5 Marketing Automation Platforms for Your Business
A business that is just starting out has the challenge of attracting clients. However, as time goes on, retaining customers and staying in touch is a greater challenge. There are different marketing platforms that can automate some tasks allowing you to build a personalised marketing campaign that can attract new customers or keeping the ones that you already have. This marketing automation helps you maintain and grow the relationship with your customers depending on their interests and their online behaviour.
Here are some alternatives of platforms that you may integrate in your marketing campaigns:
- Sumo– is a platform that provides a few products useful for automate and capture customer data for lead conversion. It can set pop-ups/exit triggers to capture user attention to gather email addresses/redirects to Bookings or Vouchers, etc. This starts as a free account and next are the paid accounts where you have some additional features which are quite useful (like A/B testing, unlimited subscribers, click triggers, push notifications).
- Autopilot HQ - this is a really interesting platform to be used for automated Customer Journey and retention. Basically, you create Journeys for your customers and automate processes in between. For example, if you’d like to provide a discount to your existing customers, you can display heads-up message with a specific promotion code only to those users. Or you may provide a delay email notification (after 1-2 days) or send a text message to remind them to continue a purchase or their abandoned carts (in e-commerce platforms). Prices are starting from 1000 contacts and go up depending on how many contacts you add.
Autopilot HQ and Sumo offers Zapier integration. Using Zapier you can integrate Sumo with Autopilot, so in the end you can use the best features of both platforms.
There is also an increase in Marketing Automation platforms for specific industries, for example:
- HotelChamp– most of this platform functionality is based on pop-ups and storing customer information:
- Voucher option - free gift for your guests (sending an email to customers with a promotion code);
- Online Support Chat – fast and easy contact with your customers;
- USP Comparison - shows what is best so your customers can choose what they like;
- Abandoned Booking – it reminds the existing customers to return and finish their booking (you may offer them a discount as well);
- Floating Tab / Flash Sale / Welcome / Review Tools / Exit Tools - similar to USP Comparison, there are popups to display headups with flash Sale, welcome messages for clients on specific actions, get your reviews, remain your visitors;
- Smart Notifications - display urgency and scarcity.
- MailChimp– they now provide campaigns for automating your email marketing, especially for building your brand or e-commerce platforms:
- Build your brand - promote your business and grow your audience with social media ad campaigns that help you reach the right customers;
- Connect with your new contacts – make a great first impression, showing customers everything you have to offer by setting up an onboarding series. Let people know you're thinking about them by creating an annual "Happy Birthday" email or maybe just a warm welcome to new contacts;
- Sell more stuff - put your purchase data to work for you. Connect your e-commerce store with MailChimp to improve the shopping experience for your customers and generate more revenue (turn website visitors into customers, recover abandoned carts, customise order notifications, follow up on purchases, personalise product recommendations);
- Boost loyalty – nurture lasting relationships by showing customers you appreciate their support (thank first-time shoppers, reward your top spenders with discounts triggered by their shopping behaviour);
- Win people back - re-engage lapsed customers or inactive subscribers by creating a win-back email series or targeted ad campaign;
- Customise, test, repeat - you can create the automation for any situation - provide educational resources to get new clients, share blog updates from your RSS feed, remind people to renew their membership and reward your top supporters) .
- Hubspot- their famous CRM can be now integrated with their new Marketing features that can improve the automation on specific B2B / B2C companies. Some of their marketing features include:
- lead analytics dashboard and lead flows;
- contact activity/management and company insights;
- blog and content creation tools;
- phone and email support, SEO and content strategy, social media and mobile optimisation;
- email marketing and calls-to-action;
- some advanced packages can include contact/company/events reporting.
Here is how Hubspot is thinking of using the marketing tools to grow traffic, convert leads and track the entire funnel in one place:
- Build and modify your website without IT, being ready for your visitors from any device because the templates are responsive out of the box;
- Get your content in front of the right people using real-time SEO suggestions, posting to social at the optimal time and sharing your content with the right followers;
- Drive more traffic to key landing pages by designing calls-to-action that visitors can’t help but click and using personalize messaging based on location, traffic source, device and more;
- Convert more visitors into qualified leads by launching professional-looking landing pages, attaching a form with a single click and run A/B tests to increase conversions;
- Turn leads into customers with less effort by giving them a personalised path to follow using drip campaigns so that every interaction with your content can trigger next step automatically;
- Track customers, record and organise every of their interaction with your brand, creating reports on how each marketing campaign and asset contributes to sales.
