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Creating Better Results with Custom Reports

Header image for SharpSpring information on PROSAR website.

You’ve no doubt heard axioms such as “measure what matters” and “how can you improve it if you don’t measure it.” These are true, we instinctively know this. But how do you measure what matters, and can you get it in a convenient, easy-to-understand format? Custom reports is the answer.

SharpSpring has done all the heavy lifting to make it easy to measure important criteria, automatically put them in user-friendly reports, even schedule them to automatically configure and email to key team members. This article provides an overview of SharpSpring’s customizable reporting function.

 

Building Better Reports

 

Though SharpSpring provides different types of sales and CRM reports, you may want to generate reports that show information from many different sources. You can create a customized report that shows only the information that you want. These reports are designed to give you all the information you need to measure your current sales performance — and to forecast performance for the future.

gif showing how to drag and drop widgets for SharpSpring report builder.Widgets are the main component of the Custom Report feature. These widgets provide an at-a-glance view of different types of data. You can configure your reports to show data with any combination of these different widgets. Statistic widgets are small, all other widget types are large. A row of widgets in the report canvas can fit a maximum of six small widgets or two large widgets.

 

By default, widgets will display data with as much information as possible. This might be beneficial for reports that look at the larger picture, but your reports will most likely need to focus only on a certain amount of information. You can use report filters to display only the data that you want.

 

You can export a report as a PDF file, and export data from individual widgets .csv files. Customized reports can also be shared through Cloud Dashboards, which are preset displays that are broadcasted to external monitors or televisions. Shared reports can be accessed via URLs that are unique for each individual report.

Once a customized report has been configured and saved, it can be scheduled to be sent via email. Scheduled reports will be sent to email recipients as a .PDF attachment.

Gif showing how to schedule a custom report to email to team.

 

Segmented by category below, there are many criteria and objectives that you can track and measure with SharpSpring’s customizable reports.

Campaign Widgets

Open Opportunities, Opportunities Created, Sales Lost, Total Leads Qualified, Activity by Campaign, Activity by Channel, Campaigns with Open Opportunities, Clicks by Campaign, Clicks by Channel, Contacts by Primary Campaign, Conversion Funnel, Top 10 Campaigns with Won Opportunities, Top 10 Campaigns by Revenue

 

Chatbot Widgets

Total Chats with Anonymous Leads, Total Chats with Contacts, Total Contacts Created, Total Conversions, Total Form Fills Influenced by Bot, Total Revenue Influenced by Bot, Bot Action Breakdown, Contacts Created Per Bot, Opportunities Created from New Leads Generated by Bot, Total Chats Per Page, Total Chats Per Page with Known Leads, Total Chats Over Time Per Bot

 

Contact Widgets

Contacts Added by Lead Status, Contacts by Lead Status, Contacts Added

 

Email Widgets

Average Email Clicks per Day, Average Email Conversion Rate, Sales Influenced by Email, Revenue by Email, Top 10 Emails by Conversion Rate, Unique Email Opens

 

Form Widgets

Average Form Submissions per Day, Sales Influenced by Form, Total Form Submissions, Revenue by Form, Unique Contacts Submitted a Form

 

Media Centre Widgets

Average Media Views per Day, Unique Media Views by Media, Total Media Views, Influenced by Media, Revenue by Media, Top 10 Media by Views, Unique Media Views

 

Opportunity Widgets

Total Revenue, Total Sales, Expected Value by Close Date and Deal Stage, Expected Value by Deal Stage, Revenue by Close Date and Owner, Revenue by Owner

 

Task Widgets

Completed Late Tasks by User, Completed On-Time Tasks by User, Completed On-Time Tasks by User, Total Completed Tasks by User, Total Completed Tasks by User, Tasks Completed, Tasks Due, Open Tasks, Overdue Tasks, Task Activity Report, Task Completion Rate by User, Task Completion Rate, Tasks Completed Late or Rescheduled, Tasks Completed on Time, Total Open Tasks by User, Total Open Tasks by User

 

Article written by Jake Crown at SharpSpring.

