You know by now how much marketing automation can help your sales team, but what about your customer service team?

Marketing automation offers a wide range of benefits for pretty much every department and industry. Whatever size your business may be, whatever your niche may be, there is a very good chance to that these tools will help you simplify your email marketing, mobile marketing and lead generation efforts.

Although it is most typically used for marketing campaigns to bring in new customers, marketing automation can be incredibly useful when it comes to customer retention, engagement and overall service. To give you an idea of how important it is to maintain customer loyalty, consider the following statistics:

• Your loyal top 10% customers spend three times more per order than the lower 90%, while your top 1% of customers spend five times more than the lower 90%. – RJ Metrics
• The cost of acquiring a new customer is between six to seven times higher than the cost of investment it would take to retain a customer. Increasing customer retention by just 5% increases profits by 25% - 95%. – Bain & Company
• Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as a first purchase. Repeat customers spend 67% more and typically have larger transactions. – MarketingTechBlog

How exactly does marketing automation help you keep your customers happy, and what benefits can be enjoyed as far as customer service goes?

How Marketing Automation Helps Your Customer Service Team

From omnichannel communication to personalised service, customer profiles, saved time and better relationships, marketing automation offers numerous benefits to your customer service team.

1. Connections across a range of channels.

Trying to connect to customers manually on a wide range of channels will quickly become difficult. Aside from the amount of time that it would waste, your team would quickly find that this approach yielded very little conversion. With automation software however, you have the ability to reach customers across a range of channels – social media, email and mobile for starters. When these processes are automated, there is far less pressure to contact valuable prospects. Instead, you have the chance to reach your customers across various channels, in a way that builds lasting relationships.

Why is omnichannel so important for marketing automation success? Essentially, automation acts as a safety net, allowing you to have your finger in many proverbial pies. You will not have to worry about customers falling through the cracks. Instead, you will be able nurture and support customers at every stage of their journey, across multiple channels. Make sure that you use a reliable automation system to store, track and report on how well each channel is performing. This will enable you to stay one step ahead of customers while keeping your omnichannel strategies going strong.

2. Highly personalised customer service.

Customer relationships are vital in every single industry that deals with people. A factor that makes all the difference between successful relationships and less successful ones is the ability to provide a highly tailored, bespoke service to every single one of your clients. This is often seen as the gold standard. Essentially, the ability to treat your customers as though they are royalty can make all the difference in customer loyalty. To show you how important customer loyalty is, take a look at these statistics:

• Only 13% of customers are loyalists that do not shop around (McKinsey Research)
• 85% of U.S. consumers are loyal to brands that protect the privacy of their personal information (Accenture)
• 51% of U.S. consumers are loyal to brands that interact through their preferred communication channels (Accenture)
• 8 out of 10 consumers are willing to pay more for better customer experience (Capgemini)
• 26% of consumers cite trust and consistency as important for brand loyalty (Rare)
• 56% of consumers said that receiving a personalised incentive would improve brand consideration (Virtual Incentives)

One of the most important factors driving loyalty besides trust and consistency is personalisation. Offering customers highly tailored messaging that is relevant, well-timed and automated for maximum effectiveness is the simplest way to promote loyalty.

Creating customer personas, segmenting your lists, scoring your leads and developing a strategy for customer retention that is based on tailored offers and content is the best way to ensure that you reach your customers in the best way possible.

3. Better understanding of your customers.

Through strategies such as lead scoring and segmentation, you will also have the ability to gain deeper understanding of your customers. Knowing how potential and current customers interact, whether it is through website visits, email link clicks, downloaded content or other behaviours, gives you critical insight into how your customers think and act.

A 2013 study done by E-Consultancy for example showed that 83% of online shoppers required some level of support to complete their purchase, no matter how much information they had previously found. This study also showed that online shoppers expect assistance within five minutes, or otherwise they either try another online shop or abandon their cart completely. Knowing what your customers want, and how they think, can do wonders in preventing abandoned carts and other issues.

When dealing with customers, marketing automation makes it easier to get insight into what customers have viewed online, what they have downloaded, which links they have clicked and what other behaviour you are able to track. This in turn helps you to provide a better level of service at every stage of their buying process, producing targeted feedback and essentially increasing the odds of further purchases.

4. Less time wastage.

Another major benefit of marketing automation in any industry is its ability to save a great deal of time and effort. In the case of customer service, you will be able to identify commonly asked questions, which can be communicated to your marketing team to reduce the amount of emails and calls relating to these questions. To use an example, customer service agents in a shopping mall may often get calls and emails to find out what time the centre opens, or a computer shop may often get asked how to get started with new laptops.

Customer service representatives can communicate such questions to marketing, who can develop an email campaign that takes customers through some of the most frequently asked questions, giving step by step instructions on getting started, or offering useful info on opening hours.

5. Better customer relationships.

Finally, another major benefit to customer service teams is the ability to build better, more engaged relationships with customers. Mobile engagement works especially well with the help of marketing automation, while email programmes that offer loyalty programmes, anniversaries, birthdays and other tailored offers further helps to drive engagement. When you are able to keep in touch with customers at all stages of their journey, from initial purchase all the way until post-purchase when they become loyal customers, you will quickly see the benefits. Marketing automation makes it easier to keep in touch through a variety of channels, enabling you to retain more customers and drive more sales through your increased loyalty and post-purchase strategies.

To find out more about how marketing automation tools can help your industry, contact the Grapevine team today.