what is marketing automation

Even in a small business, or in a mom and pop shop, if you run the marketing department, you have your hands full. You need to stay on top of prospecting for new clients, taking care of your current clients, and also following up with your past clients.

There are emails to send, calls to make, letters to write, and lots of steps to remember in your workflows – not just remembering to do them all, but also making sure you do them in the right order!

This is where an Email Marketing Automation System can help.

The term, “Marketing Automation”, is used to describe systems you can set up in advance, and then let them run on Auto-Pilot.

Marketing Automation for new leads

In prospecting for new clients, you want to stay in constant contact with them (no pun, or outside reference, intended!) until they decide to do business with you…or not. A good way to do this is by providing valuable information to them on a regular basis. But who has the time for that? Maybe you could keep up if you only had a handful of prospects – but what if you had 100? or 1000? or more?

With your new Marketing Automation system, here is what this scenario would look like:

First you would use a landing page to capture their contact information, including their email address. On the the landing page there might be an offer for an e-book with valuable information about your subject matter. Or some other piece of useful info. Now I am talking about good stuff here – information your prospect can use. I am not talking about an advertisement about how great you and your company are.

You want to offer something valuable, in exchange for them giving you their email address.

Once you have their email address, then all the fun can start! With your Marketing Automation system, you have set it up so when they fill out the form, an autoresponder automatically sends them the e-book.

(By the way, an e-book can be just 1 or 2 pages of text, providing good info).

Then you set them up on an email drip campaign and each month (or any other time-frame), they get another email from you. This drip email series can go on for weeks, or months, or even years.

This is a 100% automated process. You set it all up in advance and then just let the Marketing Automation system run.

Marketing Automation for current clients

In this example, you have just signed up a new client. Hooray!!!

Let’s say in your business you have 10 steps or tasks that you always want to perform when bringing on a new client. You want to have your assistant build them a welcome kit, then you want to have someone else on your staff call them to gather more information, then other internal processes need to take place, then an email goes out……you get the idea.

This is called a “Workflow”, and as long as things happen on time and in the right order – all is well. With a Marketing Automation system, these tasks can be automated with reminders going to each of your team members at the appropriate times, or emails automatically being sent.

Just think of the peace of mind you will have knowing all the steps in your workflow will happen, and your new client will be receiving your white-glove treatment.

Marketing Automation for past clients

Your past clients represent a goldmine in potential new business. Each of your past clients can become a current client again – or at a minimum, your past clients can be an excellent source for referring new clients to you.

But what a hassle – having to remember to stay in touch with them. Afterall, you are running around acquiring new clients and also servicing your current clients.

Don’t worry – your spiffy, new, Marketing Automation System has got this!

Automatically send a newsletter to your past customers each month. You don’t have to overthink this – just send a light reading, fun, newsletter. You can do it in email or on paper if you would like.

This will act as a subtle reminder that you are still around and available to help them when they need your services again. You can even have a place in your newsletter to ask for referrals.

This is a perfect way to stay in touch with past customers without coming across as a pesky salesperson.

A Marketing Automation system will help free up your time, and help make you look more professional – all while taking care of your clients better than you have ever been able to do in the past.

Look for an automation system that is easy-to-use, and easy-to-understand. If you need a programmer to help you set up your Marketing Automation processes, you are looking at the wrong system.

By the way, as you might have guessed, AllClients does Marketing Automation superbly, and even includes a pre-written newsletter with fresh content each month.

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