With any business, maintaining consistent, lead-producing and nurturing marketing strategies is a must. It’s no different for insurance agencies.

But all the intricate details and tasks that need to be taken care of in order to successfully market your agency or business can take huge amounts of time–the same time you could be using to generate more leads, connect with clients, and grow your business.

That’s where marketing automation comes in. Let’s look at what marketing automation actually is and delve into a few of its many benefits so you can determine if this technology is right for you.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a tool that insurance agents, business owners, and anyone else can use to increase the efficiency of their marketing programs. It does this by alleviating the stress and hassle of carrying out menial, repetitive tasks by automating them.

Many digital marketing campaigns nowadays are fully automated. From mass emails drafted and sent to clients, leads, and other interested parties to social media posts and paid ads, marketing automation software and tools can significantly decrease the amount of time you spend thinking about and working on marketing programs.

Advantages of marketing automation

There are many benefits to using marketing automation, including increased efficiency, reduced spending, increased conversion rates, lead nurturing, improved data reporting, and much more. Let’s take a closer look at how these benefits and others can better advantage your company.

1. Marketing campaign efficiency

Any tool you use should increase your efficiency in some way, no matter what you’re working on. Marketing automation tools do just that for your agency. They allow you to identify any prospective leads you may be attracting so that they can be nurtured and developed into real, business-generating leads.

Marketing automation does this by helping you understand your audience so that you can segment all of your prospects into groups that can be marketed according to their needs and position in life. What’s more, they help you maintain a strong presence with those customers along their insurance journey.

2. Less spending

When you no longer have to spend as much time on marketing by using marketing automation tools, you’re actually saving yourself a lot more than your own time. You’re saving the time of all the employees who work for you. You are also saving all the resources you would have spent to complete the work–electricity, computer systems, paper, software, and design programs to enhance emails or social media posts, and anything else that may be involved.

Your team will be able to take that saved time and those spared resources to use for work on more important projects and things that you do best, like managing the creativity of your marketing campaigns.

3. Increase conversion rate and ROI

Marketing automation tools are able to exponentially increase your conversion rate and ROI (Return on Investment). They can track and potential leads you have across a plethora of sites and marketing streams, and they can use any data they gain to retarget those same leads and increase your overall CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).

Marketing automation tools also have the ability to analyze current marketing efforts to ensure that your campaigns are attracting the attention they are designed to and are bringing in sufficient leads for your company’s needs.

4. Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is one of the most important jobs a marketing automation system will have. After all, it doesn’t matter how many leads you have or how many potential clients you are able to reach if they are being properly nurtured and grown into real leads. When companies don’t spend time looking after the leads they acquire, it is nearly impossible to convert their casual interest into a genuine sale.

With marketing automation, you don’t need to worry about it nearly as much because the process is taken care of under one of the system’s many intentionally designed programs. That way, leads are much more likely to commit to sales and help grow your business.

5. Better data and reporting

With any job that a human performs, there must be a margin for error–it’s just the nature of things. People make mistakes. Unfortunately, some of these mistakes can cost the business time, resources, money, leads, and even client business.

Marketing automation tools drastically cut down on that margin for error. They can collect, store, and recall data much more accurately, and further, they can use the data they’ve gathered to help you make informed decisions in refining your marketing processes.

6. Better customer experience

With marketing automation, customers are given the opportunity to experience better customer service from your agents. The marketing tools will keep customers informed about your company regularly with no missed posts or emails due to human forgetfulness or error. But more than that, they take the time that agents don’t have to study those leads who interact with marketing from the agency. 

Customers will be able to feel a higher level of engagement from the agency thanks to the extra attention marketing automation tools are able to provide throughout the lead generation and nurturing processes.

7. Scalability

Like any good technology, marketing automation systems have scalability. They can scale up and grow as your company gains more clients, and, if need be, they can also scale down should you need to downsize your marketing presence for any reason.

Key takeaways

Marketing automation tools are an invaluable addition to any business today, especially those that have, or want to have a strong online presence. Marketing automation tools make life so much easier for businesses and agents who can work more efficiently with their time and resources when the weight of monotonous, time-consuming marketing work is lifted off of their shoulders. Additionally, the system delivers better customer experiences that directly impact the revenue increase you will see from properly nurtured leads.

For more information on marketing automation systems and tools, contact Better Agency today.