How much time do you spend in your office doing tasks which are boring? You are trying to remember your office chores one by one, right? Repetitive tasks like sending acknowledgement emails every time a new lead enters your system, sending drip emails, reminder about certain event, client follow ups and so on. All these tasks consume half of your time and energy!
Automating the mundane tasks will free up a lot of your valuable time and would let you focus on business strategies.
With a proper system in place you can classify leads and customers according to their geographical location, specifications, lead source, the level of interest of your leads in your products/services. You can forward targeted email campaigns which are customized to suit your customers’ requirement and assign the right sales representatives to carry out the job successfully.
So, let’s see how!
Every person is unique and has specific needs. So, the way of approaching each one for selling your products and services should be unique as well. While a personalized approach is awesome, it is highly time consuming. So, even if you are able to do this personally today, as your business grows it’ll be practically impossible to keep on doing this manually.
Here, Marketing Automation helps your business in engaging your audience and strengthening your relationship with them without adding those extra hours to your day.
Here’s the automation that’ll supercharge your marketing:
So, how many leads do you get from your website in a day? How do you receive them? In your email inbox? How much time it takes for you to read those emails and send the first message? Is entering these leads into your CRM is eating away your productive hours?
Lead creation can be streamlined by capturing information of the visitors from your website and landing pages directly into the CRM system. Verifying, approving and assigning sales reps can also be done using automation.
Lead nurturing is very important. Convincing a lead to purchase your product/services is a Herculean task! Leads are seldom ready to make a purchase immediately. So, it depends on the responsible sales reps how efficiently they can build interest in the leads to make them buy your products. But, this is easier said than done!
You need to stay connected with your leads at every step of their sales journey with you, provide them with the right kind of information and solution as well. Here, identifying your leads based on preference, weight-age and buying intent can help you prioritize.
With a proper system in place you can stay up to date with every prospective customer interaction and you can automate the sales process. This will save your time and help you build long lasting relationship with your customers.
Sending targeted emails
Nobody wants to receive information that they aren’t interested in! This is the same for your leads as well.
So, you can create targeted email campaigns based on your customers’ choice. Your first task here is to find out what the enquirer wants- A service or a product, if a product then which product? Then you need to find out if that enquirer is an existing customer or not, the enquirer’s response after you have sent the first email and if they have signed up for any test drives.
Depending on each step your prospect is taking, you can create targeted email campaigns. You can set this journey up and set your marketing emails on autopilot!
Personalized emails are appreciated more because no one wants email blasts. If you are looking at sending personalized emails, then that takes time. But you do not have that time. So, how will you bridge that gap? Here automation comes into play. You can simply automate this part with CRM automation. Yes, you read it right!
You can set up schedule-based email automation within your CRM system and then send personalized emails without you having to spend a single moment on it.
Sending drip emails can be time consuming and mundane.
Suppose if you have a long message which you want to send in byte size pieces. Now it is very common that you would forget to send this message every week. Instead of mailing this message to your prospective customers every week, you can set it up at one go!
Every time you get a new lead that campaign will start. Suppose you have got 500 leads and for them you start the drip immediately. So, they get the first email in the current week, next email in the following week and so on as per set rules. Now if you get another 100 leads in the next two weeks, they are going to get the first drip email. This is how the cycle goes on.
Create more interactivity on your website with a chat-bot! Chat-bots can be trained to answer certain questions. That could be a natural language processing chat-bots, that can hold conversations naturally. Chat-bots can also be question-answer type, where there is multiple choice question and according to your choice it answers, and the following question pops up! Hence, you can increase interactivity many folds without spending any time chatting manually with the leads and customers. This is the beauty of marketing automation. It saves HOURS for you.
“Time is money”! Running a business is not simple, you always have short of time. You have a lot to do in limited time. Creating workflow which is consistent and quick is essential. With the right system in place you can automate daily activities of your business, your sales can be tracked and so much more.
The primary goal for workflow automation is to speed up and bring accuracy in task completion by your team members. This in turn increases the productivity of your team members.
Let’s see how it works!
Right now, you might be getting all the queries in your inbox. You then possibly scan through your emails and manually send those queries to the relevant representative. That query might sit in the inbox of that representative for some time before it gets answered! So, you see, it is such a tedious and time taking task.
You can reduce the response time using a CRM automation.
How? Well pretty simple!
When the leads leave their details and queries on your website “contact us form”, the CRM auto assigns the leads to relevant sales representatives.
For example, if you get 500 leads in a week then you might have to perform the same task 500 times! Automation makes this job easier for you!
Are you writing a “welcome” email every time a new lead comes? Does this task make you hate your job?
Well, then possibly with automation you can put an end to such repetitive and mundane activities.
Why focus on mindless tasks when you can focus on creative aspects of your business with the right system in place!
Do not let shortage of time affect your deals. When you have large number of deals, you have very little time to attend to all of them with equal weight-age. If you fail to approve any request from clients, you lose business.
If you do not automate this part, then you must be drafting the request manually. The pain does not end here. You need to get it approved from your manager. All these steps may cause your leads falling through the cracks.
So, what you do?
With automation you can close more deals in less time.
Generally, both leads and customers choose those vendors who respond to their needs in a short time. If you keep them waiting, then you are likely to lose business. You can easily create and schedule automated follow-up messages which you can forward to your leads and customers.
Do you need to calculate profits for a service that you offered? Do you need to calculate the age of your customer? Do you need to update the total deal amount from your quotation?
But if you are to do that manually then it is going to be time consuming, it is going to be error prone. Because ‘to err is human”! No human being can claim that he/she is above making errors. So, why taking a chance?
Hence, CRM automation can help you calculate all the complex calculations (cost calculations, revenue calculations, profit calculation, commission calculations etc) in a blink of an eye.
Do you know according to a study the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60% to 70%. Another study suggests 71% of consumers have ended their relationship with a company due to poor customer service. Hence, your existing customers are equally important as getting new ones. If you are poor at retaining customers, then you likely to reduce your profit margins.
For any existing customer how prompt you can give them the required support will always be the parameter they will judge you by. The more prompt you are in answering back to your customers the more loyalty of your customers you earn.
How can you possibly speed up your customer support?
You get probably more than 100 emails in a day. A support email might be lost in the sea of other emails. Every email your customer sends, creates a ticket against that and then it gets assigned to the relevant person when you have a proper system in place.
Another problem is people do not like to be kept in dark! If a customer raises a complaint or support request, he/she would want to know the status of the request. Your customers also expect visibility on their issues and how much time it will take for the issues to be sorted out!
Time management is crucial. If you master this art, then you can immediately see changes in your numbers! You start to earn more revenue and increase your profit margins.