Last week we discussed how marketing automation services can help your business grow, whilst saving you money.
This week, we want to show you some practical examples of how marketing automation can be used to solve a number of common business problems that can hit companies of any size in any industry.
Marketing automation can be a Godsend to small businesses looking to grow, but it can also be tricky to implement and refine.
Get it right though and marketing automation software can support any business, nurture and convert better leads, direct traffic to more relevant pages of your site, consolidate your marketing campaigns under one umbrella and much more.
Different businesses face different problems, though. Below are three problems faced by three wildly different companies which marketing automation helped to solve in its own unique, personalised and bespoke way:
1: Dormify: Creating an email journey and improving conversions
Dormify is a destination for millennials and young adults who can buy lifestyle products online for their university dorm, apartment or other small space. Their products are typically creative and artistic, but the company was having problems with batch emails.
Put simply, mass blanket sales-type emails weren’t converting as well as Dormify would have liked. Their creative message was getting lost and, crucially, Dormify felt that they weren’t making the most of such a large, diverse audience.
The difficulty being that the young audience contained so many different tastes, personalities and styles. Adults would often use it too, especially parents buying items for students. Creating different campaigns for so many different people would have taken a lot of time and a lot from their budget.
Marketing automation was key to segmenting Dromify’s audience and creating a personalised email journey. Test shots would be sent to people to identify how they responded to email, with automation segmenting people based on their reactions to the shots.
Automation services were also introduced for people that had abandoned the site with purchases still in their cart, and a creative series designed for post-purchase to keep customers interested for future purchases.
In the space of a year Dormify saw a 92 per cent increase in email revenue with email visitors also converting twice as much as the site average. Email visitors to Dormify also stayed on-site 42 per cent longer and viewed 20 per cent more pages. WIN WIN!
2: McAfee: Filtering too many leads and nurturing better quality leads
Everyone who owns a computer must have heard of antivirus and online security company McAfee.
It’s such a large brand and an instantly-recognisable name. Such a large company couldn’t have any kind problem sales-wise, surely?
Quite the opposite; time was they had far too many leads; so many in fact that the sales department began to question the marketing department. McAfee had so many leads but the quality wasn’t the best. Conversion rates were low.
Marketing automation was not only important in helping the company discover better leads and nurture them in the right way, but was key to opening a better dialogue between the two departments and making sure they were working toward the same goals.
Marketing automation helped McAfee to personalise the leads they were getting and segmenting them. People were better profiled and leads nurtured with personalised follow-up campaigns.
Marketing automation also helped McAfee to score the leads the teams were nurturing, meaning that the sales team could follow them up when they were most likely to convert.
The results make for interesting reading. McAfee saw a drop in leads of 35 per cent. The difference was they were better, more qualified leads and the company actually saw a fourfold increase in conversions.
That also meant that the value of McAfee’s new customers also improved and increased, leading them to becoming more likely for them to invest in other products and be retained by the company in the long-term.
The most crucial part of marketing automation here though was that it brought two fractured departments together and gave them the tools necessary to perform their jobs better for the overall success of the company.
3: Opsview: Data collection to profile leads from its website
IT infrastructure software company Opsview, based in the United Kingdom is a great example of a smaller company taking the next step with marketing automation.
Originally providing open-source software, the company began to commercialise its products and went about gathering data for two different types of leads. The first were simple ones who were just happy with the software, and the second were leads that hit a certain score who may be more open to other offers.
To get the latter, Opsview used marketing automation to capture data and ask survey questions to leads. People who signed up were asked numerous questions with automation segmenting them and attributing those leads with a qualifying score.
To nurture leads Opsview used their automation software to push software downloads and relevant content including whitepapers and more.
Once nurtured enough to hit the qualifying score Opsview set or if they instantly naturally qualified when signing up, that data and those leads would be sent to the sales team who would follow it up and reach out to prospects.
The quality of leads that Opsview needed to grow improved with pre-qualified leads increasing by 30 per cent from the quarter before. The volume of leads which the sales team followed up on also increased by 55 per cent in the same period of time.
Most importantly marketing automation helped increase revenue for Opsview by 178 per cent. Marketing automation was essential in helping Opsview create an effective data capture service, filter that data and personify leads, score them, nurture them and convert them.
Continuing on that path with marketing automation will help Opsview attract the right leads for their sales department to convert, ultimately helping overall business growth.
Marketing automation, when used properly in a creative manner, can be used in incredible ways to help small businesses and SMEs grow. Contact a Webpresence representative today to find out more about taking the next step for your business.
