Marketing automation services are essentially an expansion of digital in-bound marketing tactics. A customer expresses an interest in your product or service, they come to your website for more information and marketing automation tools spin creative webs to capture the prospect. From pop-ups, to forms, to email buy-ins, automated marketing is created to capture your virtual visitor.
Traditional inbound marketing is found in brick and mortar stores through the use of signage, in-store specials, packaging, point of purchase displays and customer loyalty programs. The customer comes into the store and posted specials attempt to convert their interest into a purchase. The addition of suggested customer loyalty memberships work to solidify the relationship and opens up more touch points for current customers.

Be one with the traffic

In most cases a visitor to your website is a hot prospect, the right time to sell to them is when they arrive, or when they perform a specified action. Marketing automation services answer this need by tracking, reporting, identifying, capturing and noting actions of each visitor. Each action on the website, whether clicking on an individual product page, downloading an ebook, or viewing a video, is noted. This information helps to identify what that visitor is interested in and helps to target follow up information. With automated marketing we can determine if the visitor has been to the website before, what pages they viewed, actions they took, etc.
Marketing automation is synced with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Visitors can be segmented into specified lists depending on triggers set for each action you want to track. For instance if a visitor comes to our website and downloads our print marketing ebook the download form requests their name and email. This can then feed the CRM into a segment we have created for print marketing. Someone who purchases the internet marketing ebook could be entered in the internet marketing prospect segment.
Marketing automation can also be designed to provide suggestions to the visitor through popup windows or notifications. As an example, if a prospect we recently met at a Lansing or Grand Rapids event comes to our website and lands on a  blog that talks about website maintenance, we might suggest they check out our website maintenance plans page. If they go to the website maintenance plan page we can create a pop-up or notification that suggests they call us for an instant quote during office hours. All of these pieces can be automated for prospect follow-up and to trigger numerous campaign actions based upon activity.

So are marketing automation services like digital cruise control for your internet marketing?

Did you ever hear the story that was spread around the time cruise control was first offered? It was said that a driver of a van turned on his cruise control and then got up to change his vinyl record. (Yes, cruise control is a vintage feature along with record players and 8-tracks.) Snopes has informed us renditions of that story are urban myths, but it illustrates my point. Cruise control helped alleviate one action required to drive a car but the driver still needed to be present and attend to other driving tasks. The same with automated marketing, although it eliminates a task or two, you still need to steer the prospect in the direction you want them and that takes time, planning and attentive follow up by your sales department.
If you’re ready to to drive up sales, give Connection Group  a call today to see if marketing automation services could be the best route for your company.