PROSAR Inbound Inc. is a SharpSpring Partner.

 

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Improving Customer Communications with Video Calls

Header image for SharpSpring information on PROSAR website.

Although nothing beats meeting with people to fully communicate, understand each other, and form well-rounded impressions. Communicating via email and text is efficient and can be very effective once a relationship is established. Phone calls are much better at discussing complex issues and getting to know a person, while video calls provide the benefit of voice, facial expression, as well as shared screens and group presentations.

Communication has always been the key to marketing and sales. Now, and for the foreseeable future, video calls have never been more important. Here are some tips for making effective and professional use of video calls.

 

Making Good Video Calls

Since we’re all spending more time in virtual meetings, consider these tips for good video calls:

  • Look Professional: If it’s a business call, show respect for the other participants, your company and yourself — dress accordingly for your business and role. Video calls from home can be a little more relaxed, but you still want to be seen as competent and professional so hygiene, grooming and pants are strongly recommended.
  • Be Prepared: Keeping people’s attention can be more difficult online so don’t create downtime or lags searching for information or trying to remember what you wanted to say. Have all resources close at hand and ready, make notes beforehand and include your goals for the meeting to keep you on track content-wise and strategically.
  • Set the Scene: A cluttered or discordant background make it difficult to focus on you; it may also make it difficult to take you seriously. A plain background is your best backdrop. Good lighting is critical, but from the front not back. Avoid lights and windows behind you.
  • Watch the Time: The informal nature of a video call versus an in-person meeting can foster long, boring affairs. Be mindful of the time and what is being accomplished. Keep to the agenda schedule for your input and move others along if you are the chair.
  • Watch your Mouth: Video calls are often recorded, so think twice before you speak.
  • Take Notes: Just as you would in a regular meeting, take notes to remember key points and action items that involve you. Ensure your notes are in sync with the meeting minutes.

Making Good Video Calls with SharpSpring

SharpSpring has complemented its Sales Optimizer with in-application video calling. It makes it easy to connect with others on their laptop or desktop. Recipients don’t need to use SharpSpring and there is no software to download. Their browser will ask permission to use their laptop’s mic and speaker and that’s it… you’re face-to-face creating relationships and opportunities.

Getting connected for online meetings and meaningful conversations is simple. Reach out to leads in your SharpSpring CRM with the click of a button, invite anyone via email, even invite people to video calls already in progress. Easily contact team members by clicking Video Call in the top toolbar.

Animated gif showing how easy it is to create a video call from SharpSpring.

 

SharpSpring Video Call Features

A full complement of video call features will help you succeed online:

Table of SharpSpring video call features.

 

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SharpSpring Makes it Easier to Close Sales with its New Meetings App

Header image for SharpSpring information on PROSAR website.

Booking meetings is the name of the game in sales. To help you excel at booking appointments and converting prospects to clients, SharpSpring has gone a few steps further than apps that automate the appointment booking process. It has created a fully automated process of triggered emails, tasks, notifications, follow-up and integrated it with their comprehensive marketing automation solution.

 

Creating and Sharing Meetings with SharpSpring Meetings

Invite clients and prospects to book a meeting with you in a professional, seamless and automated fashion. Use a text link (perhaps in your email signature with screenshot of SharpSpring Meeting app - adding book appointment button to email“Book a consultation now!”) or a button — either are easily created within the app. You can place the text link/button in an email, on your website or a landing page, wherever you want people to connect online and automatically book a meeting with you.

In addition, you can share meetings that you have created. Each share meeting link is unique to a specific meeting. Just like the initial meeting booking links, meetings can be shared via emails, websites and landing pages.

There is no limit to the number of users. A sales team of 2, 4 or 42 can have profiles for all staff, each with their own settings and personalized links to book meetings.

