Automation is one of the best aspects of building and growing an online business. When you think about it, automation is something that is usually much harder to pull off in the offline world.
When it comes to automating a specific task, it usually comes along with hiring new employees to work for you. However, it doesn’t work that way when it comes to building and growing an online business.
Automation is simply defined as the process of leveraging technology to replace manual efforts. So when it comes to sales funnels and email marketing, there’s a lot that needs to be accomplished. Let’s talk about those tasks in this article.
The Importance Of Sales Funnel And Email Automation
Let’s talk about the process that occurs when you make a sale online. Someone enters in their information on the checkout page and then they get taken to an upsell page (usually). Whether they purchase the upsell or not, they eventually get taken to the thank you page.
All of this happens automatically. However, there are plenty more automation details that are occurring in the background. Let’s talk about them when it comes to email marketing first.
Email Marketing Automation Defined
Did you know that you can automate hundreds of different tasks when it comes to sales funnels and email marketing? It’s certainly true.
In fact, leveraging these types of automation features has become so popular that many companies are often comparing each other in terms of who has the best features possible. A perfect example of this comes from the comparison of online business software Kartra and ActiveCampaign.
Getting back to the topic, email marketing automation simply helps you send more emails, but also make more sales by focusing on getting the right emails in front of the right people, at the right time.
Let’s start off with one of the most basic email marketing automation tasks. If someone signs up for your list and then makes a purchase from you, you can automatically move them from being a lead to a customer. This is a huge difference too.
It shows that the person has invested in themselves, and in the long run, is much more likely to do business with you. It’s also been stated before that it’s much easier to sell more to your previous customers, as opposed to getting new customers since it cost more money.
Here’s another great email marketing task: tagging. You can tag your email subscribers my actions that they’ve taken such as opening an email, clicking on a link, making a purchase (like we previously talked about), and don’t forget about watching a specific duration of a video or presentation.
Another micro email marketing task can allow you to unsubscribe someone if they haven’t opened a single email in 30 days, or however long you want that specific time frame to be. Last but not least, don’t forget about IF and THEN automation.
This is something that Kartra specializes in and allows you to take specific actions if your subscribers take a specific action. So if your subscribers open an email, subscribe to a specific list, click on a link, make a purchase, or anything else, then you can apply specific tags for them. The best part about IF and THEN tasks is that they can all be automated.
Sales Funnel Automation Defined
Building the perfect sales funnel is only half of the battle. Connecting all of the moving parts and adding automation is the other half of the battle. Let’s quickly talk about sales funnel automation.
As you might have guessed, automating your sales funnel allows you to turn visitors into leads, and then leads into paying customers. All of this can be done hands-free unless you’re selling physical products and then you might have to add a few more steps.
So what are some simple tasks that can get automated? From the top of the funnel, visitors can go from interested to reading a sales letter using a simple redirect after they give you their email address. A visitor can automatically have their purchases added to their download page when they make a purchase.
After the purchase has been complete, there’s also the ability to have that traffic sign up for a webinar and get taken to the webinar presentation page. If you didn’t guess already, all of that can be 100% automated as well.
Closing Words About Automation
Automation is certainly something that you’ll want to add to your online business. It frees up a ton of your time, allows you to work on other important aspects of your online business, and that can certainly lead to a big increase in sales.
I hope that you enjoyed this quick article and that it allowed you to start thinking more about how you can utilize automation for your online business today.
