Automating Sales and Marketing for Small Businesses: Examples to Help You Get Started

Every small business springs up as the result of a great idea. At first, the idea and drive seem to be sufficient for keeping the company afloat. However, as time goes on, the need for saving time thanks to established procedures and automation grows in parallel.

So let's take a look at the example of Jenny, a Senior Marketing Manager at an e-commerce retail company, to walk you through typical concerns, and processes that could be established and automated for more effective work.

So, here are some of Jenny's concerns that led her to consider automation:

Before enabling automation, Jenny wants to understand what processes can be established in advance, so they can start small, but have the opportunity to adjust their strategy.

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The sales pipeline is a summary of current and upcoming sales prospects that managers may use to more accurately predict the income they will bring in, the points where their sales funnel will experience bottlenecks, and their anticipated cash flow. Customers go through a journey from discovery to sales and beyond as they become repeat customers.

So Jenny decides to talk to the sales team and establish a mutual funnel where both teams can benefit from each other's activities. First of all, they decide to set the stages for working with their leads and customers to define the activities they can perform on each of them:

After establishing the pipeline with the sales team, Jenny comes back to her marketing team with the updates. Now she knows what they need to do, but how to bring efficiency to this process?

There are no marketing operations without data. Any department needs a database, and e-commerce is a rule but not an exception in this aspect. The simplest, cheapest, and most powerful entry in a list is an email address.

That's why email marketing is a powerful tool for e-commerce SMBs. Every touch of a customer's communication or action can be approved and automated by email platforms. Here are some ways email automation can help eCommerce SMBs and simplify the processes in Jenny's company:

Platforms that fit SMB: MailChimp, Snovio, Litmus, Sendpulse, SFMC.

Lead nurturing is the process of developing and maintaining relationships with customers at every stage of their journey, usually through marketing and communications messaging. Automated lead nurturing uses software to send messages that are triggered by customer behavior or predetermined schedules.

As it usually happens, "Small & Medium" is limited in human resources. The marketing team can't spend their priceless time on manual leads prioritizing and segmentation. That's almost impossible when we talk about hundreds of clients per day in any B2C e-commerce company. So here are the opportunities that can boost marketing effectiveness provided by leads nurturing automation:

Platforms that fit SMB: MCAE, Hubspot, Marketo, ActiveCampaign.

Social Media is a free and a quite powerful marketing channel, especially for SMBs. It costs nothing to tell you about your services and products, that's why the marketing team in "Small & Medium" uses Instagram and Facebook. So what are the advantages of its automation?

It's not only about scheduling and publishing social media posts in advance. Though, Jenny knows that her subordinate Alice combines the duties of a content and a social media manager, so this function saves her hours and provides visibility and consistency of posting. Some more important benefits are:

Jenny is happy with the plan of establishing a sales pipeline and automating some of the team's main tasks. However, when the plan is ready, she runs into several other concerns:

These are typical concerns of most companies that decide to bring digitization to their processes, and luckily, they can be easily overcome. A consulting partner with deep technical and business experience can help with managing data, integrations, training, and the most effective strategy for a particular field, ensuring that your business is scalable and adaptive to any change.