 

Customize Meeting App Settings

screenshot of SharpSpring Meeting app - Booking a Meeting

Set in advance the dates and times you are available, when and how you are notified of booked meetings, and which calendars are synced with your booked meetings. These settings can be modified at any time.

 

Sales managers can be notified and view all activity, monitoring follow-up, results and prospect nurturing.

You can even customize which domains the meetings are set to, as well as the color for meeting calendars.

And, big bonus, the SharpSpring Meetings app is completely free with the SharpSpring Marketing Automation subscription. To learn more about SharpSpring and their Meetings app, contact PROSAR today.

Learn more about marketing automation and its effect on email best practices in our article The New Email Paradigm: Do More with Less

 

PROSAR Inbound Inc. is a SharpSpring Partner.

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SharpSpring’s New Sales Optimizer

Header image for SharpSpring information on PROSAR website.

Sales managers are responsible for creating and implementing a sales process that consistently delivers results. But how do you outline what actions your team should take to close the deal, and when? More importantly, how do you streamline and control the process? SharpSpring has the answer!

SharpSpring Sales Optimizer ensures every salesperson follows best practices for conversion by automatically creating tasks and actions that move opportunities through the pipeline. This suite of tools is designed to give you control over both the cadence and quality of sales communication in ways never before possible.

Comprehensive Workflow Tool that Triggers Notifications, Tasks and Actions

Getting rid of those headaches starts with designing your ideal sales process in the visual workflow builder, a tool that empowers you to easily outline every step your team needs to take, from opportunity creation to a closed-won sale.

Your sales team now has access to the same powerful automation tools the marketing team uses, so they can convert those hard-earned leads to sales.

Workflows not only allow you to delegate how and when tasks are executed, but you can also automate actions like creating an opportunity and moving a deal to a new pipeline stage. Automatically generate new opportunities based on a hot lead’s engagement with your content, or move an opportunity to a new pipeline stage after they submit a signed contract. Allow automation to fill in the gaps and keep leads engaged without a second thought.

This enables your team to spend less time on the admin work involved in pipeline management so they can focus on what really matters – winning deals.

Manage Your Message with SharpSpring Sales Optimizer

Now that you’ve painted your horizon in an opportunity workflow, it’s time to add the little details that really seal the deal. When assigning actions in your workflow, you can easily control what emails and media center assets your salesperson sends out. With every auto-assigned sales task, you can link the specific email template they should send and any content assets relevant to that stage in the buyer’s journey. This makes it easy to align sales communication with the marketing team’s content strategy, so you have ultimate control over the message you want to convey.

Sales Optimizer Task ManagerDon’t worry, there’s still room for your salesperson to add their own flair – after all, you can’t automate a personal connection. From the Task Manager, the salesperson will have the option to send a Smart Mail template as-is or go into the email editor and customize it for a particular lead.

Streamline Task Management Through Entire Marketing – Sales Process

Having a more personal touch in your messaging is important for one-to-one engagement, but manually creating these repetitive phone and email tasks leaves too much room for human error. One missed follow-up email or phone call, and a sales-ready opportunity could fall through the cracks. With Sales Optimizer, rest assured that all your leads and opportunities are properly managed with the exact cadence you’ve laid out.


Follow-up tasks are auto-generated and flow seamlessly into every salesperson’s Task Manager. Even better, when leads engage with your website, their tasks float to the top of the list so your team can reach out just in time while your brand is top of mind. Sales Optimizer turns your website into a two-way communicator that’s patched in directly with your sales team, making prioritization easy and effective.

Capitalize on Hot Lead Engagement

Prioritizing who to reach out to is now easier than ever from the Activity Feed with instant visibility into which leads have automated tasks associated with them. Lead owners are able to see which leads are currently engaging and what they are engaging with, so they can respond accordingly.

If a lead opens an email or engages with your social media, this not only shows up in real-time on the Activity Feed, but it’s also highlighted when the lead owner has a follow-up task. This way it’s easy to time your sales follow-up at pivotal moments in the buyer’s journey.

