Marketing automation means using software to automate repetitive marketing tasks like email marketing, social media posting or running ad campaigns. Marketing automation is extremely useful in improving overall sales and returns on investment. It not only automates repetitive marketing tasks but also helps to understand customer journeys, generate legitimate leads and improve conversion rates.

7 Reasons to Adopt Marketing Automation for your LMS Site:

Due to its high efficiency and more personalized experience, 75% of marketers use at least one type of marketing automation software. Let’s get familiar with the benefits that marketing automation provides and see why so many businesses use marketing automation.

1. Lead Generation and Lead Scoring

Lead generation is basically turning your target market into your potential customers. Marketing automation helps to generate better leads by identifying the user pathway. If you offer informative blogs and a person comes to your website to read a blog on a specific topic. By using marketing automation software you can analyze the specific need or issue which the person is trying to understand by reading your blog and then you can offer related services or value to that person. 

For example, let’s say you sell courses on fitness and well-being. A person comes to your website and reads blogs on how to count calories for losing weight.

You can judge that the person is trying to lose weight. What will be your next step? You can offer a freebie to get their email address by showing a pop-up saying “Interested in losing weight? Check out our free checklist on how to measure calories step by step.” Or you can directly pitch your course and say “Interested in losing weight? Check out our course on losing weight in 30 days.”

This process will turn your potential customer into a successful lead. Another term used by marketing specialists is Lead Scoring. Experts say only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales. Lead scoring is a simple process of identifying which leads are worth the effort to convert into sales and which are not. Numbers are assigned based on their interest and again it helps to better manage your resources. 

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Here, if a person has conducted a site search to read specific content, the score is +2 while if a person has downloaded an ebook and subscribed to your mailing list his score is +5 as he/she seems to be more interested in your products. In this way, your priority will be the person with a higher score. In this way, marketing automation helps to identify and prioritize leads as well.

2. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is sending relevant content to prospective buyers at each stage of their buying process. Research shows that 50% of leads require further inspiration to promote them to the next stage of the buying process.

Very few leads buy as soon as they arrive at your website. Each person has a different buying process. Some people may search for different products at the start, then compare their prices and features, then read reviews and then finally purchase the product.

Some may be interested in just features and buy the product once they get all of the desired benefits. Marketing automation helps to identify the stage of each expected buyer and then sends relevant content and encourages them to take a step ahead. 

Let’s take our example of a health and fitness website again. Assume that our website sells fitness equipment and a buyer has researched our yoga mats but did not buy them. We can offer a 5% discount if he purchases in the next 24 hours. Or we can show him the specific benefits that our yoga mats provide including slip-resistance, reduced pain and low chances of injury.

Maybe another person has searched the broad category of fitness equipment but could not locate the exact product. So we can help him identify his exact need and provide relevant tools. If you use automated marketing software, the whole process gets automated and your efforts are decreased tremendously.

3. Customizing the Sales Funnel

You have already become familiar with lead generation and lead nurturing. The sales funnel is the entire process through which a buyer passes until the purchase. For example, you were passing in front of a shop and saw a beautiful pair of shoes. You went into the shop. This is the first step. Then you saw the whole rack of shoes and checked their sizes. This is the second step. In the third step, you picked 2 pairs of shoes, went to check out and made a purchase. The whole process is called a sales funnel.

Implement the same example to your specific niche and identify how your expected clients make a purchase. Manually identifying each potential lead and then offering relevant content, assisting in identifying their problem and solution until the final purchase is not an easy thing to do.

Thanks to the new age of automation, these tasks can be done with a click by using specific software. Automation offers a 1-1 strategy to focus on a particular person and keep in touch with them through different channels other than emails like social media posts or social media ads as well.

4. Personalized Automated Emails

If you have read our article on improving course engagement, you already know the importance of communicating with multiple students at different times. You have to send a welcome email, a follow-up email, a notification email and then sales pitches etc. Moreover, to generate leads, you have to send multiple emails to your mailing list as well. 

You need to identify each expected buyer and send relevant content. To offer superior customer service, you can personalize each email according to the recipient as well. If you are sending the same email to multiple people, you can write an email and then change the name of the recipient at the start to “Hi James” or “Hi Belle” and so on while keeping the message body the same.

You can automate the process and then the marketing software will send each mail at a specific time. For example,

• Welcome Email (When someone purchases the course)
• Onboarding Email (1st day of course)
• Follow up Email (2nd day of course)

In this way, you can easily automate the whole process and focus on other strategic things other than these manual tasks.

5. Keeping Students on Track

Some students require constant motivation to remain engaged in the course. Some may lose interest after a few days and need some encouragement to resume. You can check if a person has not logged in for several days and send him a follow-up email to check if everything is alright. You can send new content, live video or webinar, a new assignment or quiz notifications through email to make sure the students are kept informed about any new activity.

6. Analyzing Data

Collecting, reporting and analyzing data can be a cumbersome process requiring tons of time. Another very important benefit of using automated marketing is data reporting. It provides analytics, and closed-loop reporting, and collects and stores data offering a comprehensive solution to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. It also helps to analyze and predict consumer behaviours. 

You can identify any friction that may be hindering your potential buyers from making a purchase.  You can examine if your leads drop during the lead nurturing campaign or if they drop just at the end of purchase. Maybe your website is not structured properly and your clients are unable to understand how to make a purchase. Either way, you can identify the issues and fix them before losing a major share of customers.

If your marketing and sales team consists of multiple people, you can measure the performance of different marketing activities and even different individuals. Having real-time data helps to make accurate decisions leading to the better optimization of the whole purchase process.43

7. Saves Time and Effort

You can save about 6+ hours a week by using automation in social media. At the end of the day, marketing automation is all about efficiency and effectiveness. You may be doing all of these things manually, but automating the whole process saves a lot of time and mental effort and also provides efficiency by handling multiple tasks at the same time while you can exert your efforts in doing other strategic tasks like content creation.

Moreover, by using automation, rather than hiring a whole sales team, you can run ads in multiple channels and generate more leads while saving a lot of money.

Conclusion

According to Moosend, 63% of companies that use marketing automation outperform their competitors in sales and ROI. Manual work may be feasible if you are managing a small group of clients. If you are thinking of growing your business and improving customer experience, manual work is not enough. To grow and develop your current business, you will have to automate your marketing process.

To read about more automation tools for the WordPress LMS sites, check our article here. If you need expert advice to pick the most suitable marketing software for your e-learning or membership website, our LMS crafters can help you. To book a free call or to hire an expert check our services page here.