In the digital world in which we now live, marketing automation is perhaps the most important way to both streamline your operations and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. According to HubSpot, the types of nurtured leads generated by marketing automation make 47% larger purchases than those who were not. More than that, a full 91% of marketers believe that their use of marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of ALL of their efforts according to Marketo.

Making the decision to move to marketing automation isn’t as easy as flipping a light switch, however. It will take a great deal of time, effort and preparation to build the foundation necessary for your marketing automation efforts to thrive.

Break Up That Sales Funnel

If marketing automation is one of the best ways to guide your leads from one end of the sales funnel to the other, it stands to reason that the first step towards preparing yourself for this shift involves defining all stages of your sales funnel. What shape does initial contact with your lead take? After how long do you begin to deepen your relationship, investigating suitability? What is your value proposal to continue to nurture your lead over time? What does your follow up look like? These are all important questions that you need to answer as early in the process as possible.

Getting to Know Your Target Audience

If you don’t truly understand the people you’re marketing to, how can you ever expect to give them what they want or even speak their language? Who are these people? What problem do they have in their lives that only you can solve? What specific features of the product or service that you’re offering are going to attract their interest the most? What might get in the way of a sale? What are they worried about? What other products and services do they like to spend money on?

The answers to all of these questions will not only help you craft more compelling marketing materials, they’ll help provide a true focus for your efforts to guarantee the highest level of effectiveness at all times.

Match the Right Content to the Right Stages

Once you’ve made a list of all the various types of content that will appeal to your target audience (including blog posts, reports, how-to manuals, whitepapers, case studies and more), AND you’ve spent time creating the type of high value content you know they’re looking for, the next thing to do is make sure you’re getting the right content into the hands of the right person at that oh-so-perfect moment.

To do this, you’ll need to identify a few key things. Which of the pieces of content you’ve created will be valuable enough to your target audience that they’ll be willing to exchange their content information for it? What content is more practical and actionable in nature and, as a result, will be ideal for helping to guide them farther down the sales funnel? Most importantly, which of this content do you have and which do you have to create from scratch?

Once you answer all of these questions as they relate to not only your product or service but the unique audience you’re trying to attract, you’ll find that you’re more than prepared for the benefits that marketing automation brings to the table.

Looking to make the shift to marketing automation? AgencySquared works alongside your team to answer all of the above, making sure that you’re prepared to optimize your efforts and see results. Get a complimentary consultation.

 

Are you not seeing the leads you need from your email marketing campaigns? You could be using email the wrong way. This powerful tool can produce results, but following best practices is key. Here are some of the top proven practices heading into 2016, and how they can help your business grow!

 1. Collect More Email Addresses

It’s time for easy math: The more email addresses you collect, the more leads you can obtain. As a marketer you should be generating fresh, new email contacts regularly. Your contacts’ email addresses may become stale over time as contacts move jobs, opt-out of your email campaigns or abandon old email addresses. As a result, there are many ways for companies to increase their email leads, simply by encouraging more customers to sign up for email messages, promoting a contest or sweepstakes online, creating newsletter-only deals, or offer a birthday club to give something away on their special day.

The most useful tool in accomplishing this is to develop an automatic CTA (call to action) which appears to all website visitors. This simple pop-up form needs to be easy to understand, quick to complete, and rewarding to use.  

2. Offer Value in Exchange for CTAs

We mentioned that a call to action should be “rewarding to use” and its important to understand the value of this tactic for both CTAs and the emails you send to your customer list. People don’t like to give away their email addresses in exchange for nothing, so offer regular rewards for viewing emails and collecting lead opportunities. A classic example is sending an email with a unique link to download a discount code for a product purchase. Without that email, the consumer doesn’t get the discount. This confirms early on the value of signing up and reading emails from your brand. It opens the door for more effective conversions down the road. Also, remember to clearly show the value offered in your email headlines!

 3. Don’t Go Too Hot – or Too Cold

How many emails do you send out to customers each week? Send out too many, and customers will block your emails or leave them to languish in the “promotion” section of the email client that no one ever visits. Send out too few, and consumers will trash your emails because they don’t even recognize them when they do show up. The middle ground is important to find here. Studies indicate that one email per week is around the best rate to avoid the pitfalls.

 4. Format for Mobile and Easy Consumption

If customers can’t read your email, they won’t. If they have to go to extra effort to read your email, they won’t. Due to more and more consumers accessing email via mobile devices, it’s vital that you optimize your messages, make them responsive for mobile devices, and make them very easy to read (avoid that dreaded newsletter format if you possibly can). Ensure that your calls to action appear early in the email, are large, invoke your logo colors, and whisk consumers away to better content.

5. Personalize and Automate

We know that these are both popular buzzwords, but they are also revolutionizing email campaigns. Personalization taps into customer data about recent purchases and viewed products to make customized recommendations and offer unique deals to past customers – results that guarantee a higher number of successful repeat sales. Automation helps save a lot of time and makes sure that customers get emails when they are supposed – right after signing up, after making purchases, when the company has important news, and so on.

Remember, the best email campaigns take advantage of the strengths you already have; When in doubt, consider what already engages your customers and wins their loyalty. With the right timing and format, those things will work through email channels, too! For any additional questions or a look at the latest ways email marketing can help your business, visit AgencySquared.com

Hunting for scalable email marketing solutions for your agency can be a daunting task, especially when you have limited time and resources to work with. Fortunately, there are a number of budget-friendly and free tools that can effectively solve your agency’s business development problems right now. 

If you have been struggling to find the right tool for your team, here are our recommendations on the best free and low cost email marketing tools for growing agencies.

Cyfe

In the interest of efficiency, check out Cyfe to track data and analytics from various sources. The Forever Free Plan can solve many of your issues. 

Cyte is a convenient all-in-one business dashboard solution that gives you the ability to bring your website and/or blog analytics, SEO metrics, and social media analytics, into one shared and easy-to-read dashboard. It can help you analyze data covering year-to-date revenue from Salesforce, Google Analytics website visitor locations, keyword rankings and funnel paths, Twitter tweets, and email marketing analytics from MailChimp. We know you are interested in email marketing, but you get all the other information as well. Pretty cool!

MailChimp

If you have less than 2,000 email contacts, you should explore MailChimp’s Forever Free Plan. The plan doesn’t expire, and you can send up to 12,000 emails a month using the majority of their tools.

VerticalResponse 

VerticalResponse is a great tool because it enables you to send up to 4,000 emails a month, create unlimited sign up forms, a connection to one Facebook and one Twitter account, and test out their auto-responder tool for free.  

Thunderbird From Mozilla

Thunderbird is a dynamic free application developed by Mozilla, and it may be just what you need. This email application is easy to set up, easy to customize, and it’s loaded with fantastic features.  

It combines privacy, speed, and the very latest technology. Thunderbird also includes many innovative extra features including mail redirect.

99design

There is a new email design category from 99design. It’s a perfect source whether you’re running a SMB or a larger firm. Remember several years ago when the buzz was that email was going to disappear? Well, not happening. 

With 99design, the demand for services and free templates is growing. They also offer free design consultation.