Direct selling is an industry well-known for the flexibility it offers to its distributors. However, conferring flexibility to distributors comes at a cost for the direct selling companies. In order to give distributors the flexibility they seek, companies need to have a well-equipped system in place. A system that can organize, manage and lead the business on its own. Marketing automation platform helps direct selling companies make this a reality.
What is marketing automation? How it does is our point of discussion! Marketing automation is not confined to simplifying just a single business challenge. It covers wider and more challenging areas of your direct selling business making it easier for you to manage and succeed. While it is clear that marketing automation is not all about saving time and costs, the role it plays in amassing success in direct selling is not negligible. Marketing automation tools help distributors to engage their leads and enhance the customer experience throughout their brand journey. Marketing automation ranks 8.6 on a 1-10 scale of importance indicating that marketing automation is very important to marketers in a variety of roles. You have a gush of audience to your website. How do you expect your distributors to welcome them all? While it is quite evident that this cannot be accomplished manually, marketing automation software can help trace visitors toddling their way through your website. These smart tracking tools identify and filter the steady walkers that are in close proximity to your brand. Marketing automation platforms employ lead scoring and lead tracking techniques to generate quality leads. With already sorted out leads, distributors can lean on marketing automation platforms to segment these leads and create unique buyer personas. This helps them in designing personalized approaches for each set of leads making their path to assured conversions easy and hassle-free. Distributors can extract the full potential of automated campaigns through email marketing, social media, and other customer-preferred channels. It also helps them organize themselves and manage goals faster by prioritizing their tasks. Taking the burden off their shoulders also contributes towards engaging your distributors for the long term. While it automates the complicated and time-consuming marketing processes, it also helps streamline the sales and marketing activities of your distributor teams. Sales automation platforms creates personalized follow ups and reduces response times, assisting your distributors speed up the sales process. These automated platforms are also good at delivering actionable insights on the performance of your marketing efforts. The insights thus acquired can be leveraged to modify or optimize processes that could engage and enhance customer experience. Automating cuts sales processes short. In direct selling, where sales and marketing are often single-handedly managed by distributors marketing automation can benefit them largely to align these processes making their way to assured conversions faster. Marketers have seen proven value from using a MAP across the board. Most notably, 56% of respondents have seen an increase in conversion rates. Giving distributors ample time and resources to understand and learn about your customers helps them design sales processes in a way customers enjoy their brand journey. Delivering appropriate content that customers expect you to deliver at the right time also serves as a factor in customer retention. Connecting the marketing automation platform to your network marketing CRM can double your chances of long-term customer relationships. You can watch each step your customer takes, trace every moment, and understand where you lag. Applying the learning and optimizing your strategies could contribute towards increasing the lifetime value of your customers. "Marketing automation is the technology that propels your business into a new era of relationship based marketing with quantifiable results. When powerful technology meets effective implementation and internal process management, your will soon find itself on a journey that leads to new heights of business success." — Jon Miller In today’s highly competitive world, businesses breathe customers. The growth and sustainability of a brand depend on its customer base. That clearly explains the brownie points customer-centric culture is amassing today. A marketing automation platform can enhance the experience of your customers in bountiful ways. It allows distributors to create highly personalized content for each prospect group and deliver it to match customer preferences. It can also help identify customer pain points and make distributors walk the extra mile with them. Marketing automation platforms can be tuned to the extent that customers see only what they want so they don’t get bored with irrelevant content. These platforms are a great way for distributors to get hands-on experience in customer service. The most important goals for marketing automation are increasing sales revenue (56%), improving lead nurturing (53%), increasing lead generation (50%), and improving the customer experience/engagement (52%). Marketing automation in direct selling can completely transform the way you manage your business. Marketing automation empowers each of these business processes in more ways than one.
Marketing automation at its plainest definition is the process of using automation software to streamline and automate monotonous tasks that help distributors save time and companies save costs.Marketing automation at a glance
The role of marketing automation in driving success in direct selling
Help distributors generate quality leads
Increases distributor productivity
Shortens sales cycle
Ensures customer retention
Enhances customer experience
Find out from our customers how our solutions give MLM businesses an edge and exceed customer expectations
10 areas in your direct selling business where marketing automation can do wonders
How to choose the right marketing automation software for your direct selling business?
52% of marketers say integrations are key when selecting a marketing automation platform, followed by key features (45%) and scalability (35%).
Direct selling is different from other industries in the way that it operates across its community of distributors and customers. The demands and challenges it encounters could be met only with a platform that encompasses and executes them to yield a perfectly crafted solution.
There again, choosing the right platform that suits your business requirements is quite tricky and complicated. Considering the factors below might help you in your decision making process.
Introducing marketing automation into your direct sales business can be done in two ways. You can either integrate marketing automation onto your existing direct sales software or purchase a direct sales software that has all the essential modules combined.
So, before you choose either of the two, keep these points in mind.
Integrations
Make sure the platform is flexible enough to allow alterations at any time and to any extent for optimized performance.
Training
The platform should be simple enough to take your distributors easily up the learning curve.
Customer support
It should be attentive and supportive to your customer concerns at all times.
Scalability
Choose a solution with the capability to scale itself as and when your business expands.
Cost
Always be wary of the hidden charges and support costs.
Automation in any form can be beneficial to businesses but together with a human touch, it can do wonders. Marketing automation can make your path to your customers’ hearts easy, but melting and molding it is undoubtedly in your hands. Good luck with that!
Source: Demand Spring (Marketing Automation Platform Insights 2021)
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