The word “automation” may conjure up images of mechanical precision, speed, and efficiency, but it doesn’t sound particularly warm and friendly. Marketing automation, however, allows companies that use it to deepen their customer relationships and provide more personalized service. This isn’t a contradiction; it’s a built-in feature of marketing automation. By giving businesses the opportunity to focus on the human aspects of interaction and the creative side of content, automation is improving connections between customers and the businesses that serve their needs.
As a lead generation tool, marketing automation excels, but it’s equally good at forging strong bonds with the customers you already have. Retention, not just acquisition, matters. Harness the power of marketing automation for customer retention and discover why this new technology is for more than just lead gen.
Personalization
You can’t personalize your communications with your customers if you don’t know who they are. Marketing automation integrates with your customer relationship management software to complete client records and organize customers into relevant audience segments. While your CRM stores relevant contact information and notes, it doesn’t offer any insight into this data on its own; for that, you need marketing automation.
Once you have a better idea of who your customers are and what they need to know, you achieve a far higher degree of personalization. Tools to customize everything from email correspondence to landing pages helps create a custom user environment for your customers, making them feel at home whenever they visit your site or open your newsletter.
Scale
A conversation with too many people at once either turns into noisy chaos or becomes a monologue with one speaker addressing a largely silent audience. Marketing automation changes that, making it possible to scale up your conversational capabilities and carry on one-to-one conversations with thousands of customers at once. By handling routine correspondence, automation technology also allows marketers and sellers to devote more time to the small but meaningful gestures that deepen customer relationships.
Intuition
While technology hasn’t advanced quite far enough to predict the future with certainty, it has developed considerable predictive power. Marketing automation’s a proactive tool, generating insights about your audience and giving you the tools to act on that knowledge in real time. When you want to see which email headline resonates with your customers, run an A/B split test in real time and get the right answer quickly using marketing automation. Not sure which of your newest customers have the highest potential lifetime value? Your system can tell you that too.
Organization
Customers know their loyalty has value, and customer appreciation programs are an excellent way of honoring that. Managing and administering a loyalty program is time-consuming, though, and not all of them offer a reasonable ROI. With marketing automation, the organizational and administrative tasks involved with a customer appreciation program become transparent; the software handles these details so your personnel don’t have to. Now you’re free to focus on which customer loyalty programs work best for you and your clients, how to improve customer care, and which are your high-priority accounts.
Marketing automation isn’t the opposite of personalized, highly specific customer service. It’s a tool-set that works alongside your personnel to give your clients the ultimate in customer care.
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