Today, I have a very special video for you.
What we're going to do is we are going to talk about marketing automation and what you need to run in your CRM stack, or your email automation stack, so that you can effectively deploy email marketing automation in your business. We're also going to talk about the best niches for marketing automation and CRM marketing.
What CRM marketing automation does for you.
Typically, when somebody first learns about you, it's through some traffic source. The traffic source, it might be Google. It might be a paid ad. It might be a Facebook page post. It might be Instagram, whatever. Wherever your traffic comes from they:
- Learn about you
- Click through a link somewhere
- Ultimately, they end up on your website finally...
- Becoming a lead.
Once that happens, then you can't just let your lead hang out and do nothing. Something needs to happen for them that moves them closer to your business... Closer to buying from you.
So many of our clients are like "Yep, we know we have a big list but we just don't email them. We don't send them stuff. We don't even send them blog posts or nurture the relationship."
At the end of the day, what you will find is the relationship with your customer, your prospect, that one person, is really hat CRM marketing is all about. It's how can you help that person understand your business better so they can make a better buying decision.
That is done through messages. It's done by emailing folks, segmenting lists with tags, putting them into marketing campaigns, and ultimately helping them understand what it is you do.
Marketing-based CRMs are made up of really only three things
You have your trigger.
So, the trigger is how did that person find you. Did they fill out a form? Did they hit a webpage?
Then you have your campaign. So, your campaign is made up of emails, texts, calls, print post cards. All of that outbound stuff is really the material that is in the campaign.
Really, to get a customer, prospects go through the exact same process every time.
Campaigns automate repetitive tasks so you don't have to do them manually and they make your marketing a predictable process.
Oftentimes when we're working with clients, they're like, "Okay, we're launching. When is our first customer going to come?"
I'm like well, that's a great question. It's kind of a trick question, but it's a great question.
The reason is is because in order to get a customer, first somebody needs to opt-in to your website and then they need to get some emails about the thing they just opted-in for because nobody ever opts-in to a form that just isn't going to give them something. So, whether it's a spreadsheet or a lead magnet or a webinar or a video or a course or whatever, free training, they're always going to be opting in for something.
So, your first responsibility is to get them that something. Then you can put them in a nurture sequence.
The nurture sequence is like here's what we do, here's some links to our blog. Here's a little bit about the founders. Here's links to the social media profiles, whatever.
Whatever's going to help bond them to you.
Whenever I think of customer acquisition, I have this picture of a mountain.
Are they moving closer? Or further away?
So, the mountain is off in the distance. It's snow-capped. There's thunder clouds over top of it. When a customer signs up with you, they are either moving closer to the mountain or they are moving farther away. Everything you need... All the messages, all the campaigns... Everything you do needs to move them closer to scaling that mountain because the closer they move to scaling the mountain, the more likely it is that your going to get a buyer, you're going to get a customer. If they turn around and start walking the other way, then of course they're never going to buy from you.
So, in order to cultivate that and nurture that, then we send them four or five emails designed to get them to get to know you better. Then maybe we do a product promo. We introduce them to a physical product you have or a digital product or a lot of marketers like to put $7 trip wires here or whatever. Whatever it is you have in your portfolio or your repertoire, that's what you would promote.
Then it's not just enough to send the product emails. Then that person needs to click through the email, visit your sales page. Then they need to go to the order form, pull out their credit card and buy, which puts them in a product purchase sequence and they get added into a buyer fulfillment sequence.
So, getting buyers, getting customers, is a lot ... there's more moving parts than just asking the question when am I going to get buyers because each one of these things represents not a hurdle, but a doorway they need to step through to move on to the next piece.
Your CRM marketing stack moves people through the buyer journey
So, the first thing you have is your contact records. Your contact record is where the customer lives, digitally at least, where all their data lives. You need their general information. Of course, you need their first name, last name. You need their email, their phone number, but then ideally, you also need some detailed information like things you would ask on a survey.
We have a lot of real estate clients so some of their detailed info might be how many beds, how many baths, when was the roof remodeled, when was the roof replaced, when was the furnace replaced, stuff like that. All of that should live in the customer record associated with that customer so that later, when a sales rep goes or when this person calls in or whatever, they can just pull up one contact record and have access to everything. It's not strewn about in three or four or five different places amongst spreadsheets and amongst stuff that is hanging out on somebody's computer.
You'll also want to see the history. The history is really important, especially when it comes to paid traffic. You want to see what tags this person has, like where they've been previously in your marketing system. What reports did they download? What campaigns? What sequences have they gone through? What pages did they visit?
I had a meeting the other day with a with a bank and I was like if you have one visitor who goes to four pages on your website about commercial lending and you have their phone number, you should really be able to get a notification says "Hey, call this person. They're interested in commercial lending."
The better you can understand your contact, your customer, then the better you're able to sell to that person. Then of course, any tasks associated with that person, any purchases that they would have made and their overall lifetime value. So, all good metrics. Their lifetime value is nice because you can sort based on it. So, you can send things to your best buyers.
