Marketing automation - Does it make sense for SME-s?
5 min reading
Marketing automation is the bogey for many small and medium enterprises even though there is a plethora of affordable alternatives, so financial limitations should not stand between efficiency increase and SMEs. Why are still many company managers uneasy about automating their marketing processes?
Automated marketing and high level customer relations? An absolutely powerful match!
Many people instinctively think that the two end points of the level of marketing automation are in contrast both in terms of quantity and quality.
Well, it is time to declare that this is not so.
Although suitable for the efficient service of a large number of customers, automation does not rule out, but on the contrary, considerably promotes kind, attentive and customer-centric communication when used in tandem with a well-chosen software and the appropriate marketing strategy.
What can automation offer that an average contact person cannot?
It never has a bad day and has infallible memory even after many years.
A properly configured automatism with relevant messages is like the most thoughtful company managers themselves were addressing their business partners. It is an attentive and professional point of contact, which shows even more as the business partnership matures. It remembers every due date, knows the wine varieties your partners order and how these orders are distributed throughout the year. Automation knows which restaurants are more popular in summer, or in autumn and winter. It does not fail to send a relevant social courtesy message to all business partners on holidays, and it also determines when the sales volume can and should be increased for each partner. All that automated.
Perfectly customisable to your company
What makes an automation solution good is that it can flawlessly align with the goals of a company, putting everything “in one hand”. It stores and processes all data at the same time. Using the correct logical relationships to convert data to information delivers fabulous profits and benefits: the right message is sent in the right time to the right business partner with the highest conversion probability.
Who is the contact person or sales expert that can immediately retrieve the necessary key partner data with next to no effort while storing the data of several hundreds of partners? Messages dispatched in the right time do not only make partner relations stronger, but can also affect stocks and drive service sales.
The marketing pipeline, the alignment of customers / customer groups and messages has practically no limits, but creativity. There are virtually no limits to the number of potential interfacing links in a good automation software. Moreover, you can also monitor the number of people who opened an e-mail, the distribution of messages and announcements according to the segments that clicked on them, and the triggers that deliver conversion.
Beware! Marketing automation can be a magic wand, but you decide what you use it for!
Automation will work as you configure it. You can use it to retain so many smiling return customers that would be certainly impossible without automation. You still cannot skip segmentation and determining the tone of your messages and your own brand. Giving thorough consideration to the automation process and the desired messages to fit your company’s annual marketing strategy are critical.
There is no doubt: once you find the harmony between the individual components, you will have no difficulty in nourishing, building and improving your truly long term, possibly large number of business relationships.
