation tools aren’t there to only be used to gain new leads, they can also be used to help retain current customers. One way to keep current customers actively involved with your business is to set up drip campaigns in Act-On, these could be used to send current customers hints and tips or they could be used to announce new features which could be possible upsell areas. Keeping current customers in the loop makes them feel valuable to your company. Another great way to keep current customers involved could be to invite them to any webinars that your business is giving, you can set the webinar up in Act-On and automate all communications around these events. You can then trigger communications to be sent based on the results, for example, those that attended may receive a questionnaire asking for feedback on the webinar thereby providing valuable information for your business and those that were unable to attend could receive a different communication with an invite to a similar event that is coming up.

Marketing Automation measures the overall success of the customer’s lifecycle, build your brand, attract new leads and deliver a customer experience that sets you above the competition.

What to learn more about how Act-On can help you?