Are you looking for a way to streamline your marketing processes? Most equine businesses don’t have the time or resources to do manual repetitive marketing. That’s where marketing automation comes in.
Marketing automation enables technology to take over those repetitive tasks. Therefore, giving you more time to focus on your brand or get a few hours of riding in!
1) Understand your customers better
Wouldn’t it be nice to know what products or services each of your customer is interested in? Well with marketing automation you can understand your customers better by getting that information directly from the campaigns you send out.
Marketing automation systems can track what your potential customers click on within your emails. This gives you a clear insight into what products they are most interested in. Allowing you to send personalised automated emails in the future.
For example; A contact clicks a link to a product in your email, they are then automatically added into another campaign that you have set up. Here they are drip-fed content related to the product. Allowing the customer to receive more targeted and relevant emails.
2) Boost Customer Loyalty
Marketing automation lets you target people based on their behaviour, preferences and purchasing history. This allows you to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
Example automated emails you could send;
- Welcome new subscribers – When somebody subscribes to your list or makes a purchase from you let them know they are welcome. Introduce them to your business and your top products or services.
- Reward customer loyalty
- Recognise milestones or birthdays
- Send personalised confirmation and notification emails.
3) Save you time
Once your marketing automation systems are set up they will save you and your team valuable time. Marketing automation should nurture your cold prospects in the background, giving you time to focus on hotter leads. Therefore saving you time as you will no longer have to send individual emails/ reminders or texts.
For example, you no longer have to manually follow up with each customer after you have sent out a quote. You can set up automatic tasks to contact that customer at regular intervals, reminding them of the quote, reinforcing why they should buy from you and notifying them of quote expiry dates. All without you physically having to send an email.
4) Increase sales
Marketing automation allows you to recapture and reengage customers that didn’t quite make it to the checkout on their first visit to your website. By setting up abandon cart emails, customers will get a reminder of the products in their basket even after leaving the website.
This is a vital step in the customer journey as it can re-trigger customers to go back to your website to complete the purchase. Without any effort on your part!
You can also re-attract customers that have not purchased from you in a while. If for example, a customer has not made a purchase from you within the last 6 months, you can create an automation to send them an incentive to purchase from you again.
5) Generate More Leads
If you have a website, you have an easy resource-light way to generate more leads. Simply set up a web form on your homepage that collects customers; names, email addresses and relevant customer information. Once a lead has submitted the form they are in your database to contact automatically without your team having to do anything.
Example data to collect depending on business;
- Location
- Horses Name / age (Horse Feed Business – send nutrition advice based on age)
- Male / Female Rider (E-commerce store – send new clothing arrivals based on gender)
How does Marketing Automation work?
Marketing automation can only take place if you have enough information about your customers. This is where having a great CRM (Central Relationship Management) system comes in. You need a place to automatically store your customer’s information. Information you can get when a customer subscribes to your newsletter, makes a purchase from your store or clicks on your ads. You can also track how customer move around your website, what they click on and if they make a conversion (contact you/ make a purchase).
Once you have the information, you can set up how you want to segment your customers, what information you want them to receive and what will trigger the automation to begin with.