3 Ways You Can Increase Revenue This Year With Marketing Automation

As marketers, we like to innovate. We are full of ideas and possibilities. But ideas are worthless if they are not executed as they don’t do anything to increase revenue for your business.

To execute ideas and increase revenue this year, you have to invest time and money. But when you use marketing automation platforms like ActiveCampaign, then you realise that you can easily execute ideas without spending any extra money.

And with a bit of time spent upfront on setting up your marketing automation strategy, you’ll free up A LOT of your time and energy to implement all those other ideas you’ve been thinking about.

Here are some of the benefits of using marketing automation to increase revenue for in business this year:

It’s personalised. Every email will be delivered based on your subscribers’ actions, so the emails are more relevant and timely.

It’s effective. When compared with standard broadcast emails, an automated email gets a click rate that is 119% higher (Study by Epsilon). Another study found that relevant emails like these contribute 18x the revenue of broadcast emails (one-off emails).

It works 24/7. Once you setup your funnel, it goes to work on the triggers you specify. You can sell your product on autopilot, and increase revenue without having to pay the landlord rent.

CMO’s love it. Gleanster reported in 2013 that 79% of CMO’s saw increased revenue while 76% saw higher quality of leads

Reduces the cost of doing business

Increases sales productivity as it eliminates admin work your staff probably hate

We’ve listed some of the most common marketing automation sequences below that work well to increase revenue for most small businesses.

#1 Set up a sequence to nurture your leads

It’s hard to get new leads. It’s usually an outcome of your investment you made doing Facebook advertising, word-of-mouth through networking and great customer experience.

What happens after that?

We need a smart CRM to help us get on top of our leads, and a marketing automation platform to help us market to them when the time comes.

To start your first lead nurture sequence, just jot down a few pieces of content that you probably already have, re-purpose it for lead generation and send them every few days or so.

Not only will this help you stay front of mind with your leads, but it will help position you as the authority on the subject.

It’s much easier to ask for the sale when you have this in place.

Pro Tip: To determine how often you should email your prospects, just think about how long, on average, your customers take to make their first purchase. If it’s about 4 weeks after inquiring, that’s a great time to trigger an event, and send a follow up email and ask for the sale.

Don’t stress about getting this sequence perfect.

The good thing is that you can always go back and make changes based on what’s working and what’s not working.

#2 Welcome new leads or customers

One great way to use marketing automation to help increase revenue this year is to follow-up while the lead is “hot”. The follow-up should happen as soon as a prospect makes a contact with you, whether it be via a Contact Form on your website or via an Opt-in form.

As soon as they join your database, you should welcome them!

I’ve met so many business owners who collect leads, add them to their list, and proceed to do nothing else. What happened to that lead’s interest?

At Bumper Leads, we’ve implemented an ActiveCampaign sequence that helps us keep track of inquiries that come via our website, and our prospects are greeted automatically by one of our staff members.

With an automatic reply function, you can instantly make a connection with a new subscriber or lead.

According to research done by MarketingSherpa, the average open rate for a welcome email is a whopping 50%, making them 86% more effective than traditional campaigns.

Here’s an example of our Active Campaign sequence that replies to our new lead enquiries:

#3 Customer on-boarding funnel

You can automate this part of your business process, which will help with customer retention and referral strategy. And having this in place will certainly contribute to increase in revenue and your bottom line.

This funnel is important to have for every business, but most importantly a service based business such as accountants, lawyers, coaches, etc, this sequence will set your new customer up for success.

The great thing about this funnel is that you are already doing this as you greet your customers over the phone or email. However, you can use automation for your onboarding process which will make it easy for you to scale as you get more customers to join your organisation. Not only this, but it will help your customers to KNOW what to expect when working with you.

For example, let’s assume you’re an accountant who has just closed a deal with a new business client. You could set-up a series of emails for anyone that joins your organisation. The first email could be delivered immediately, and this would be a simple Thank-you note with a new customer form to fill in all their business information.

The second email could be a week later, which could feature best practice bookkeeping tips.

The third email could be sent after another week, and this could be encouraging them to like or share your content with their wider business network.

Automation doesn’t need to be overly complicating to work for you. It just needs to be fit for purpose.

Initially, it takes some time to set-up, but once you are done, you can certainly predict your revenue streams better and make your business more scalable.

Do you have interesting automation sequences that you’ve implemented which helped you increase revenue in your business? Leave a comment below and share your experiences with us! Or send us a message here.