Marketing and advertising agencies are always keen to offer and supply clients the latest fashionable service, whatever that may be. So the flavour of the month right now is of course social media.
But what about services that can really make a dramatic impact on the bottom line for their clients. I would like to make out the case for offering marketing automation as a solution. As I specialise in automated marketing, in particular using a leading system for small to medium size businesses called Keap / Infusionsoft I will reference this.
OK, so agencies will offer PayPer Click and SEO services and they will deliver traffic to the clients site within a given budget and fee. A small proportion of the visitors will go on the buy from the clients site -great! But while the site has converted the “low hanging fruit” into buyers, many of the visitors will leave without buying. Surely this wastage is annoying for the client, but agencies don’t seem to care! Marketing automation can address this issue by capturing leads and automating the marketing to these leads for months, even years if required.
And what about the customers who purchased? I often find that clients build up email lists of customers and then make do with using a simple email system to manually send out bulk newsletter email sends to the entire list. With the right automation system these customers can be individually nurtured, up-sold and cross sold – all on autopilot. The first thing I learnt back in the 90’s in the traditional mail-order business is that the “customer list is where the gold is”, the same is still true today, so why do the experts at the agencies largely ignore this valuable asset?
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I first got into marketing automation back in 2009. Previously I was a mail-order marketer – direct mail and catalogues.
A client of mine wanted to migrate from off-line direct marketing to online marketing. We had a small email list – only 1,200 addresses. So using a simple and inexpensive email sending platform and PayPal “Buy Now” buttons off we set. Within days we were generating orders and all appeared rosy.
Then came the issues that restricted our progress. The first issue was of fulfilling the orders which proved difficult when exporting raw data from PayPal and this also made customer service tricky and time-consuming. And you could forget the thought of generating any meaningful reports. Then when we wanted to conduct targeted email campaigns to new customers and we found we could not because we now had two, separate and unlinked databases – one for orders and one for email addresses.
This is where I see many new and smaller businesses finding themselves. First, they create an on-line shop, then they need to fulfil orders, then they want to use email marketing and maybe use affiliate marketing. But as I had quickly discovered, if you use separate systems and databases that do not “talk” to each other then you quickly get bogged down with IT issues – we call this “Multi System Chaos”. Often the business gets “stuck in the mud” with on-line marketing and any thoughts of on-line success soon disappear.
I quickly realised that having separate databases and systems was a recipe for future headaches which I did not want, and so as a marketer I then looked to find a cost-effective solution to automate online marketing activity and generate sales.
I found the solution by following and observing how the internet marketing gurus (the guys who make serious sales and money with online marketing) conducted their marketing – and this was with Keap / Infusionsoft.
Then once I had Keap / Infusionsoft at my disposal the world of internet marketing opened up to me. One central database and dashboard enabled me to control and automate the marketing program.
Below are just the headline benefits;
Email Marketing – highly targeted, automated sequences. Able to build sophisticated on-line campaigns that integrate with off-line marketing.
E-commerce– shopping cart, one page order forms, credit card and PayPal payments.
Affiliate Marketing module
Customer Service
Lead management
Opportunity identification
Continuity/ Subscription / Membership programs.
Digital and physical product fulfilment
As a result of acquiring Keap / Infusionsoft and deploying the email and affiliate marketing tools that I now had at my fingertips I took my client from zero on-line revenue to £500,000 within 5 months. In addition we generated an email list of over 300,000 records. My next step with Keap / Infusionsoft was to develop a subscription product which was marketed to the email list and this alone generated £100,000 revenue in the first year.
So when marketing automation can make such a positive impact on a clients turnover it still amazes me why agencies never off this as a solution for their clients.
To my mind an agency that could not only offer services to both generate site visitors (ie PPC and SEO etc) but also to take that traffic and efficiently convert it into repeat customers would be on to a winner.
If you would like to learn more about marketing automation and how I can assist with clients then please schedule a Discovery call where we can have a chat.
