Even though email marketing has been around as long as the Internet, many small business owners and managers are still not segmenting their lists and using marketing automation. Doing this is essential to maximizing profitability.
Where marketing automation was once only available at enterprise level pricing, today many affordable solutions with marketing automation features are now available for small businesses.
Marketing Automation Workflows
GetResponse now offers marketing automation workflows so that your lists segment themselves based on the actions of your subscribers. These workflows can also apply lead scores, allowing your sales team to pinpoint where to best spend their time following up.
This image shows how marketing workflows are created by adding elements, and then choosing what action your automation will take based on what emails or links subscribers opened:
When you use this type of marketing automation, your list is auto-segmented for more targeted messaging. This can increase conversion rates. Having your sales team focus on subscribers with the highest lead scores will allow them to close more sales with less effort.
Most email marketing solutions provide segmenting, but without workflow to do it automatically and immediately, it must be done manually based on actions of subscribers recorded over time. If you get busy and fail to segment your lists, you will not be sending messages optimized by actions.
Marketing Automation Process
Your marketing automation process should start with getting people to subscribe. This will fill the top of your funnel so you can start building relationships with potential customers.
While most people immediately think of lead capture forms for getting more subscribers, there are many other ways including:
- Lead capture forms in the sidebar of a blog or site
- Offering gated content such as a case study or e-book
- Autoresponder series of email messages
- Webinar sign-ups and videos sent via email after completion
Offering a one-time download has been the method of choice for years and is still commonly used by B2B solution providers. However, because many people will subscribe, get the download, and then unsubscribe, a series of autoresponder messages could be more beneficial to keeping people on your list long enough to turn them into paying customers.
This is my favorite short video that makes understanding marketing automation fun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFZSSYsxE1o
Webinars are one of the most powerful methods for onboarding new prospects. Brands offering strong audio-visual content will have an early lead in capturing the attention of potential clients.
Most people have no problem with sharing their name and email address when they sign up to participate in a webinar. They are also more likely to open your follow-up email messages containing the completed webinar, especially if you include additional information such as answers to questions raised during a Q&A portion of the presentation.
Landing Page Creation and Testing
Everything starts with your custom landing pages. Every offer will have at least one lead capture form or landing page that is specifically about that offer. Test multiple landing pages to determine which generate more leads.
Create landing pages and test them by using solutions specifically created for that purpose. Choose from existing templates that are easily edited, typically by dragging and dropping the elements you wish to use.
The best solutions allow you to see what the landing page will look like on both mobile devices and computer screens as you build them. This makes it easy to create a compelling design and quickly change out particular elements to test one element at a time.
Use Webinars for Lead Capture, Branding, and Education
Getting people to subscribe to live events generates an urgency that recorded events don't have. They get people to act now rather than later. When prospects interact with your brand by asking questions and participating, they are more likely to remember what is being offered.
Webinars are only as good as the presenters and content, so don't skimp here. Focus on making the topic truly interesting. Before you create your presentation visuals, review these tips from Seth Godin:
Use Autoresponders to Keep People Engaged Longer
Gated content works because you can get contact information. But what really works is continuing to build a relationship past the download or webinar. For that, autoresponder series are best.
The good news about autoresponder messages is that they are most effective when they're short. People read and act on short messages immediately; they save long messages for a later that never comes. What that means is you may already have the content you need for your series. Take long form content and break it up into sections and use each section as a separate message.
How Often to Send Messages
Marketing platforms are great, but they can offer too much flexibility for beginners who don't know how to use them effectively. How many messages should you send? How far apart? What time of day? You need a place to start before you can start testing to get the best answers for your business.
Understand that there is no “correct” answer to any marketing strategy. Many marketing gurus email every single day and want to push people away who aren't rabidly interested in their messages.
How often to email will depend on your business, your audience, and your goals. Personally, I do not want to hear from a brand more than once or twice a week at most–and that applies to the brands I actively patronize. If you don't email at least once every couple of weeks, your subscribers may forget about you and flag your messages as spam.
Here is a typical timing example that I decided upon after giving the question about email frequency a lot of thought and reading a lot of recommendations:
- Immediate: Thank you for subscribing; include a description of what the recipient will be receiving and how often.
- Next day: First message with an explanation of why subscribers are receiving it (in case they forgot).
- Three days later: Second message in the series.
If messages contain information about a particular challenge someone may be having, I will send them every three days, up to as much as a week apart. If you feel three days is too often, try five so that they do not always arrive on the same day (until you know what day people are likely to open them).
Strategies to Increase Sales and Profits
Businesses that offer weekly specials should send messages once a week. For example, online grocers that sell perishable produce will send their messages on Sundays with cut-off times for produce to ship that week since they need to ship on Mondays to ensure delivery before the weekend.
E-commerce stores should look at prior years' sales and promote products that sold well during the current and upcoming time periods of prior years. Do this with email as well as pay-per-click and remarketing.
By looking at your records to see where future demand may lie, your business can start promoting earlier and reap more sales. I call this positioning yourself ahead of the next sales wave.
How to Implement Marketing Automation
In years past, solutions to manage email may or may not have had autoresponder functions built in; some entry-level email solutions still don't. Landing page creation tools and solutions for split testing, also known as A/B testing and multivariate testing, were standalone.
Webinar solutions were also separate. But today, at least some companies offer all of these in one integrated package. I know that GetResponse originally priced these separately, but when it introduced its marketing automation workflow, it also started offering an introductory price to use everything in one integrated package.
I mention GetResponse because the cost of using this integrated solution (at least at current pricing) is only 25 to 30 percent of what it would cost to use separate solutions and only a fraction of the cost of other marketing solutions. Also, because it integrates with Salesforce and other CRM platforms, a small business can have nearly the power of a $200 to $5000 marketing solution if the primary goal is email or webinar lead generation and follow-up.
Higher priced marketing automation solutions should include lead scoring and source attribution, landing page creation and testing, and automation workflows, but not sales automation. They typically should also integrate with sales solutions and CRMs. I am not aware of a solution that includes webinar integration, but they may exist. There is some overlap between marketing automation and sales solutions.
Difference Between Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Sales
The primary difference between advanced email marketing is the ability to monitor, score, and route leads from multiple channels beyond just email. When comparing solutions, determine which of these items each offers in order to make a fair comparison:
- Email marketing
- Social listening/analytics
- Landing page creation
- Web analytics
- Workflow business rules
- Sales CRM integration
You could invest in a full blown marketing solution, but expect to pay between $200 to $800, up to thousands for implementation. Enterprise solutions are the most expensive and require the highest upfront costs plus payment annually in advance. Surprisingly, even the most expensive enterprise marketing solution, Marketo, must be integrated with Salesforce or a similar CRM solution, so include that cost in any price comparisons.
By using the least expensive marketing automation, as explained in this post, plus some social listening tools, a small business can get a system that's almost as effective as an expensive system, and for a fraction of the cost.
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