Because small businesses have just a few people covering all aspects of running the business, automating repetitive tasks can significantly improve marketing efficency and effectiveness and free-up time to devote to other tasks. Read on to find out if marketing automation is right for your small or mid-sized business.
What is Marketing Automation?
A subset of customer relationship management, marketing automation provides a framework for continuously collecting, testing, and refining data to improve marketing accuracy. Marketing automation allows market needs to be addressed with precision through the activation of pre-set triggers to communicate more effectively with existing customers and to convert more prospects.
Marketing automation software gives marketers the ability to pre-define rules for triggering automatic responses like an email or phone call, delivery of a specific piece of collateral material, the sending of an invitation, and other typical marketing communications. Marketing automation systems track responses and facililate data analysis that leads to improved marketing precision. The key is establishing parameters for when, what, and how communications are triggered so they can be timed to have maximum impact.
Why Don’t More Small Businesses Use Marketing Automation Software?
Perhaps it is because in the past most marketing automation software was designed for larger enterprise systems, putting it beyond the needs and price range of small businesses. Recently, we went exploring for small business marketing automation software to see what features and benefits were offered.
Below are some of the features:
- Contact Management
- Marketing Automation
- Email Marketing
- List Management & Segmentation
- Multi-media Broadcast Marketing (fax, voice, letters, email, direct mail, etc.)
- Automated Follow-up Marketing (Nurture/Drip Marketing)
- Website Integration
- Campaign Planning
- Workflow Automation
- Reports
- Preloaded Templates, & sample communications plans
Next, other resources that marketers can use to automate specific marketing tasks. Feel free to leave a comment on marketing automation or other small business marketing issues.
