Increase Customer Touchpoints with Marketing Automation
As a marketer, your goal should always be centered on reaching your audience with the right message. If you are a boat dealer, you need to make sure the watersports enthusiasts in your area to know that you have the best boats at the best prices – and you definitely want them to be in the know about your seasonal sales and promotions. As an agricultural equipment dealer, you want to make sure local farmers know that you sell the highest quality equipment, and you don’t want them to miss out on your service and repair specials.
How do you deliver your messages to your prospects and customers? It’s important to focus on customer touchpoints. A touchpoint is defined by any way that a customer or prospect comes into contact with your business – before, during, or after they make a purchase from you. The most obvious customer touchpoint is when a person visits your store. Another would be when a member of your sales team reaches out to a prospect or customer about a unit they are interested in or a purchase they have made. But there is also an abundance of digital touchpoints that make it easy to reach customers anywhere, any time – before, during, or after sale.
Marketing Automation helps you cover all your bases when it comes to customer touchpoints. Anyone who visits your site and provides contact information is then added to a system that tracks their actions on your site as well as digital interactions with your business. While your website may be the first touchpoint for a new prospect, their next stop might be one of your social media channels. Marketing Automation continues to monitor additional interactions as well and takes those into account in the Lead Scoring process.
Reaching customers at different touchpoints moves to an entirely new level when utilizing email marketing capabilities within Marketing Automation. The fully automated process adds your website visitors to specific email lists based on the behaviors they display and what they show interest in on the site. Your customers and prospects are then taken through an email marketing workflow that is personalized to them – all messages they receive via email are based on the units they have expressed interest in as well as their level of engagement with your marketing efforts. The contacts in your audience who frequently click on or reply to your emails receive more and more of them, increasing the chance that they will follow through with a purchase.
The more a customer hears from you, the more likely they will be to buy from you. Emails and other methods of follow-up are highly effective in closing hot leads, and Marketing Automation makes it easy to weed out the leads that are cold, so you waste less time marketing to unlikely prospects.
The relationship shouldn’t end after the customer makes a purchase, either. In fact, there is are great opportunities to foster repeat customers through Marketing Automation post-sale follow-up – service reminders, invitations for trade-in, parts and accessories offers, and more. Marketing Automation creates a rock-solid foundation for keeping both prospects and established customers interested, engaged, and coming back for more.