Get Back Your Summer with Automated Services!

It’s officially summer and every Friday is now packed with families crowding up the streets to go to the shore for the weekend. But if you’re a small business owner, you probably feel like you’re missing out because you feel that stepping away from the businesses for a few days would ruin everything you’ve currently built up.

Luckily, automating sales and marketing workflows makes it easier to take back your summer. No more coming up with emails and posts that you have to make and publish the day-of.

Newsletter subscribers can now be automatically added to a list; leads can receive automatic responses and follow-ups and prospects automatically nurtured over a period of time.

For most small businesses, starting a newsletter is a great way to start. A newsletter keeps you in touch with customers and prospects without investing a huge amount of time.

  • Start by Building Your List. A subscription form on your website helps bring in new clients to join your newsletter. You should also add existing customers and prospects to the list. Just ask for their email address: most people don’t mind giving it away, especially if you start sending them promotions they’d like to hear about in the future.
    • Some emailing list sites will give you the information for your coding for your website that will directly feed them the information for your subscriber like Mail Chimp, and others, like iContact lets you create your own forms for your potential customers to fill out that automatically places contacts and their information into their designated contact list.
  • Design your Newsletter: don’t be afraid of color and images. Color can be a great visual separator between sections of your newsletter, and images never hurt as long as they seem valid. Color and images help increase engagement with email newsletters.
  • Keep it Short and Sweet. Be selective about the content in your newsletter, and let there be enough white space between content to give the eye a place to rest. A good rule of thumb is to include a maximum of three major stories to prevent content overload.

When you have different forms on your website, prioritize the forms that are more likely to result in a sale: Request a demo, price quote or consultation forms. These prospects should be followed up with promptly.

Auto-responders and internal notifications and team task assignments sent immediately as part of an automated campaign can help you and your team efficiently manage and prioritize leads.

Best Practices for Auto-Responders:

  • Send an immediate follow-up email as the first step of your auto-responder. This email confirms that the form submission has been received. If this is in part of something that they will need to be in contact with one of your team members, let them know when they should expect to hear a response from; how a representative will be getting in touch, and any information they need to know beforehand.
  • Automated responses don’t have to be boring. You took time to come up with a tone for your brand and your website – use the automated response as a way to introduce that tone to your prospect.
  • Add links to your social channels, blog or newsletter. Give the prospect something to do while they’re waiting to hear back from you! Since they were already on your site, they’re clearly interested in what you have to offer, so keep them hearing more about you!
  • Keep it short. The goal is to thank them for submitting their form, let them know when they’ll hear back and add in a call-to-action. That’s it! Don’t send them the businesses life story and all of your companies accomplishments.
  • Personally follow up within 24 hours. The faster you reach the lead, the more likely you are to convert them while your product or service is on their mind.

 

If your company has a blog or social media and emails you schedule out to have done at particular times- there are automated services that allow you to plan out everything in advance and pre-schedule everything so that you don’t have to worry about someone being in the office to schedule everything out.

If you still have more questions about these kinds of services, or you’d like someone to do it for you- ask MGems. We’ll be offering Social Media Services soon; and we already offer email marketing and workflow campaigns.