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Marketing Automation is Your Holiday Gift to Yourself

In the comedy film Multiplicity, construction supervisor Doug Kinney wishes he could be in two places at once since the demands of his job are interfering with his family life. Thanks to Doctor Leeds, a scientist with a handy cloning machine, Kinney is able to make his wishes a reality. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a comedy if things went according to plan, and Kinney soon finds himself with a lot more of himself than he bargained for.

Kinney isn’t alone in his desire to be everywhere at once. Running a business often stretches us more than we would like, especially when it comes to our marketing. One great way to keep that from happening is with marketing automation software.

Save your precious time

Perhaps the biggest advantage of automating your marketing is that it saves you time. While a marketing campaign can be exciting, many of the intermediate steps to bring in new customers or to keep in touch with old ones, are tedious and time consuming. Do you really want to manually send out product updates or newsletters to hundreds of different customers who may be scattered across half a dozen time zones? Probably not. Automation lets you concentrate your time where it really matters.

And automation means more than just automatically sending out emails at 6:00 am. Good automation software can accumulate data about each customer and each interaction you have with that customer. It allows you to build a profile, tracking buying patterns and shopping habits so you can improve your customer’s experience, and just as importantly, customize it for each buyer. We all like personal attention, and with automation software you can gather the data to provide it.

If you’re not tracking results, you’re wasting time and money

If you’re tracking a lot of information about your customers, how do you make sense of it so you can use it? That’s another benefit of quality automation software. It not only tracks data, but organizes it for you so you can make smart marketing decisions. For example, by tracking what type of information a customer accesses, the software can tell where he or she might be in the buying process. That information in turn can be used to determine what sorts of follow-up actions might be effective, such as a trigger-based marketing message or a personalized email.

Make easier decisions

There’s a lot of information flowing through a growing business. Good marketing automation software helps you keep track of it all. It helps the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Should you follow up with Smith and Company? Maybe, but it helps to know if you, or one of your team, contacted their sales rep last month, last week or just yesterday. By keeping track of customer interactions, marketing automation software can help you keep your message consistent and professional.

No, we can’t be in two places at once. And while marketing automation software won’t clone you in the literal sense, it can help you get a lot more done in a lot less time, which is almost as good. Talk about a great holiday gift to yourself.