How to use Marketing Automation for Sales and Profit

It’s obvious, but marketing’s intention is to boost profits, and knowing that – marketing automation should – in theory – further amplify sales.

Well, it’s not just in theory – it’s very much in practice. Take a look at these entirely convincing stats:

• 80% of marketers using marketing automation saw an increase in leads, and 77% saw a substantial increase in conversion rate.
• 37,7% of marketing automation users cited an improved quality of leads
• 45% of businesses use marketing automation software to show ROI, and 42% use it to measure performance

Marketing automation will not only decrease overhead and improve results across your marketing processes, but it has a high ROI.

It’s not only in indirect ways that a marketing automation platform will improve your sales – such software can also be integrated with your CRM, and therefore all the data collected and analysed by your marketing teams will be easily accessed and leveraged by your sales team; ensuring a seamless process, better client relationships, and more sales in all.

Let’s take a look at some of our recommendations on using marketing automation to make sales and profit:

Integrate your CRM and Marketing Automation platform

As briefly mentioned above, most self-respecting marketing automation platforms offer integration with your sales CRM. For example, Swift Digital offers out-of-the-box integration with the ever popular Salesforce.

How does integration with marketing automation software help your bottom line?

Sales teams can work with the data collected and analysed by your marketing team. Behavioural, demographic, and interaction data is collected across event, email, SMS, and survey marketing. This data (with CRM integration) will be reflected, live, across your CRM leads.

Gauge how warm leads are with Engagement Scoring

Marketing automation platforms offer a wide diversity of predictive and analytic tools when it comes to understanding your audience.

Engagement scoring is one such tool. This tool enables your company to assign engagement ‘points’ to specific behaviours and actions, resulting in an overall engagement score that makes segmentation and targeted campaigns a whole lot easier.

Scoring your contacts’ engagement is also an easy way to gauge how ‘warm’ your leads are. A highly engaged recipient will be more likely to convert than an unengaged one, and as such they require completely different communication strategies.

Trigger send sales emails to contacts when they’re ready to buy

Relevance is everything in email marketing. When a contact receives an email that is relevant and timely, they’re far more likely to engage.

Marketing automation platforms often have ‘trigger’ tools which allow you to pre-schedule emails which send automatically to contacts based on their actions.

For example, your sales email will most likely succeed if sent to a contact who’s recently attended one of your events. You could set up a trigger which sends your sales email 3 days after a contact has been marked as ‘attended’ for an event.

Don’t waste time and breed mistrust by blasting all your contacts with incessant promotional emails. Instead, send the right email to the right person at the right time, and see how that improves your conversions.

Use personalized landing pages to increase conversion rates

If it hasn’t been drilled into you already: being relevant in your marketing efforts makes a huge impact on your ROI.

No one likes to feel like a number, and no one likes to feel targeted by a robot-like sales guy. With Marketing Automation tools, you can build both email campaigns and landing pages (or any other web pages) with Dynamic Content – that is, content which changes based on who’s viewing it.

This gives your marketing team a huge amount of power. Gone are the days of creating generalised copy on sales pages, in 2019 you’re going to be building variations of sales page copy so that the most effective content shows up for each individual visitor.

As you can imagine, personalizing landing pages will have a huge impact on warming up leads, as the content will be relevant regardless of the specific demographic and interests of any page visitor.

Personalize sales journeys by sharing marketing contact profiles with your sales team

Personalization via marketing automation can further help your sales team. With an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform, your sales team can leverage the huge amount of data collected by your marketing team to send follow up emails which are personalized and relevant.

Instead of running the risk of showing a disconnect between your brand’s teams (for example, asking a contact to attend one of your events when they already have done so recently), you can create a seamless brand journey for your leads by sharing all past marketing interactions with your Sales CRM.

Using a Marketing Automation platform to map out personalized lead journeys better improves upon the traditional lead to sales pipeline by making it more consistent, targeted, and relevant.

Track across multiple channels, contact behaviors, and publication reports

Nothing helps improve upon sales strategy like data. By using a Marketing Automation platform, your company will have access to more data than you probably know what to do with.

Personal contact data, behavioural data, engagement and interaction data, publication reports, event management data – and more – will all be easily available to your marketing and sales teams, enabling them to better inform strategy, and better predict conversions.

You have to measure results to best understand your leads and how they turn into paying customers – and that’s where your marketing automation software data and data analysis tools come in. With integration between your automation platform and your CRM, your sales team will have access to invaluable marketing data whenever they need it, helping them to make smart, predictive moves rather than ill informed stabs in the dark.

Turning a profit is what marketing is meant to lead to. It only makes sense then that automating your marketing processes helps to automate your sales pipeline. With better data, easier insight, and smarter tools – your marketing automation efforts will lead directly to improved sales and profits for your company. Bridge the gap between your marketing and sales team by using integrated Marketing Automation software, and see the difference in your bottom line.

Want to use Marketing Automation for sales and profit? Talk with our friendly team about Swift Digital’s marketing automation platform. You can call us on 02 9929 7001, or contact us here.

Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning emails and events communications using our drag-and-drop email and event builder.

You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, polls, article feedback, and emojis and schedule messages to send at the right time.

Government departments’ unique marketing requirements are covered with Swift Digital, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.

Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software and event management working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.

Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.

To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.

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