Automation. That single word is enough to strike fear into those people who claim it’s on a one-way crusade to remove every single working person on the planet and create an AI hierarchy. Of course, that’s not the case. Automation, in fact, helps businesses run more efficiently by taking away menial tasks for employees’ and helping businesses grow.
This can be the case for marketing automation in the construction sector. With an endless list of Barbour ABI contacts to reach out to, wouldn’t you much rather leave it to a more than capable bit of software? If that’s the case, and you are ready to take your Barbour marketing emails to an all-new automated height, you’ll want to know how exactly to use it to get the best results.
Have An Objective
The common misconception when using marketing automation for Barbour ABI subscribers is that the aim needs to be something huge. “We need to increase sales by 25% in the next month!” This just isn’t what automation at this level is designed to do. Marketing automation isn’t a like-for-like replacement for your sales team. Instead, it works alongside them to help make their job much easier. When using marketing automation, Barbour ABI subscribers should set much more achievable objectives. Things like ‘having X contact forms completed’ or ‘Y newsletter sign ups’ provide a steppingstone for the automated system and your sales team. Having the wrong objectives is the biggest problem subscribers face. They go in expecting automation to overhaul their sales team - when in reality - it’s there to do the menial tasks.
The Key Form of Marketing Automation
Automation is globally renowned for the 4Ds. This means that its implementation is suited to work that is dangerous, dull, dirty or dear. When it comes to contacting your Barbour ABI database, sending emails is usually the best way to make a cold outreach, however sending thousands of emails can be a hugely time-consuming and costly task, taking up resources that would be better used elsewhere. This makes it the ideal solution for automation and something which can save you hundreds of hours.
Automated Emails Have To Work Independently.
You’ve got your Barbour ABI contact list and now it’s a case of turning them from cold contacts into piping hot prospects. Acting like a funnel, a series of automated marketing emails will help you achieve the previously mentioned goals before leaving you with your sales team with a list of names who followed all the automated actions. However, it’s not as simple as sending all the emails out at once. Each has to work independently at a specific point in time. Only when recipients have open or read an email will the automation add them to the list of the next in the workflow.Automating Emails Through AIDA
This is achieved through using the AIDA marketing technique, or attention, interest, desire and action. Only in clicking through the final stages will the Barbour ABI contact become a hot prospect.Attention
This is sent out to grab the recipient’s attention as the first point of contact. You might want to state an interesting fact that readers might not be aware of.Interest
After opening the attention email, the next one to send would be Interest. In pointing out a potential problem to your customer, you will gain their interest and encourage them to read more.Desire
Following interest comes desire. In highlighting a familiar problem, now is the time to show your customer that there is a solution and begin reeling them in.Action
The final stage is action. This is an automated email with a ‘call to action’ included and matches your earlier objective. Once this has been completed you now have leads your sales team can talk to. Marketing emails should also be personalised, using the first name of your contacts. This helps create a greater relationship with the customer with studies from HubSpot suggesting that 41% of consumers switched businesses due to a lack of personalisation in marketing. Instead of writing 1,000 personal emails, marketing automation helps you write one email, and send it with carefully considered personalisation to 1,000 of your contacts.
Conclusion
Marketing automation helps take away the mundane tasks from you, letting the software focus on getting the most of your Barbour ABI contacts. There are 3 key takes in how best to use it with Barbour ABI. Firstly, give yourself realistic objectives, newsletter sign-ups and introduction phone calls are a great easy win and something automation can easily help you achieve. Secondly, make sure your emails are independently created, so that content is tailor-made to specific points in the AIDA funnel, repeated content is a big red flag and enough to put people off. Finally, and some might even say the most important is personalisation. In adding a single ‘first name’ field into your marketing email, you’ve created an infinite amount of emails despite only writing one. Whether you’re using a system like Mail Chimp or can rely on an automation expert like Project Prospecta, these techniques can help Barbour ABI subscribers get the most from huge databases of contacts.