A small business can use its website or mobile app as a powerful tool to connect and communicate with more potential customers. But it must promote its products and services aggressively by targeting relevant customers to increase conversion rate. Often small enterprises and start-ups lack the resources required to launch and manage expensive digital marketing campaigns. The marketing automation tools help entrepreneurs to accelerate marketing processes without putting extra time, effort, and money.

The marketing automation solutions enable small enterprises to streamline common marketing tasks like lead generation and nurturing, cross-selling and up-selling, customer segmentation, customer retention, and customer lifecycle management without deploying additional staff. The marketing automation solution further allows the entrepreneur to store all marketing data in a central database, automate common marketing tasks, and monitor/measure marketing campaigns efficiently. There are also a number of reasons why more and more small businesses are adopting marketing automation solutions.

7 Reasons Why Small Enterprises Must Use Marketing Automation Solutions

1) No need to deploy additional marketing staff

Often small enterprises lack the resources required to recruits and train their marketing staff. The marketing automation services enable enterprises to avoid recruiting and training marketing staff by automating common marketing tasks. For instance, the entrepreneur can use robust marketing automation software to create marketing campaigns and accelerate lead generation and nurturing automatically without deploying additional marketing staff.

2) Speed up repetitive marketing tasks

Often enterprises have to put extra time and effort to perform repetitive marketing tasks like updating marketing list, sending marketing emails, organising customer data and monitoring marketing campaigns. Many enterprises even deploy additional marketing staff to perform these repetitive and routine marketing tasks. The marketing automation solutions enable small businesses to perform repetitive marketing tasks smoothly without deploying extra staff. The entrepreneur can even use the software to automate both marketing campaigns and rules.

3) Refine the entire marketing process

Often marketers find it daunting to visualize the customer journey precisely while making marketing strategies. They even create certain marketing processes without evaluating their relevance to the customer journey. The marketing automation tools visual the customer journey precisely and create marketing processes based on the customer journey. Hence, it becomes easier for small businesses to refine their key marketing process and eliminate irrelevant processes. The refined marketing process further organize lead generation and nurturing according to specific stages of customer journey.

4) Reach out to relevant customers through multiple channels

Each enterprise must promote its products or services through both online and offline channels to drive sales and increase conversion rate. It further needs to communicate with potential customers through various marketing tools – emails, text messages, social media and phone calls – to impact their buying decisions. The automated marketing tools enable small businesses to connect and communicate with potential customers through multiple channels and marketing tools. Some solutions even allow marketers to communicate with targeted customers through a variety of marketing tool. The entrepreneur can further use the solution to align the marketing tool to specific stages of customer journey.

5) Accelerate up-selling and cross-selling activities

Like large retailers, small businesses also increase sales revenue through up-selling and cross-selling. They use up-selling as a tool to persuade customers to opt for products of higher value. Likewise, the use cross-selling practices to persuade customers to buy complementary products. The marketing automation software enables small enterprises to leverage up-selling and cross-selling opportunities by dividing customers into various segments and track the purchase activity of individual customers. An entrepreneur can even use a robust marketing automation solution to automate the up-selling and cross-selling activities as part of marketing automation. He can even use the tool to generate and send conversion-friendly up-selling and cross-selling emails to customers automatically.

6) Perform A/B testing simultaneously

Their small marketing budgets often make it difficult for small business owners to experiment with various digital marketing methods and techniques. Hence, the entrepreneurs have to explore ways to increase conversion rate by creating the best marketing emails or designing the most effective ad landing pages. Many small business owners perform A/B testing to evaluate the effectiveness of different versions of the same email or ad landing page. But they have to put extra time and effort to run multiple A/B tests. The marketing automation solutions enable small business owners to run multiple A/B tests at a time. The entrepreneur can even use the tools to perform A/B testing at regular intervals.

7) Monitor and measure marketing campaigns

A small business can automate the entire marketing process to drive sales despite small marketing budget. But it must monitor the marketing process and campaigns consistently to calculate ROI accurately. The marketing automation solutions make it easier for entrepreneurs to monitor and evaluate marketing campaigns by generating a variety of reports. A small business owner can simply refer to the report to identify and differentiate the successful marketing campaigns. At the same time, some automated marketing solutions even enable entrepreneurs to compare different marketing campaigns based on important parameters like direct traffic, email marketing, organic search, paid search and social media.

On the whole, the marketing automation solutions help small enterprises to streamline marketing process and automate common marketing tasks. An entrepreneur has option to choose from a wide range of marketing automation solutions according to his precise needs. But a single solution may not complement all marketing needs and objectives. Hence, it becomes essential for the entrepreneur to choose the right marketing automation tool to increase conversion rate and curtail marketing overheads.