Keep Your Team Accountable

Powerful new automation features sound great, but how do you make sure everything is going according to plan? Keep your team on track with detailed task reports that provide insight into which automated tasks are being completed or rescheduled during a given time.

Sales Optimizer Task Report

Instantly see if your sales rep sent an email when you assigned a phone call, for example, so you can make sure everyone follows the correct process. You can also identify any holes in your sales plan based on the outcome of automated tasks. Are deals closing on target?

Close More Deals With SharpSpring’s Sales Optimizer

Designing, implementing and fine-tuning your sales process can be a difficult feat. Make it easier – and more effective – with Sales Optimizer. To see exactly how the power of automation can benefit your bottom line, contact PROSAR today.

There is an endless supply of shiny new apps to help you manage your business and grow sales. Some are awesome, many are horrible, many are good, but not optimal for your business. Read our blog on Choosing New Tech Solutions for Business Growth — 5 Things Not To Do.

 

Article written by Nicholas Mangold, Product Marketing Specialist at SharpSpring.

PROSAR Inbound Inc. is a SharpSpring Partner.

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3 Ways to Activate Your Website

Business person using laptop with icons of website, email, customer, data, marketing automation for PROSAR blog

It’s common practice to check out a company’s website before deciding to use their product or service. We all do it; either to learn specific information about the product/service, gain further insight into its use, or simply to feel more comfortable with the company before making a purchase or commitment. This is true for both B2C and B2B, online and in-store purchases, packaged goods and professional services.

Understandably, companies are doing their best to create websites that engage with targeted audiences. Savvy organizations are:

  • Presenting what they do in a stylish and easy to navigate manner.
  • Making their website easy to use on tablets and smartphones.
  • Ensuring their website is accessible for people with disabilities (a legal requirement for some organizations).
  • Incorporating meta information and strategically worded content to build a solid foundation for SEO.
  • Engaging readers with relevant and interesting information.
  • Positioning their brand with messaging and imagery for greater impact.

So, let’s assume you’ve done all the above and have a good looking, informative website that provides a good user-experience on any device. Good for you… however, you can do more. If you expect your website to play an active role in your marketing, it needs to go beyond passively presenting and further engage your audience.

Here are three areas where your website can play a more active role in increasing awareness, improving your message and brand, and facilitating growth. Note that PROSAR is a SharpSpring Partner, so naturally we recommend SharpSpring as a cost-efficient and comprehensive marketing automation solution, but there are many good automated marketing platforms such as HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, etc.; and software specifically for email such as MailChimp.

 

Automated Emails

Going beyond an auto-reply email greeting when someone completes a form, your website can assist in nurturing relationships and prompting conversations when people have indicated an interest.

In their pre-purchase research, consumers may visit several websites looking for something specific or simply wanting to feel comfortable before they commit. Most consumers don’t announce that they are ready to buy, but they do provide signals. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your website could help identify those potential customers and reach out to them?

  • When a known user returns to your website within 24 hours or visits specific pages, a personalized and customized email could automatically be sent them. Perhaps providing details on the products they were looking at, informing them of an incentive (price, warranty, added value, etc.), suggesting an appointment, call or chat to answer questions… there are many ways to engage and determine how you can help them.
  • When someone downloads a resource from your website it can trigger a scheduled series of personalized and tailored emails with tips, related products/services, articles of interest, other relevant resources.
  • On an e-commerce website, an abandoned shopping cart or product comparisons could trigger a series of emails designed to provide information and insight, or bundling cost advantages on the specific products.

Workflows are series of emails crafted in advance and triggered by prospects’ specific behaviours. The flowchart can be as simple or complicated as you wish, with every if-this-then-that sequence of decisions triggering different emails. The prospects’ actions control what emails are sent to help them with their purchase decision.

Notifications should be added to the workflow so that marketing and sales staff can be alerted when and how a prospect would like information or assistance. Notifications can even alert when a prospect is on the website browsing.

