Ask people what they think of marketing automation and you’ll hear many answers, even misconceptions and urban legends. We want to help small business owners understand marketing automation by addressing popular myths about it.
1. “My business isn’t big enough for marketing automation.”
Traditionally, marketing automation has been reserved for the biggest of brands with the money and resources that can be dedicated to routing millions of consumers through their marketing and sales processes.
Not anymore. Marketing automation is becoming much more mainstream and accessible to small businesses. In fact, FOCUS Inc. discovered that small businesses represent the fastest growing segment of marketing automation users. Like CRM, adoption of marketing automation technology is expected to increase to 50% by 2015.
There are many marketing automation solutions available on the market. You want the one that is sized for your business. Infusionsoft is tailored for businesses with 2-25 employees, seeing more than $100K in annual revenue and are actively marketing on the web. If you’re still looking around, check out this marketing automation buyer’s guide from Econsultancy.
2. “Marketing automation is impersonal to my prospects and customers.”
Marketing automation provides more personal experiences to prospects and customers through being attentive to their actions (or inaction). Often people associate marketing automation with annoying messages sent at unwanted times – that’s called spam. A successful marketing automation campaign occurs when customers and prospects don’t realize that the communications they received was sent automatically. Likewise, marketing automation campaigns should be created to be personal and genuine. See a few examples that we’ve created.
What’s more impersonal: following up when you’re on vacation automatically or letting them fall through the cracks? We’d argue that following up consistently is better.
3. “Marketing automation requires expensive consultants.”
This ultimately depends on the amount of time and energy you put into your marketing activities and the size of your business. Honestly, the first month or two will be the most challenging while all the campaigns are built and the copy is written. After then, people are being nurtured from marketing automation campaigns and the marketing and sales machine feeds itself.
Marketing automation is still a new concept for many businesses – just like social media. If the business has folks who are marketing-savvy, consultants often aren’t needed. However, for a more traditional business, they would benefit strongly in having a marketing automation consultant help them implement the software and make the migration smooth.
4. “Marketing automation is costly.”
The ROI in marketing automation is there. The right marketing automation software is available for the right stage of businesses so it makes sense and is affordable.
Let’s take a stab at showing the value of marketing automation:
Leads per month: 100
Sales per month: 10
Revenue per customer: $1000
Increase conversion rate from 10% to 20%
Before Revenue: $10,000/Mo
After Revenue: 20,000/Mo
(These numbers are hypothetical, but you can see how marketing automation fits.)
In the example above, it’s important to focus on the conversion rate. With marketing automation, a business can follow-up effectively and consistently with every prospect, delivering helpful content to aid the purchasing decision. A nice side benefit is that it can shorten the sales cycle, too. Marketing automation is all about increasing the relevance in the follow-up messages, making them specific to each individual’s needs and delivering more engagement (value) between the prospect and the business.
There are a lot of marketing automation providers available these days. Their prices range from a couple hundred a month to several thousand – depending on the size of the business and number of contacts they’re working with. As mentioned earlier, it’s not a question about the cost – but always a matter of finding the right solution that fits for the business and offers them the legroom to grow. B2B marketing analyst, David Raab, has put together a guide to help business owners select the right marketing automation vendor based on their needs.
5. “Marketing automation is only about lead-generation.”
Marketing automation is an advanced technology that monitors the behaviors (clicks, opens, purchases and other activities) found in customers and prospects. With this technology, businesses are able to build strong relationships simply from a transaction, an opt-in or from regular and expected follow-up messages. And it’s not only email, either – marketing automation can tap into the power of direct mail, phone, fax and even having someone provide tailored attention to each customer in your business.
Lead generation is only one step in the customer lifecycle. It’s important to business owners, but so is the need to intelligently send the right information to the right prospects at the right time. Lead nurturing is just as important as lead generation – otherwise you may as well toss those leads in the trash.
And after the sale, customers want to know that the business cares and is in touch with relevant product information and company updates. Segmenting customers instead of sending to “all” customers is a fine art that only marketing automation can make a simple and easy process.
To help visualize this, we have a Perfect Customer Lifecycle. It’s a guide to that shows the prospect-to-customer ascension path and segments the process into seven key areas. Marketing automation helps business owners build a scalable process that helps gently guide a prospect to become a customer, then helps a customer stay satisfied and asks for referrals.
The point here is that you see that it is possible to maintain and scale the relationships a business has with its customers and can do it profitably. These misconceptions are prevalent throughout the industry and I often hear these questions from people when I explain what marketing automation is to them. Hopefully, I’ve helped you understand it a little better.
Have you heard any other myths or urban legends about marketing automation? Spill the beans in the comments below and we’ll put them to the test.
[Image credit: nesster]
Posted In: Marketing Automation
