You may have heard of sales and marketing automation, but what exactly is it?
Email marketing automation helps you automate your marketing campaigns – such as selling shares in a horse – to make them more efficient and free up time to focus on training your horses and growing your business.
Email marketing automation software helps:
- Send automated emails or a series of emails that share critical, timely information to a prospective buyer
- Expand your contact list, send specific messages to your target audience and include strong calls-to-action (CTAs) to encouraging contacts buy
- Ensure you’re sending the most compelling message to the right people at the appropriate time
Watch this short video from our chosen software provider, Keap. Very American and not specific to the racing industry, but it will give you an idea of what we are talking about.
It is more than just email marketing
Email Marketing is clearly a key component of any sales and marketing process. Yes, other channels have grown rapidly in recent years (such as social media), but those channels simply funnel more contacts into your business. You then engage with those contacts in a variety of ways, most importantly, via email.
Email marketing can be grouped into three subsets:
- Email broadcasts, or “blasts” out to your entire database. OK for newsletters, but not for selling.
- Automated Email Responders to email information to a new contact. Read our article about automating inbound marketing.
- Automated, behavioural-based email marketing driven by live profile and behaviour data. This allows your audience to chose effectively their own journey.
Each of these three email marketing tactics has a role to play. But if you are not yet adopting automated email marketing in your sales process, with the aid of a Sales & Marketing Automation solution, there is great risk that your marketing is both less effective and less efficient.
Here are some proven automation tactics that clients of our CRM & Marketing Automation service use on a daily basis.
Automated Email Responses
Rather than making your new contacts wait for a response to their horse enquiry, use marketing automation to generate email responses as soon as a customer completes an enquiry form.
That automated email may include images, videos and other information. It may include share prices of horses or special deals.
Repetitive Requests
Email automation software handles emails that you would otherwise find yourself typing over and over again. Create a sequence of emails that automatically go out that cover specific information that may be important to customers.
That may include information about your business, your Terms of Service and Fee Schedule, your team or answers to FAQs.
Event Workflows
Use an automated email series to handle event RSVPs and attendee communication before and after an event. For example, you could set up emails to remind customers to attend the event and share directions/instructions, and then send them a thank you after the event.
Purchases & Reservations
Struggling to keep up with the percentage of each horse you have sold? Why not include a link to an online reservation form in your automated emails?
Reserving a share online gives your prospective buyers the chance to reserve a share before others. It helps you keep track of “who wants what”, and allows you collect personal contact information (address, phone number, dates of birth etc) automatically online.
Promotions
Promotional emails get the word out about a new horse, service, or event to your current customers, new contacts, or email subscribers. They are great for sharing limited time offers or to generate interest in an upcoming yearling sale!
Transactional Emails
These pragmatic emails confirm specific interactions the recipient expects to receive. These may include confirmations of purchases, welcome emails and contact detail requests.
Because there are so many possible use cases for transactional emails, email marketing triggers for this example will vary.
Review our CRM & Marketing Automation service and contact us for a free consultation.