Automated emails are not an excuse to force your information on unwilling recipients; the objective is to provide information to those who are seeking it. Harassment is not good business, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) imposes strict and sensible regulations on how a company can engage with people via email, you can read more about CASL here.

 

Dynamic Content
On your website, as in your daily life, what you say and how you say it matters. When we speak, we typically cater our words to the audience we are addressing. Most websites are static in nature (ours included these days!). They are filled with relevant, but generic content. Many larger companies have people dedicated to their website and social media accounts, so content can be updated, making it more relevant and topical. However, it is typically focused on a single targeted audience, or worded to address as large a segment of the public as possible.

Personas are being used more and more by organizations to better understand and target specific audience segments. SharpSpring tools enable different versions of emails and website pages so that headlines, text and images can be customized for specific audience segments. When the website identifies a user, it will present the content that relates to that persona. One of the underlining benefits of marketing automation is the ability to target your ideal customer personas and treat them as individuals.

Dynamic content facilitates more appropriate and persuasive communication with targeted audience segments. It also improves SEO by tailoring versions of your content with specific search terms. Such strategically worded content impacts being found online, effectively presenting your message, and converting leads to customers.

 

Conversion Process

Combining personas, dynamic content, workflows and email campaigns with tracking, lead scoring and a full CRM tool (Client Relationship Management) provides a platform to nurture and convert prospects. This complete package is how things come together to more effectively (and efficiently) manage prospects and customers. By tracking user behaviour and notifying marketing and sales staff, your website plays an important role in supporting your customers and identifying prospects.

Marketers can identify trends and create customized content and workflows (emails and landing pages) to address them. Salespeople are notified of potential interest and reminded of customers who have not been active, triggering workflows to engage and retain lapsed customers.

Your website can be more than a 24/7 online brochure. It can be actively participate in the marketing and sales process by attracting, engaging and converting leads, as well as maintaining existing customers. Unlike social media, your website is a stable hub that you control. It is an ideal resource to go beyond passive information presentation and effectively engage with your targeted audiences.

 

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Email Sender Statistics Demystified

Stethoscope on laptop keyboard

If you’ve spent any time among marketing automation, especially emails, you’ll probably notice email sender statistics. And you’ll probably notice a lot of ambiguity for how you can change your sender statistics.

Stethoscope on laptop keyboard

The Basics

An email campaign report is made up of two primary components: email delivery statistics and engagement statistics. Both of these combine to create your overall email sender statistic.

 

Email delivery statistics are made up of hard bounces, soft bounces, marked as spam, and repressions.

A hard bounce is a failure to deliver. These will lower your sender status if you have too many. Try to keep these under 2%.

A soft bounce is a temporary failure to deliver. Two of these will not lower your sender status, but they become a hard bounce on the third failure, which will lower your sender status. Soft bounces are a warning the email might be invalid.

Marked as spam were emails delivered, but were flagged by the email provider as spam and placed in the junk folder.

A repression is an email that has been suppressed by the tool you’re using. Some software, such as SharpSpring, will automatically suppress emails that are “high risk”— those that have been bought and sold on lists heavily and are often blacklisted by spam watchdogs.

 

Engagement statistics are made up of deliveries, opens, and possibly internal clicks.

Deliveries are emails that were successfully delivered to the address.

Opens are emails that were opened by the client.

Internal clicks are when the person clicked on a link within the email.

You need low hard bounces, high engagement, and high volume in order to improve your sender status. Until you have sent multiple thousands of emails, you will be considered a low-quality sender for the safety of already-established high quality senders

 

Best Practices

You want to make sure your lists are clean before sending anything to them. Sites such as BriteVerify allow you to get detailed reports of how many emails will hard bounce or be repressed because the emails are associated with spam, and return you a clean list.

If the list has low percentages of bad emails, it’s safe to use.

When it comes to soft bounces, keeping an eye on emails that have soft bounced is critical. You can either manually check who has two bounces, or you can rely on an automatically-built list that remove emails from your lists after two soft bounces.

