Proudly serving the industry for which it was named for more than 50 years, Outdoor Power Equipment provides dealers who sell and service outdoor power equipment with valuable information to succeed in a competitive market.
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/120369
FEATURE STORY By Bob McCann important tool for dealerships seeking to increase their revenue and grow their businesses. Put simply, marketing automation is a tool that helps you easily streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks so that you can efficiently and effectively reach out to customers and prospects to sell more stuff. Currently, there are many solutions available to you, and some marketing automation tools may be included in your current business management system or other solutions that you use. Depending on the tool you are using to automate your marketing tasks, you may have access to tools that will help you generate and nurture leads and customers, cultivate relationships, target prospects by interest, cross-sell and up-sell, and measure return on investment (ROI). Marketing automation enables you to nurture prospects who aren't ready to buy and convert turn them into buyers and lifelong customers when they are ready to purchase. At the same time, it allows you to sell more products and services to your current customers. Marketing Automation: A must-have tool for getting the most out of prospects and customers L ast year, I shared with you a roadmap to help you turn leads into lifelong customers. The roadmap provided tips and recommendations/best practices for before, during and after the sale. The roadmap was meant to help you put a program in place to cultivate relationships to help sell more products. How are you doing with the roadmap? Hopefully, you created a program that began to turn ideas into action. If you've captured the names, mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses for every prospect and customer 16 who entered your dealership or sent you an inquiry from your website, you're well on your way to developing a successful program. Now, it's time to reap the rewards of your efforts and start growing your business. While no two dealerships are alike, all dealerships have one thing in common: They want to increase sales and profits. And that's where establishing a marketing automation program comes in. What is marketing automation? Marketing automation is an increasingly OUTDOOR POWER EQUIPMENT Once you've made the decision to invest in a marketing automation program, here are some things to consider as you begin setting up your program. • How often is too often? The verdict is out on how often you can "touch" a prospect or customer via email before your message becomes perceived as spam. I tell dealers that, as long as your message is relevant and provides valuable information, up to 16 times a year is a good target. • Set your goal. Before you put fingers to keyboard and write your message, decide what goal you are trying to meet. • It's all about the content.Gleanster reports that 50 percent of buyers are not ready to purchase immediately. What does that mean to you? Your initial responses should be focused on providing product or service information, not closing the sale. Make sure your messages are providing value and delivering quality content. If you use your marketing automation program to send emails that are focused on closing the sale, you're likely to turn off the buyer and lose the sale. Being fast is good for gold medals. But without pertinent content, speed is not a virtue; it is a detriment to closing the sale. www.outdoorpowerequipment.com Image above ©istockphoto.com/ s_john79 Getting the most out of a marketing automation program