Email and marketing automation software is used to nurture leads and automate your marketing so that you can provide personalized attention to your clients in a scalable way.
It lets you categorize leads in such a manner that you can tell right away whether they are simply “interested” or “sales ready”.
Samples of email and marketing automation software include email management programs that segment lists and target specific emails to distinct customer groups.
They are a helpful way of dividing your prospects according to where they are in the sales timeline so that you can optimize your approach depending on their willingness to buy at any particular moment.
Another example of email and marketing automation software are lead nurturing programs. This is software that can warm up leads with a series of customized emails.
In most cases, they start with an introduction of your business and the product and services you are promoting and gradually builds towards asking for the sale.
Personalized Emails
Email and marketing automation software programs can be used to trigger personalized emails based on your leads’ behavior online.
This software looks at what visitors to your pages do once they get there, then uses “bots” that give programs automated responses tailored to each visitor’s actions so that you can appeal to precisely what they are looking for on your website.
Automated Report Generation
Marketing analytics software are tools you can use to generate reports and measure the success of different elements of your marketing strategies. It typically tracks all of your marketing activities and automatically creates rich reports so that you can have the tools you need to direct future marketing strategies.
One examples of marketing analytic software is closed-loop reporting. This type of program ties your leads back to specific marketing initiatives. This is helpful in calculating the actual return on investment for each specific marketing strategy.
Another type of marketing analytics are programs that analyze your web traffic to determine which sources are generating the most and best leads.
This lets you to focus your efforts on those sources that are working the best, and limiting your expenses on those programs that are failing to provide a good stream of prospects.
Tracking Your Competition
Competitor tracking software includes programs that analyze your competitors’ online metrics. Knowing and understanding the performance of your competitors in the marketplace is every bit as important – if not more important – than understanding your own business’s performance.
You can use these tools to make decisions that will guide your company past your competitors and more effectively dominate the marketplace and capture a bigger share or customers.
Outbound Marketing and Its Limitations
Outbound marketing is based on things you do offline to generate sales leads. These can include networking with other industry professionals, attending trade shows, participating in seminar and webinars, creating email blasts aimed at purchased lists, cold calling potential customers, using outsourced telemarketers, and print, television, radio and billboard advertising.
These are called “outbound marketing” because you are taking pushing out into the world so that you can hope to find potential customers. But outbound marketing isn’t always as focused as inbound marketing. And, ultimately, it may be less effective because people have become so inundated with being bombarded with marketing messages throughout their day that they tend to ignore nearly all commercial messages.
In addition, advances in technology enables people to tune out, fast forward or skip over most outbound marketing that they have no interest in. For these reasons, outbound marketing is far less effective and consequently less desirable as a marketing investment opportunity than inbound marketing.
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