Marketing automation helps you generate high-quality leads that can successfully turn into customers. It gives you great visibility into what the visitors and leads are actually doing, and you can easily find what content they are looking for, how are they responding to the emails or how they are moving through the sales funnel. This way you can monitor and measure how the marketing automation system is performing and where you might need to make improvements to get better results.
We all want to see our companies succeed. And by observing the use of marketing automation in the last year we can all notice incredible results. Explore all options and find a platform that gives you flexibility and a proven track record to help you reach your marketing goals.
If you need any help, get in touch and Phaeria team will do its best to help you achieve your goals.
Why SEO is Important for Businesses
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consists of multiple strategies, actions and best practices, all of which have the end goal of improving your website’s position in search engines.
SEO is Google’s way of determining which sites deserve to rank highly for each query entered into its search engine.
SEO is important and it’s something that you can control. You can improve your rankings meaning you can control how many visitors visit your website. That leads to how many sales or leads you get, which impacts the amount of money you can make from being online.
There are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO consists of anything you can control on your own website to improve your rankings (like site speed, keyword presence, header text) and off-page SEO which is about anything done on other websites that may influence your rankings (links).
So why is SEO so important?
- Because you want to provide visitors to your website a great user experience that they will tell others
- Because you want to provide search engines like Google critical information that will place your website in the top 5 spots on the returns page
If you are not engaging in Search Engine Optimisation, you are not going to be on that first page of results. You need to stay competitive, giving your brand name exposure, gaining new customers.
SEO is about having a relevant and meaningful website content, including the right keywords, getting attention of the search engines, also keep it short and simple but exciting enough for users to want to click on your site.
Studies have shown that SEO can provide a business visibility, branding, web traffic, credibility and insight into customer behaviour. For example, if two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimised website is more likely to have more customers and even conversions (sales).
Search Engine Optimisation is also good for the social promotion of your website. Customers who will find your website on the search engines are more likely to promote you on social media as well. And again, you may gain more clients and your name is seen.
In short, SEO is a set of rules that can be followed by website owners to optimise their websites for search engines and, in this way, improving their search engine rankings.
It is important for any kind of business, small or large and is a crucial factor for your online success. And don’t forget: updating your site often is very important!
If you need any advice on how to improve your rankings or to use our SEO services, please get in touch. Our team at Phaeria will be happy to help!
Halloween Marketing Campaigns incorporated into your business strategy
Holidays are always excellent opportunities for marketing and Halloween makes no exception. There are lots of ways to incorporate Halloween marketing campaigns into the business strategy and generate leads by getting into the holiday spirit. People love to see the fun side to any business and its employees. Check out a few options to do just that:
- Different Halloween incentives: start a loyalty program, offer reward points or gift cards on purchases made in a certain time frame, give away freebies with purchases, seasonal discount;
- Site facelift: incorporate small but effective web design features like cobwebs, spooky font, a darker colour, spooky illustrations;
- Host a photo contest. Even if it sounds like a cliché, it never gets tiresome. Everybody can wear silly costumes: employees and customers just the same. Along the way you can opt for food creations, decorated rooms or spookiest things and places.
But, talking here about social media campaigns, you need to encourage followers to submit their Halloween photos for a brand-related prize because every campaign must link back to your brand, mission or product. Use specific hashtags because your goal should be to join them with tweets, posts and updates related to countless conversations. But, the only important difference that you will need is to seek out hashtags and post content that actually make sense for your brand.
In the end, offer fun rewards throughout the competition with the main prize announced on the morning after Halloween.
- Run a mysterious Countdown. It is a good way to get your social media followers excited about an upcoming event or a product release. During the countdown, in order to keep the audience excited, give continuous clues that encourage guessing. Keep the theme spooky so that, by the time it’s finished, you will have the people’s full attention.
- Email Campaigns: use spooky gifs, words and fonts to raise users interest by making different promotions or just to wish them a happy Halloween. This reminds them about your company and will help them get into the holiday spirit.
- Trick or Treat: Halloween marketing campaigns are a good opportunity to raise awareness about a certain charity or cause that reflects your brands morals and ethics. You could release a Halloween themed product as part of ‘Treating’ others or you can create a campaign around a chosen product, which you could highlight that, for every purchase, your business will donate a percentage to that charity.
Now it is time to start thinking about using the Halloween ideas in your marketing campaign. If you need any advice you can get in touch with us.
Our developers at Phaeria might have awesome ideas that can help your company grow and be creative in attracting new clients! Good luck and …. Have a Happy Halloween!
