If you own a brick-and-mortar store, you’ll know that every second, minute, and hour of your time is precious. Marketing automation can boost customer engagement efforts and save businesses time and resources for long-term growth.
Tasks like serving customers, replenishing stock, managing staff and bookkeeping all need assistance, making it harder to find time for the things that actually progress your business, like marketing.
For store owners that never have a spare minute, it is still possible to run a thriving business that actively engages with customers on a one-to-one level. The answer lies in marketing automation and allowing technology to remove some of the pressure from your drained resources.
Marketing Automation for Brick-And-Mortar Stores
Marketing automation solutions are used to perform some of the repetitive, often time-consuming tasks that concern the marketing function of your business. An example of this in practice would be a regular customer receiving a loyalty discount after purchasing their 10th coffee at the same shop. Rules can be set within the marketing automation technology to trigger a coupon delivery once the customer has made their purchase.
There are lots of ways of implementing the technology, but every tool will base itself on a foundation of data – usually collected by the business itself – which informs who receives what message.
Some brick-and-mortar stores engage with hundreds of customers every single day, which is why they need marketing automation to cater for everything that happens around their business. The time-saving aspect of marketing automation is a benefit that a lot of stores will cite when using the technology. However, there are many other advantages that come with its use.
10 Benefits of Marketing Automation Solutions
1. Customer loyalty
Every customer has the potential to become loyal customers if they’re treated with care. Store owners talk about the importance of service and being able to cater for every person’s demands. Well, this should be a consideration for what happens after someone has bought with a business, as well as before it. Marketing automation can be used to communicate with people on a frequency that suits their unique situation. By setting up rules to deliver discounts, exciting offers or simple “thank you” messages, a business can make their most valuable customers feel like VIPs.
2. Saving of time
We can’t ignore that marketing automation saves a lot of time in what can be a highly chaotic working environment. Rather than have someone in charge of manually sending messages out to customers, the business can schedule communications which resonate with the people they’re trying to target.
Tasks like the segmentation of data are also worth considering, as marketing automation can help organize and utilize the information that passes through a business.
3. Reduce your manual labor
Any reduction of manual labor means a reduction in the cost of paying for it. Small businesses often employ temporary staff or contractors to take care of repetitive tasks around their marketing function. That money could be used elsewhere if marketing automation was to have a more prominent role within the business.
4. Message personalization
Good marketing automation tools will enable you to personalize the communications that come from your business. Simple touches like including someone’s name at the start of a message are effective at making a customer feel wanted and engaged. However, marketing automation gives you the power to take things further with personalized product recommendations, based around what your customers have bought.
Research shows that 56% of customers are more likely to shop with a store that knows them by their name, while 58% can be swayed by a business that suggests items linked to their purchase history. Personalization could be the missing link in your marketing strategy.
5. Centralizing your marketing operation
People who struggle to keep track of their marketing activity should always be looking for ways of simplifying their view of the function. Packing in features for campaign creation, right the way across to analytics and reporting, marketing automation tools are highly versatile and include many features that enable end-to-end communication delivery. That in turn reduces the need for specialists in areas relating to the technical aspect of marketing.
6. Strong analytics and reporting
If you launch campaigns via automation then you’re going to want to assess how they performed. Marketing automation tools can present data analytics and insights from your emails, offers and newsletters in a digestible way, giving you all the information you need before launching your next batch of communications.
7. Reduction of marketing mishaps
The marketing department can be a hotbed for human error, leading to several embarrassing moments and lost opportunities.
Once marketing automation has been used to handle a task, you can replicate that same formula to remove any chance of a mistake. These are the areas in which machines and humans can really strike a middle ground.
8. Consistent communications
With so many platforms to post on, keeping on top of things with regular updates to your email and social channels can be difficult.
Automation enables you to schedule messages when you have the time to spare. It’s always good to do special posts when something big happens, and it gives you a good chance of building a following if you’re consistent.
9. Marketing ROI
Some marketing tactics can be very hard to measure. When you look at something like a billboard or a newspaper ad, how can you guarantee that people are visiting your store as a result of that activity and spend? Marketing automation puts things like your ROI in a very clear way, enabling you to track how many people were engaged in any one of your posts. From there, you can find ways of optimizing your campaigns for an even bigger impact.
10. Customer insights
Many businesses use marketing automation to discover more about the people that buy with them. Whether you’re looking to conduct product research or wanting feedback on how to improve, surveys distributed through email and other channels help you gain crucial insight into your customers’ true feelings
Como is a customer management platform that leverages the power of marketing automation to streamline omnichannel strategy. Meet your customers where they are with relevant offerings derived from a data-driven approach.
Ready to make marketing automation part of your business? Contact us to learn how Como can enhance your omnichannel engagement strategy.
