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What’s New with Marketing Automation

By DCA Blogs | September 4, 2019

Good news, small business owners! Newsletter platforms are more intuitive than ever. Their features for drip campaigns and workflows have made it even easier to keep in touch with your clients and prospects. And some have gotten even smarter, incorporating in the CRM model: Lead Pages, tracking codes, and even lead scoring.

The last time DCA Virtual Business Support reported on Email Marketing, Automation and Workflows was in February of 2018 That blog focused on the free and freemium platforms that help beginning marketers. This blog will focus on more innovative technologies for small businesses that are growing or ready to grow. Technology that combines an Email Management System (EMS), Content Scheduling Tool, and Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) with Lead Scoring into one efficacious system.

Email Management Systems

There are many good EMS out there. We talked about a few in our past blog: MailChimp, Constant Contact and GetResponse. These platforms are not truly EMS, but they are outbound email delivery systems. They are quite capable of creating campaigns, drip campaigns, and logic workflows; think if-then statements. But they are only OUTBOUND.

A true email management system is also able to capture, retain, and manage INBOUND email. An example would be a call center. The flow of work might look like this:

  • Email received
  • Concern/issue identified
  • Concern/issue placed in a help desk ticket via email
  • Help desk ticket is assigned to the proper agent and the email trail is recorded on the customer account
  • Everyone in the process can see all the actions and information about this ticket from the initial request to how it was handled along the way, including a manager, if needed

I’m sure you can see the benefits!

Content Scheduling Tool

Content scheduling tools are software such as Buffer, Planoly, HootSuite, or TweetDeck. These are productivity tools that allow you to bulk schedule posts to your social media accounts. If you don’t use one, I highly recommend that you do.

Can your scheduling tool also schedule your monthly eblasts out to your consumers, segment your lists, and record every time a social link was clicked or eblast opened? DCA’s can!

Customer Relationship Management Software

Over the years, the DCA team has used many CRMs within DCA and for our clients. Act, OnePage, Contactually, Little Green Light, Basecamp, and Dubsado are some that come to mind.

The purpose of a CRM is simple – to help you manage the relationships of customers and potential customers. They all have some basic features in common:

  • Contact management
  • Sales opportunity management or deal management
  • Ability to create, track, or assign tasks
  • Mobile app functionality
  • Some integrate with email and social media
  • Other integrations with API or Zapier

Recently, DCA has started using SharpSpring as our all-in-one system. We love this system so much, we became an agency partner. We feel like having an EMS, CRM, content scheduling tool, plus the ability to score leads, create workflows and drip campaigns, and trackable lead pages is far more efficient than having several different systems that we have to track and manage data separately. We have streamlined from using Zoho, MailChimp, and Buffer to using SharpSpring.

And the BEST is yet to come. We can help you with this same powerful streamlining for your marketing, sales, and communication. Pssst…we have some specials going on as well. Are you interested in finding out more? Schedule a time for us to chat.