As we continue to touch on marketing automation during the month of September, there are more important points to discuss. Marketing automation is great for things such as social media posts, messaging platforms, emails, and more, but it is also great for things you may not be aware of. It is great for customer follow-up, an essential practice for every type of business out there. In this post, you will learn more about customer follow-up and how marketing automation can help with that process.
What is customer follow-up?
This has been said many times before, but your customers are one of the most important things about your business. They are what keeps your doors open for another day, so they need to be paid attention to. But before someone is even a customer, they are considered a lead. A lead is someone who may be interested in your business but has not decided to purchase goods or services yet. If you are unaware, marketing automation can also really help you with tracking your leads. SharpSpring is a great platform for this and Focused Engagement heavily recommends it.
Whether someone is a lead or a customer, always communicate and follow-up with them whenever they interact with you. Many businesses out there simply take someone’s money and run without ever talking to their customers again. Don’t do this because it can damage your reputation and make someone not want to work with you again. You will want to treat each customer as an individual human being rather than a number. People enjoy when you know their name and remember them for contributing to your business.
As a business owner, it is important to give your customers the respect they deserve by asking how they are doing, how you can improve, and thanking them for their business. We understand that this can be a very time-consuming process, and that’s where marketing automation can help with customer follow-up.
How marketing automation can help
Custom responses based on data
The beauty of technology these days is how much data can be gathered from simple actions that a customer or lead may take. For example, if you are a bicycle store and have a lead or customer that visits a certain page, such as a popular bike listing that you are focusing on, you can set your marketing automation system to automatically notify you of this page visit. You can then contact the customer via email, phone call, or whatever other method you choose. By knowing that your potential customer was on a certain page, you can craft a specific follow-up with information from the page they viewed. This custom response is more likely to get a response out of them rather than a generic and boring response.
Utilize tasks to retain customer preferences
Another potential application of marketing automation for customer follow-up is using tasks to set reminders. By using tasks to set reminders, you can follow-up with customers when they want to be contacted rather than at a random time that may not work for them. The marketing automation software can remember the best contact times for many customers, so use this to your advantage when approaching your customer follow-up strategy.
Personalized sequences
If you would rather have the marketing automation software do all of the work for you rather than write your own responses, you are in luck because it can do just that. You can create personalized sequences for each customer that will contain their name and other information that they put into your website. These responses can work for a lot of customers, but some might be catch on that they are not custom written messages. For better results, write a few messages that you can sprinkle into the sequences to give them a bit of your business’s personality. This will benefit both sides of the sequence as customers will appreciate non-generic messages.
Let’s get started!
Marketing automation can have a huge affect on customer follow-up and your local business as a whole! Contact us today to set up a FREE consultation of your business. We specialize in many areas including marketing automation, social media, content creation, local SEO, and more. We would love to help your business grow in the local community.