You also want to be making sure your subject lines are attention-grabbing and enticing to keep engagement up. Testing different subject line lengths, offers, keywords, and “sent from” addresses Having people open your emails helps establish you as a high quality sender.

Also segmenting your lists to those who primarily engage with your emails to send the majority of your communication to them, only doing infrequent mass mailings, helps keep your engagement statistics high.

All of this must be done over an extended period of time, with a large volume of emails. The amount of emails it takes to be considered a good sender fluctuates, but is multiple thousands of emails. Building up a reputation with a solid, reputable email provider is necessary to work your way up to proving yourself a good sender.

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Get Personal With Dynamic Emails

sending dynamic emails

Custom messaging, or dynamic messaging, is content that changes and is served on your website based on a visitor’s characteristics. Imagine going to a website and having only the product or service pages that most interest you being highlighted on its web pages. Or sending out an email that has three different versions with customized headlines, images, text and offers for each of your key personas. When you speak directly to your market segment you can better connect and nurture an ongoing relationship.

 

A lead visits your site for the first time? Provide them a whitepaper or an educational document about your products of services.  A visitor’s site visit history indicates they are ready to buy? Offer a quote or testimonial to close the deal.

 

Custom (dynamic) messaging is all about providing content that is personalized to a visitor, helping to increase online conversions.

 

This is a quick introduction to SharpSpring’s Dynamic Email capability.

 

Dynamic Emails help to significantly increase conversion rates as we are delivering messages that are tailored to the recipient.

 

Dynamic Emails are single emails with contain content that changes based on information that we have on a lead. As an example, let’s use a lead who is interested in services that a Marketing Agency provides. These services could be Branding, Website Design & Development, Digital Marketing or Creative Services. When a lead shows an expressed interest in one of those services we can change the content in your email to be specific to that interest.

 

When the lead fills out a form on your site for more information on the service in which they are interested that triggers an automatic email to be sent from your automated marketing platform, such as SharpSpring. Using a Dynamic Email, we only need to create one email that sends to all leads who fill out the form – however the content within that email will be specific to the interest of that lead.
Not sure where to start with Dynamic Emails? Here are some ideas:

 

  • Use the contact field “Has an Opportunity”, and then create Dynamic Emails with variable content based whether or not the lead has an opportunity associated to them.
  • Lead Status – If a lead is a customer, email may point to our support forum or provide an email address for support or “Manage Your Account”. If the lead is not a customer, include an email segment that directs them to Sales.
  • Create a custom contact field called “Has Provided Review”. If a Customer has provided a review, then we show an email segment that points them to a “refer a friend” page. If the customer has not provided a review, we include an email segment pointing them to a review forum.

 

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Sharpspring and CASL Compliance

Letter with barbed wire.

Building a Prospect List With CASL

Marketing automation is a useful tool in any business, but it becomes more important with Canada’s Anti-Spam Laws (CASL). In order to be CASL compliant, companies must provide evidence of compliance in the form of opt-ins and records of transactions in order to establish the communication to their prospects is consensual. This can be difficult to manage, require constant updating, and can drain resources away from other facets of your business. It can also make your website less effective, because you’re not holistically tracking your customer base.

However, with tools like SharpSpring, you can determine worthwhile leads, use forms to opt-in, track lead behaviour, and use lists to qualify leads. SharpSpring also automates the tracking of who has opted in and not, and has options to track purchases.

Letter with barbed wire.
credit: s576/ getty images

Forms

Forms are, by far, the strongest SharpSpring tool for CASL compliance. By including an opt-in on all gated content, you increase your odds of receiving permission to send email communication.

All opt-ins can then be stored in a separate list (more on lists later), meaning you never have to worry about sending communication to somebody who has not opted in.

Using forms also allows you to capture emails and get a barometer for who is seeking out your content, giving you better audience data and allowing you to improve your future campaigns.

