“Gone are the days of sending one big email to all of your leads and hoping it’s relevant enough for some of them to click through or engage with it. it’s time to start using smarter tools to send your leads what they’re looking for and make them sales-ready faster.” – Hubspot

Once upon a time, rural telephone companies used to be the only option in town, and while serving your customers was important, sales and marketing was not. But for rural telcos today, nurturing leads with relevant content is required. If you don’t want your marketing message to get ignored, it needs to be targeted and personal – more than ever before. That’s where marketing automation comes in.

You may be thinking, okay, I have a vague idea about marketing automation, but what is it really? Marketing automation is a set of tools that lets companies:

  • Increase the number of qualified leads by nurturing all prospects with personalized content;
  • Generate more leads by identifying and capturing web visitors;
  • Drive more sales by identifying and following up with sales-ready prospects;
  • Improve up-selling and cross-selling by developing and retaining existing customers; and,
  • See the effectiveness of each marketing tactic you use, by tracking the entire sales process from end-to-end.

As marketers, we don’t want to be thought of as spammers. So instead of constantly pushing out generic email blasts to all the email addresses you have, marketing automation helps companies focus on the best ways to attract your targets to your brand or value proposition. With the proper marketing automation, you can create stronger relationships with your leads and move prospective customers from a “maybe” to a “yes” by nurturing, guiding, and even handholding.

Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have shown that content marketing through email helps them to increase conversion rates, improve engagement with qualified leads and reduce the sales cycle time. In one study, almost 70% of marketing automation users said that the most important benefit was improved targeting, followed by improved customer experience (45.9%), improved quality of leads (37.7%), and an increased number of leads (34.9 %).

Marketing automation helps close deals by sending the right message to the right person at the right time. And we all know that every single customer counts.

Interested in marketing automation but don’t know how to get started? Plus One offers the tools you need to track, measure and connect with customers and prospects. We help define real sales opportunities from your digital engagement through powerful automation rules, dynamic content and targeted emails based on your customers’ interests.

For more information about Plus One’s marketing automation services, please contact Tanya Sullivan at tsullivan@plusonestrategy.com or 703.772.2235.