We know nothing is ever fully automated—not unless you’re hiring robots to do your work for you—but wouldn’t it be nice to have some aspects of your marketing strategy handled by someone (or something) else?
Every first-time customer goes through a series of steps starting with them as a prospective lead and ending with them becoming an actual customer. Marketing automation helps with that process by streamlining tasks associated with each touchpoint—things like posting on social media and sending out emails. Here are some great tools that can help make each touchpoint of the marketing process much simpler:
Step 1: Reaching Out to New Leads
One of the first steps in marketing involves finding new leads. Use Connectivity’s Customer Insights product to learn more about your current audience, including age, household income, geographic proximity, and interactions with your business. You can then use Connectivity’s Automated Marketing Campaigns tool to create lookalike ad campaigns to target leads who share similar demographic details with your best customers, and direct them to your site.
Step 2: Converting Your Potential Customers
Once prospective customers are brought to your website, you need to ensure they won’t leave right away. Unbounce helps you create flexible landing pages that engage your customers, encouraging them to either continue browsing your store or make a purchase.
Step 3: Making Sales
The average online shopping cart abandonment rate is nearly 69%. That’s a lot of lost sales. Shopify has the tools to make the sales process easy for you by helping you create an appealing online store for your site. When a purchase is made, you can accept the order in one click, and your inventory is automatically updated. And you can recover lost sales by automatically sending an email reminder with a link to the customer’s shopping cart. Easy, peasy.
And now that they’ve made a purchase, you can take it easy. Just kidding! Now you need to make sure your customers will return.
Step 4: Bringing Your Customers Back
You’ve turned a lead into an actual customer, but your work doesn’t stop there. With Connectivity’s Reviews and Social Media Monitoring tool, you can build a strong online reputation by keeping track of online reviews of your company, and see which ones you should respond to. Increase your customer retention rate by following our tips on following up with a customer.
We know it can be a time-consuming process to maintain your social media accounts—43% of businesses spend six hours a week on social media. You can simplify the process by scheduling your posts with social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.
With these tools, you can ensure that you’ll have a much more efficient and productive marketing plan in place.
Top image credit: Ruslan Grumble/Shutterstock
Alex Vaccaro is VP of Marketing and Client Services for Connectivity.
