How Marketing Automation Can Help Small Teams Succeed
- Are you the one who is running the show alone?
- Bootstrapped and don’t have enough funds to add the marketing team for your startup?
Here you go!
Through this post, I am trying to write down what I have learned from being a sole contributor to a few of my past projects. These learning didn’t make me a millionaire selling some ebooks or affiliate kinds of stuff but surely helped me in identifying the true potential of existing software products that can multiply anyone’s effort.
What’s wrong out there?
Most of the time we start planning to gain visitors on our website when the product is launched. No, this should not be the case rather we should start building our audience even before we build a prototype or publishing just one blogpost/podcasts, etc.
So let’s start with the email list first.
Why the email list? Because this keeps you sending returning visits to your website or blog without incurring additional cost on acquiring them again.
Although there are too many email automation tools available online, I should suggest you to discover & try products that help you scale with minimum cost. Sign up with Sendy as it allows sending unlimited emails & drips (not recommended if you want to send event-triggered emails) live or scheduled. Sendy needs integration with Amazon SES to deliver emails. It costs around $69 for a lifetime and Amazon SES cost is quite economical, so the combination of two of these products looks affordable for you.
Create a list & get a newsletter subscription box incorporated in your website or blog using Sendy codes. You should create user onboarding drip campaigns before adding a newsletter subscription box to your website.
The drips send sequential emails to users on the list, so you don’t need to sit and send emails manually at a certain interval.
In case you need to send event-triggered or segmented email sequences, you can try SendGrid, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, SendX, etc.
What’s happening now?
You are busy acquiring new users through different marketing channels and on the other hand, the email automation tool is adding up more counts to total visits by sending returning traffic through email sequences/drips.
Did I forget to mention that you can send your latest blog posts to your email list without manually inserting it into your email drafts? Yes, email marketing tools allow you to import RSS feeds in email messages.
Ok, let’s move on to the next channel that keeps you busy the whole day — Social Media.
Signing in to three of the most used social media platform at a time, posting similar content over and over again, publishing or scheduling them individually on each platform is time taking, isn’t it?
Switch to any of the social media management tools like SproutSocial, HootSuite, etc. These platforms allow you to bring all your social media profiles in one place. This helps you manage your posts, followers, mentions, comments, and publishing for all the platforms from one place.
If you want to add more acceleration to your social media activities, you can start using platform-specific social media automation tools that actually imitate you i.e. reply to your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn messages, post status on your behalf and do much more. The best thing is few of these tools are built on Google Spreadsheets allowing you to do more customization even then you don’t have coding skills. For Autotweet on Twitter, you can try Relgrowth.
Now the third thing we need to focus on is Customer Service. If they are happy, they are soon going to be our Brand Ambassadors.
Use Hubspot, simple and easy.
You get a free live chat application to add it to your website. You can connect your Google account to access your support emails on Hubspot and reply back from the same dashboard. You can manage a complete life cycle of user here i.e. guiding a user from onboarding to sending them emails in sequences, to pass them from MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) to the sales team after certain events or actions.
Sales teams can then start their own email drips or calls using an inbuilt schedule managing system.
Hubspot, Zoho, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Freshworks are the world’s most known and used marketing automation platforms. They help you understand users, engage with them, help you sell and retain your customers and whatnot, they keep your customers happy by keeping you posted about each and every request they make through any integrated channels. So you don’t miss your customers.
Last but not the least you should definitely have access to automation tools like Zapier & Integromat that help to connect apps to apps.
For example, you got 1000 email subscribers in your Sendy list (as we created on in Sendy at the beginning of this post) and you want to export it to Google Sheets, what will you do?
- Hmm, login to Sendy, go to lists and will export it.
What if you need to add those 1000 subscribers to HubSpot?
- Will import the exported sheet to HubSpot
Now, what will you do in case you need to add the same subscribers to HubSpot who are subscribing to your email list through Sendy, live?
- Not sure!
These integration tools make sure you find it easy moving your data from one app to another without any hassle or expertise in writing codes.
I hope the above suggestion helps you become more productive, focused and resulting by adopting marketing automation or productivity tools.
