Marketing is really what drives your business forward. But, most marketing activities are tough, tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Yes, it can be dreadful thinking about all that you must undertake to complete your marketing tasks. But, you must invest in it somehow to keep moving forward. The best way to handle your sales and ads is to automate your marketing campaigns, preferably with artificial intelligence and live chat software.

 Content is King but engagement is Queen, and the lady rules the house.  – Mari Smith

Ways to automate your marketing.

Delivering the right message at the right time is essential to increasing your ROI. So much so, 77% of businesses are believed to have witnessed a rise in conversions since they started using automation.

So, here are a few ways you could accomplish that:

1. Artificial Intelligence.

The most powerful tool in the hands of a business owner or a marketing manager is artificial intelligence. Chatbots are no longer just for techs. It is a tech that, in the hands of marketers, can make businesses flourish, giving the extra-special human touch, even without having to spend on additional customer service staff.

What’s even better is that bots never go wrong, and never spend time thinking over what the response should be, or even on normal human activities, like taking regular breaks during working hours. They are always there to respond to client/customer queries every minute of the day, as long as you keep the systems running.

AI can follow shopper behavior to offer necessary suggestions on products and services that customers may have shown interest in. Shoppers can also ask chatbots specific details about products in stock, request to be notified when a product is available or even get suggestions based on past purchases.

2. Live Chat Software.

You can boost sales with live chat services too. There are quite a few live chat software options available in the market to choose from. These applications can make marketing activities quicker and more efficient.

Live chats improve sales in several ways. Here are a few ideas:

• Generate quality leads by engaging prospects in real time, customizing messages, shortening sales funnel, improving lead nurturing, increasing conversions.
• Building the mail list from web visitors whom you managed to engage on live chat with offers or the like. You can request for the visitor’s email ID by promising to reply to his or her queries in detail. He/she may not have bought your product, but you can keep urging them to do so via emails.
• Mine chat transcripts to analyze customer trends, preferences, behavior and insights. These can be successfully utilized to chalk out a new strategy or test out a current one.
• Personalized conversations always please customers. This is where you can efficiently use live chat software to cater to every customer’s specific needs, even while automating your marketing processes. This software is a mix of both live and chatbots. The initial part of the conversation is dealt with by the bots, while the customer relations executive can engage with another customer who has already asked questions that go beyond the purview of bots.
• Better than CTAs, since with CTAs on your landing page you can only hope that your customers would take action if they feel like it. But with live chat software, you can ensure you have got your customers’ attention and engage them long enough for them to decide if they will go ahead and buy your products or hire your services.

3. Email Marketing.

Email marketing is still one of the best means of reaching out to your audience. And if you don’t have to send every one of them manually, even better. Automated emails make life easier while ensuring that it will appeal to your customers, pique their interest, and increase revenue.

Once your intended customers have been added to your email list, they should receive regular emails, informing them of the recent offers, changes in policy, latest collections, their latest transactions, and recent page visits, etc. All these emails depending on the stage your leads are in.  

Remember: Each mail should have a call to action. Depending on which stage your leads are in, always end your emails by urging them to do something. It may be to view the latest collection or to read what the media has to say about you, or even to contact you for further queries.

Email automation can also be used to wish customers on their birthdays with coupons or remind them when it’s time to reorder supplies.

4. Inbox Filtering.

Throughout the day, an innumerable number of emails keep bombarding your inbox, most of which would inevitably be junk. You may end up exhausted, checking through every mail to make sure you don’t miss out on important ones, and in turn, also waste a lot of precious time that should have been spent strategizing your next plan.

It’s best to automate your inbox. You can set this up with any email service provider by setting rules domain message authentication, reporting, and conformance, (DMARC Policy) for your inbox.

5. Social Media Marketing.

The adage “Content is King” totally fits this area of marketing. But, what good is an engaging piece of content, if you don’t share it often enough or at a time when your customers may be paying attention?

• There are quite a few ‘third-party services,’ like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, that can provide you with scheduled social media posts ahead of time.
• Most social media platforms have scheduling options.
• Some apps also come with options to schedule auto-responses to certain requests from customers, including Facebook’s seller section.

Incorporate easy email marketing strategies with your Facebook efforts to see more significant results — profits.

• Amy Porterfield

5. Marketing Analytics.

Set up automated analytics to monitor successes or losses. Don’t spend time on physically investigating analytics. Start with a list of key performance indicators, KPIs that are specific to your marketing goals and then find software that will do the job for you.

Cyfe is a great tool as it incorporates multiple platforms/software (Google Analytics, Facebook, Moz, Salesforce, etc.) to track all digital marketing campaign activity on one dashboard.

6. CRM Tracking.

Invest in a CRM tracker to track your calls, emails, meetings, etc. for each customer. This will be both time-saving and beneficial for customer service. Quite a few CRM options are available that you can utilize to connect with all your different processes to automate them.

Final Thoughts.

You have only 24 hours in a day. How many tasks can you do on your own? Wouldn’t it be great if some things were done for you? Even better, if you didn’t have to pay those working hands a monthly salary? With marketing automation, you can decrease human error and make marketing initiatives more repeatable and consistent. So, don’t think twice about it. Freeing your hands from unnecessary, menial tasks is really in your hands.

Jasika Adams

Jasika Adams is a writer with a passion for writing on emerging technologies in the areas of human resources, startups and business management. She is a talent acquisition manager currently associated with Index Time Clock. In her free time, she loves to play with her kids and reading mystery books.