Regardless of your business’ operational scale or industry in which you operate, automation of your customer outreach activities can be highly beneficial. According to Small Biz Genius, 65% of businesses indicate that generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge, with 53% of marketers stating that half or more of their budget goes toward lead generation. This inevitably leads to higher costs for both marketing and sales teams regardless of how well they perform at the end of the day.
A similar study done by Finances Online shows that 71% of customers expect businesses to reach out to them early in the purchase consideration phase, with 57% of them choosing brands based on Customer Experience (CX) features provided alongside the product or service they bought regardless. Both outreach and nurturing play a pivotal role in ensuring that your business is profitable and self-sustaining in the long run. That being said, let’s dive into how automation of marketing and sales activities can indeed turn things around for your brand and ensure that your Return on Investment (ROI) shows upward growth going forward.
Higher Quality Content Creation Output
Whether you operate as a cloud-based service business or an e-commerce platform, the content you produce and showcase with your brand’s name on it will speak volumes of your business etiquette. Automating your marketing outreach and sales departments via dedicated email platforms or chatbot algorithms will ensure that your content creators have more time on their hands.
This will allow them to create content of higher quality based on more detailed research, audience targeting, SEO, and other factors that will add up to your content’s performance once it’s published. Tools such as Evernote can also be utilized to ensure that your content is well-formatted and free of proofreading and/or grammar errors. Higher quality content marketing posts will be shared more, have lasting value, and ensure that you convert more viewers into quality leads as a result of more time and resources allocated to the content creation phase.
Reduced Cost Per Lead
Reducing your Cost Per Lead (CPL) while also maximizing your revenue with each piece of content you publish lies at the heart of marketing and sales automation. According to Social Media Today, 47% of businesses stated that growth of sales revenue is the reason behind their increased focus on automation, with 74% stating that the time they save by automating outreach processes is the largest benefit of automation. By introducing marketing automation into your business, you will effectively ensure that more viewers convert into customers going forward.
Michael Brook, Head of Marketing Department at Studicus spoke on the matter recently: “Ideally, you want your marketing and sales departments to be sustainable and bring in more value than their initial cost. That way, your profit margin will increase with each quarter and you will be able to allocate newly-acquired resources into the further refinement of marketing and sales, increased pays, PPC, etc. – therein is the true value of outreach automation.”
Higher Quality Lead Nurturing
The secret to ensuring that your business is profitable in the long run lies in lead nurturing. Once you have successfully converted a number of leads into recurring customers, you should make sure that they stay loyal to your brand. This can be done in a variety of ways such as email marketing with special offers, dedicated 24/7 customer support available as well as incentives for repeat purchases of your products or services.
Marketing and Sales Collaboration
Lastly, introducing automation into your marketing and sales processes will effectively ensure that both departments collaborate on common tasks and goals in the foreseeable future. Cross-department collaboration can be highly advantageous for a plethora of reasons, including team morale, productivity, insight into future campaigns, better lead nurturing activities, etc.
Once marketing and sales become one in your company, customers will start to perceive your brand’s image as a cohesive whole and be more likely to refer their social circles to your website. This can lead to further ROI increase opportunities through the introduction of referral links, exclusive discounts, and other conversion incentives in your digital marketing campaign, ideated by the sales department. Start thinking of these two elements as facets of the same coin and you will have a much easier time coming up with creative new ways to utilize their potential in automated customer outreach.
The Essence of Profitability (Conclusion)
While it may seem counterintuitive at first, automation of your marketing and sales activities will ensure that profits rise while costs go down over time. This is especially true for businesses with an international audience where manual servicing and outreach would require extraordinary feats of organization and availability around the clock.
Now that we have a clearer idea of why automation is key for ROI and continuous business growth, it’s time for you to find creative and brand-related ways to utilize its functionality. Don’t simply rely on scheduled emails or social media posts and call it a day – find ways to intrigue your followers and existing leads with unique content ideas and they will very likely return the favor and purchase your products and services.
Author Bio
Angela Baker is a self-driven specialist who is currently working as a freelance writer at writing services and is trying to improve herself and her blogging career. She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth and is convinced that it’s always important to broaden her horizons. That's why Angela develops and improves her skills throughout the writing process to help to inspire people. Also, she writes for LiveInspiredMagazine, rounding out her professional writing career.