 

Track Lead Behaviour

If somebody doesn’t check the opt-in box, that doesn’t mean the contact is useless. You can proceed to track how much they use your site, what pages they visit, and see if they’re worth manually calling (something not covered under CASL), or transferring them to an “opt-in” list after they’ve made a purchase from you (at which point, there is implied consent).

SharpSpring allows you to both set a lead score based on behaviour, and has an option to trigger workflows that notify your salespeople when a lead has done actions that your company has deemed important. Both of these features allow you to use methods other than email campaigns to further your sales efforts, making CASL less of a concern.

 

Lists

Arguably one of SharpSpring’s more powerful features, lists allow you to segment all contacts by criteria you determine. Not only can you separate those who have opted in versus those who haven’t, but you can create rules-based lists that adapt according to lead score or user behaviour.

The previous two features (forms and tracking lead behaviour) are critical in helping you build lists. While the most obvious uses for lists is creating email campaigns, lists can also be used to qualify prospects. By assigning lead score points based on pages visited, number of return visits to the site, and number of forms filled in, a sales team can establish which leads are qualified and ready to make a purchase. Instead of following up with every lead, salespeople can limit themselves to following up on leads who are more likely to produce a return on the investment of selling to them.

 

Overall

Automated marketing is a vital tool to maintain CASL compliance. In order to best cover your legal bases, it makes sense to purchase a tool such as SharpSpring and work with a partner to best establish how you can advance your business without relying on random email marketing.

 

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Why You Should Use Marketing Automation to Gather and Use Analytics

Analytics. For many business owners and marketers, the word comes with mixed feelings: both excitement at the opportunities it could present, and intimidation, for the seemingly endless breadth of knowledge available on the subject.

First, what are analytics, in the context of marketing for your business?

Analytics: a collection of online data from which meaningful information and insights can be derived that can help you make better marketing and business decisions.

If you’re doing it properly, you’re not just collecting any data, but actionable data. Actionable data is useful, relevant, meaningful information that can be used to make intelligent, real-life marketing and business decisions. This is where marketing automation platforms such as SharpSpring come in.

Analytics-ThinkstockPhotos-473265020 Photo: Thinkstock / iStock / pingingz / 473265020

The Power of Marketing Automation

One of the best ways to not only acquire useful analytics, but to act on them, is to invest in marketing automation. Marketing automation allows you to do so much more than simply accumulate and store analytics and look at graphs, it allows you to take the data and turn it into something useful that will help move your company forward!

For example, instead of simply sending out an e-newsletter to an email list and wondering how they responded to it, marketing automation platforms such as SharpSpring allows you to not only collect actionable data, but they allow you to act on it!

With SharpSpring:

You you get a real-time report on the amount of contacts who open the email and click on specific links, and finally, have the software automatically sort them into lists based on their behaviour and interests (i.e. what they click on)! Now, you’ve learned something about each contact that you can use in a variety of ways. Further, if certain links in the email haven’t performed well, you’ll know, and can adjust your tactics accordingly to improve engagement next time!

Perhaps some of these same contacts have visited certain landing pages on your website, that show further interest in your company and/or specific services you offer – this criteria could be added to your list(s), too!

For example, you might create a list called “People who are Interested in Vintage Fashion” and have it automatically populate with contacts who have clicked on links to blogs about vintage fashion from your e-newsletter and have also visited product pages on your site devoted to vintage fashion.

From there, when it’s time for the next e-newsletter to be sent out, you’ll be able to send each new list a version of the e-newsletter that is tailored to their interests, perhaps with a link to a form with a new offer that they’ll appreciate (e.g. a free resource on vintage fashion). Of course, you’ll be able to automatically track all of this too, and to automatically save it with your contact’s profile. The more you learn about your contacts, the better equipped you’ll be to give them what they want and to continue to nurture them along the sales process.

This is just one example of the many ways in which marketing automation can enhance the value of your analytics and your ability to use analytics intelligently and profitably. Check out our other recent blog on what questions to ask when putting together an analytics report.