How to save time and automate your Marketing

With each Marketing channel calling out for content, it can be difficult for businesses to update each platform consistently and creatively on a regular basis. We always advise our clients to post on a daily basis and amongst other things in your business, this can be a time consuming task for most. As well as keeping check on followers, interactions, reach, engagement and click through rates via social media platforms.

Scheduling Social Media via built-in features and third party sites like Buffer and Hootsuite has been happening for some time now, (though we don't like to shout about it too much, because we feel that social media algorithms penalise your content on newsfeeds and prevent you reaching the top), and it has saved business owners a LOT of time whilst ensuring content is being published frequently.

In addition to scheduling Social Media, more of us are beginning to automate our Marketing campaigns as a result of saving time. You may have seen more paid ads on your social newsfeeds asking you to sign up? or retargeted marketing ads following you from platform to platform? and emails that are less like newsletters and more personally targeted emails?

Email Marketing is a big part of marketing automation as it's the third stage of the customer buying journey, the conversion stage, where you have can capture customer data and target them through this platform. A lot of email sign ups are generated through social media, where initially your business was trying to gain momentum in awareness and interest, before conversion. The other good thing about email marketing is that the data you are collecting is from warm leads, from customers who are interested in what your business has to offer.

Email automation enables your business to regularly connect with your customer base and reduces the time attracting new customers. With the right business rules and workflows in place, you will see incredible benefits. You can target customers based on their behaviour with your brand.

For Example: A frequent visitor to your website can be targeted with a “do you want to register for our newsletter?” email. Or, a customer who hasn’t purchased a product in over three months could receive a “we miss you!” email. These are only some of the examples of email automation – thanks to the advanced tools and technologies available, you can define a wide range of scenarios as per your customers’ persona and automate emails accordingly.

As your business grows and your audience expands, it will no longer be feasible to identify leads using website analytics and manually send out communications. That's why automation is now a must-have.

3 reasons why automation will save you time

1. You can scale your business based on your business rules and workflows. If you communicate manually, your marketing team can only send out so many communications per day. On the other hand, email marketing will continue to message new and old customers automatically.

2. You can personalise the message based on how the customer interact with your business. Your new customers will receive a different message to customers who are already buying from you. This is extremely effective when converting leads because the message is targeted and relevant.

3. Do less work with more results. Invest a significant amount of time on personalisation, workflow, configuration, set-up etc and save time on manual pipelines in the long run.

For benchmarks on email marketing automation, you will need to look at the metrics to measure the effectiveness of each email. For help setting up your automation, or review & analysis reporting on your existing workflows, contact us hi@gemmediamk.com and we can analyse in more detail.