B2B industries aren’t as customer-centric as B2Cs. They survive by providing services and products to other businesses. However, B2B companies often struggle with revenue generation and targeting the right audience since their customers have individual needs and are scattered everywhere.
As a savvy marketer, you know that conversions are the key to your success. But this is a challenge for even the best of B2B businesses. If you are a B2B digital marketer looking for ways to increase conversions, you’ve come to the right place.
In this post, we’ll cover how marketing automation can help increase conversions. Additionally, see how it facilitates collaboration between sales and marketing in real-time, improves efficiency and productivity, and helps engage customers throughout their buying journey.
Ready to get started? Let’s begin by understanding what marketing automation is and continue by diving deeper into how it can help your business.
What Is Marketing Automation?
As the name suggests, marketing automation (MA) simply means automating marketing tasks with technology's help. Therefore, you can automate, streamline, and measure your marketing tasks and workflows. In fact, the software can help complete repetitive marketing tasks, nurture leads, personalize messages and content, and much more. According to Blogging Wizard, 53% of B2B organizations utilize marketing automation, while 37% have plans to implement it.
What Are The Benefits Of Marketing Automation?
There are multiple benefits that MA can offer, such as saving time, money, and effort while simultaneously increasing sales and revenue. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. B2B marketing automation handles tasks that would otherwise be overlooked or would have been completed at a slower pace if attempted by a human. As a whole, it can offer the following benefits:
How Can Marketing Automation Help Increase Sales?
There are several ways to use marketing automation to drive better marketing campaign results and help grow conversions. Options range from data analytics to customer relationship management to optimizing various marketing channels. The marketing automation you choose depends on the size of your B2B, budget, niche, needs, and target audience, among other factors.
The following chart lists the common examples of marketing automation:
Let’s take a closer look at how marketing automation can improve your campaigns.
1. Email marketing
Automating your email marketing campaigns can make them more successful. It can allow you to improve lead nurturing, build stronger relationships, and generate better results.
Here are several ways automation can help convert prospects:
- Segmentation: By segmenting your target audience, you can send more targeted emails and relevant information to prospects. According to Campaign Monitor, segmented email campaigns can experience up to a 760% increase in revenue.
- Personalization: Personalized emails can connect with readers better. According to Digital Doughnut, personalized emails can improve conversions by 10%, CTR by 14%, and produce almost 20% more sales opportunities.
- Drip email campaigns: You can create a series of emails to help guide your customer through various sales funnel stages, from awareness to consideration to decision. Automation can allow you to send the right information at the right stage of the sales funnel. According to Pin Pointe, this continuous communication with customers can generate 50% more leads and 80% more sales at 33% lower costs.
- Analytics: With the help of analytics tools, you can provide accurate information on how effective your email campaign is. With metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rate, number of unsubscribes, growth rate, etc., your reports will highlight areas that need to be optimized.
2. Live website chat
Customers in every industry want immediate answers to their questions. Adopting live chat is a great way to connect with web visitors in real-time and nudge them towards a conversion. Moreover, it allows businesses to capture leads that would otherwise be lost. According to Zoho, 87% of companies find live chat quite effective, helping to increase user satisfaction, retention, conversions, and sales.
However, offering 24/7 live support means hiring a team that can interact with your customers throughout the day. Even then, there are a lot of customers that need answers, and you have limited time.
But now, automated solutions are making this task easier. They can answer queries faster, offer 24/7 support, provide relevant information according to the page a customer is viewing, and offer customer support in multiple languages.
But besides facilitating connections and interactions, live chat can provide valuable data to improve your website and other business processes.
3. Social media
Social media automation is one of the most-used and most famous examples of marketing automation today. A lot of your social media tasks can be automated, such as sharing content and thanking followers.
On average, 32% of businesses have witnessed an increase in revenue after 12 months of implementing automation tools, while 77% saw a rise in conversions. The critical question now is what kinds of automation tools you should consider investing in?
- Scheduling: Automating your editorial calendar can save time and boost engagement. This eliminates the need to post in real-time and allows you to schedule social posts in advance.
- Holistic SMM marketing: Automation tools can help coordinate efforts on multiple social media platforms by identifying the best times to post on each channel.
- Communication: Chatbots can facilitate communication with customers, streamline marketing practices, and provide better customer support.
- Analytics: Automation tools offer a wide range of analytics in one place, including impressions, reach, conversions, engagement, etc. This makes it easier to share results with your colleagues and clients. Moreover, you can automatically monitor the success of your SMM campaign across various channels.
- Content curation: You need to share relevant content to build an audience around your brand on social media. Automation tools can help you find fresh content quickly so that you can continue to engage with your target audience and build your online reputation. The more trust viewers have in your B2B business, the higher the conversions.
4. Lead nurturing and customer onboarding
For B2B companies, it can be challenging to get new customers to try services. 96% of visitors aren’t interested in buying.
In order to connect with your customer base, you need to position your products as a solution to their problems and build better relationships. As mentioned above, you can achieve this through drip email marketing, explaining how they can get the most out of making a purchase.
That’s why you need to focus on grabbing those initial prospects, convert them into sales, and transform them into loyal repeat customers.
However, your success greatly depends on how well you engage with visitors and nurture your leads. When done right, you have more opportunities to convert prospects into loyal repeat customers. According to Marketing Sherpa, improving lead nurturing can increase conversions by 79%.
Whether it’s through emailing valuable advice, providing demo videos, or offering free trial offers, you need to do whatever it takes to nurture your leads. And automation can help by providing appropriate content to ensure your prospects understand your solution's value before a sales representative contacts them. In fact, automated lead nurturing and customer onboarding allow businesses to respond to leads quickly and send them the right content automatically.
5. Churn reduction and customer retention
As a B2B company, you need loyal customers that will help generate a steady revenue stream. So the last thing you want is for them to walk away after all the hard work of converting a lead into a paying customer.
This can be a severe issue if you are a B2B organization that offers a monthly subscription. To prevent customers from canceling their subscriptions, you need to build strong relationships with them and provide valuable content. Automation can help with:
- customer relationship management to keep customers satisfied
- identify solutions to consumer problems and reduce churn rate
- offer activities and policies which to encourage existing customers to remain active with the company
6. Referral marketing
According to Influitive, 84% of B2B decision-makers start the buying process with a referral. Needless to say, referral marketing is a good source of leads for your business. More importantly, automating a referral program helps keep your leads in sync across platforms.
With the help of marketing automation, you can automate several referral marketing aspects to generate better results. For instance, B2Bs often offer customers discounts on future purchases when they refer a product to a friend. Automation appropriately distributes rewards to consumers based on their actions and effortlessly tracks their referrals.
Other ways you can automate referral marketing is by producing broadcast emails and social media posts. This helps boost awareness as well as reminds current participants of the program. For instance, the following tasks can be automated:
- Send a reminder notification to users who are inactive for a certain number of months
- Blast reminders every quarter to everyone
- Send a reminder to anyone who clicked on a link to your referral program but did not complete an action
Over To You
With proper use of automation, you can make your digital marketing efforts more productive, profitable, and competitive. However, if you genuinely want to gain the advantages of marketing automation, you need to use the right resources and integrate them properly into your current business offerings. Make sure to train your staff to have adequate skills to manage the technology stack you invest in and know how to reap the most rewards from it.
It’s time to take your B2B organization to the next level. Are you ready to bring marketing automation onboard?