Email Automation
The email automation of CRM marketing piece is paramount. The ability to send emails out to buyers or send emails out to prospects, email is one of the best communication tools. From an ROI standpoint, email still works better than most everything else, but you NEED a simple campaign builder to make it work. This is the biggest issue.
There's lots of different ways of building campaigns but if it takes longer to set up a campaign than a couple hours or even 10 minutes, then it ends up being too cumbersome, too complicated, and nobody does it.
You need a clean email creator.
You need the ability to schedule things. So, if somebody opts-in for a report, they get the first email. Then a day later, they get email two. Then a day later, they get email three. So, it's being able to delay and delay campaign messages is important.
Then custom fields, this kind of mimics the CRM marketing or the contact record piece. You need the ability to use the custom fields in your marketing. So, if you're asking somebody how many beds and baths, then you need to be able to use that. And then template is another big one.
Intuitive Form Builder
One of the big problems with a lot of the software tools that we've used is the form builder sucks. If the form builder sucks, then it means that you're not able to request and ask for the information that you need. So, what we did was we actually built ... You can drag unlimited fields into a form very much like a Wufoo or a SurveyMonkey or whatever. All contact record fields and user-defined fields are available to be dragged in. There's no weird contact mapping. You don't need to map a form through an API or like adapt your API back to your amrketing CRM and it saves all the data to the contact record. Then you can easily build extremely custom forms.
So, we have a business funding client that we're actually ... We just rolled him out and we're building a full survey inside Axis and it's no additional software. All that information saves directly to the customer record. So, you're able to combine a couple different pieces of software nicely.
Then you need clean landing pages, clean sales pages that actually convert. So, one of the things that we implemented inside Axis is a landing page builder that actually converts better than pretty much anything else we've ever seen. Most of it is because we test the pages ruthlessly for our clients and for own stuff. Landing pages, sales pages, confirmation pages, video pages, scheduling pages, and automated webinar pages.
In doing a lot of automated webinars, we've found that the actual webinar tool, the automated webinar functionality, is cumbersome. It's hard to set up and really, you don't need that tool. You can just have a collection of four pages and a countdown that actually moves people one to the next and that's something that maps to your domain.
Fill In The Blank Email Scripts
One of the biggest drawbacks in terms of time in CRMs is the ability to write email copy, but we did and some of the inspiration behind putting it into a CRM itself is because if we're writing the copy, we might as well be sending it for clients as well.
There are 25 internal email sequences, a total of 83 emails to promote physical products, digital products, webinars, webinar replays, consultative sale sessions, all that kind of stuff. Then there's over 700 emails pre-written for affiliate sequences. So, there's 20 different niches for affiliates that ... All of that, you ... It's already pre-written. You go through, fill out a little form. It drops it into the email and then you can schedule and automatic from there. So, it's fill in the blank forms, email sequences done in minutes. I'll show you this in a little bit.
The best niches for email automation.
So, we've done a lot of work in the service agency like marketing consulting, all of that.
The biggest thing with the service agency is somebody's coming to you to solve a problem. So, that problem, if you can deliver the content and bond and nurture, then that problem ... The better they like you, the more readily they will call and ask for services. Banking works really well. Manufacturing ... Even though from a email marketing automation piece ... Lead acquisition isn't great in manufacturing. We have a couple local manufacturing clients and it's difficult to get a high-end enterprise multi-million dollar company to fill out an email form on a website. They will do it but oftentimes, they just call somebody. They call the sales rep or they call somebody at the company and say, "Hey, do you make stainless steel widgets?" And the company says yes and say, "Okay, here's a quote.
What we have found from an email automation standpoint is it's much more intuitive to start using CRM marketing automation in the bidding process or the bidding or the proposal process. So, being able to send a document out in an email and then automatically reply saying is the price too high, is it too low, that kind of thing. So, it's all stuff we're working on from a manufacturing standpoint. Legal's another one. Legal and law, another great place for email automation. We have a lot of real estate clients who use marketing automation, both for sellers and buyers. For people who are selling their property, whether it's a distressed homeowner or it was something that was willed to them or whatever. So, in different geographic areas around the country. And then also buyers are investors. So, people who ... they have the capital and they want to invest it in real estate but they don't necessarily have ... they're not sourcing properties themselves. So, two different sides of the same coin, but automation works really well.
Small and medium business always need solutions for marketing. E-commerce is another one. So, if you have a Shopify store set up, Shopify itself has pretty weak email marketing. They have some shopping cart abandonment and stuff in there, which is kind of cool, but it's difficult to do too much from an email prospecting side with physical products with the exception of discount codes and a lot of the physical product companies who are more content-heavy. They put out a lot of videos whether it's Instagram or Facebook and it's a little bit easier to drive prospect email list and then convert them into buyers. Insurance is another one, business services. Kind of goes with the service agency. Online education and traditional education also work great for email automation and crm marketing.