Marketing Automation for Revenue Generation: What It Is and how to do it

Marketing automation is an essential component of productivity and success as a firm that provides online training to streamline the processes which divert your attention from the bigger picture. Learn how to get started today.

What if we told you that email is your highest-profit sales channel? It's true: your most warm and most active potential customers will come from your email list. Since the revenue generated by email marketing is estimated at 11 billion by the end of 2023 ( Statista), your ability to send an appropriate amount of emails quickly is crucial.

It's important to know that it is to create new revenue streams via online education. But, given the constraints of budgets and other priorities, you may not have the time nor the funds for an elaborate email marketing program currently. That's where marketing automation can help, helping you to hit your sales targets while making your customers experience memorable on autopilot.

In this article, we'll give you the basics of easy and cost-effective methods to set up email marketing software in order to:

• Engage students and improve graduation rates for courses and certificates.
• Market effectively to expand your autopilot program
• Prevent churn and keep your income streams stable

Do not miss this:

•    What is Marketing Automation? for businesses as well as Organizations through Online Courses?
•    Why should you invest on Automation for Marketing Automation?
•    Determine Your Goals for Marketing Automation
•    What Does Marketing Automation Do Its Work?
•    Execution how to use Marketing Automation
•    Stay Away From These Top 3 Marketing Automation Faults
•    Integrate Your Marketing Automation Platform With A Flexible, Reliable LMS

What Is Marketing Automation to Businesses and Organizations through Online Courses?

Marketing automation is a software tool that puts repetitive communication tasks on autopilot. You're probably already receiving email ads from your favourite retailers and brands, announcing sales and product updates. Many people are unaware they use automated marketing software to create and distribute these promotions on a regular basis.

Automating marketing for companies as well as organizations that offer online courses extends beyond emailing newsletters or discounts. For example, you can use your automation system to develop continuous lead generation funnels that collect emails, then send reminder emails to prospective customers, then invite your prospects to purchase your online course. You can also make use of Marketing Automation to deliver your course modules with the help of a "drip schedule" and send messages to students reminding them to meet the course's requirements.

An easy and smooth course for students is directly connected to the amount of revenue that the course will generate. In fact 59 percent of B2B marketers rely on email marketing as the most effective revenue generation channel. (Benchmark)

Why should you invest into marketing Automation?

With tools such as marketing automation tools, your business or organization can reach thousands of students on the internet and run a profitable online course company. Even smaller teams that are strapped for resources are using marketing automation platforms to hit their sales goals, show ROIand keep their eyes on growing their business.

Marketing automation streamlines critical income-generating processes without having to manually measure or segmenting, which could be exhausting, difficult, and time-consuming. This means that the automation program frees time and mental energy to concentrate on more important issues. That is, it is now possible to work onyour enterprise instead of focusing on it.

The following are the reasons why marketing automation software is an absolute must for leaders scaling a course enterprise:

  Marketing automation is an essential element of your conversion funnel  

Traditionally referred to as an "sales funnel" your conversion funnel depicts the path a buyer takes before, during and after they become a student. Thinking of the buyer's journey in terms of funnels can help you map out and understand every step that buyers go through when they progress towards making their choice.

• The top of the page: Customers who are aware they're having issues and are now looking for solutions
• The middle People who know which options are available and begin to narrow down the options available to them
• The bottom line:Customers who have completed enough research and are ready to accept your call to action (CTA).

To increase your conversion rates, you'll need constant funnel optimization. Marketing automation can provide you with the necessary data to evaluate each stage of the funnel and pinpoint areas for improvements. The data will reveal the percentage of people who drop out of your customer journey and when they do at what stage, when the event occurs and what causes it, as well as why.

A digestible report that is automatically generated from your marketing automation platform highlights problem areas in the funnel. This could be because your sign-up is too complicated or the message isn't hitting the right pain factors to trigger the right kind of.

Marketing automation allows you to understand your customer journey, from when a prospect first discovers your business/organization to when they become a paying student. You can use customer journey data to:

  Use Marketing Automation to Design Evergreen or "Always On" sales strategies  

Many moving parts to be considered when selling and marketing an online course. It is a time for campaign launches, special promotions and the ongoing creation of new educational resources and products. The process of implementing all these points of contact can be quite difficult without marketing automation.

Companies and organisations typically utilize marketing automation software to plan and schedule the launch and campaign to allow their business or revenue stream to function like a well-oiled machine.

Automating marketing eliminates the need for repetitive work such as sending out emails, posting on social media and updating your website. Automation allows you to "set it and forget it" in order to reach audiences at the right time, regardless of the time zone or working all hours. For example, you could program an email that is automatic requesting feedback and testimonials to be sent 30 days after an individual has finished the course.

• There is no more hand-written email blastsIt might be a surprise to you, but many marketers still manually send out email blasts and manually select the list to send to. Automate your campaigns through the marketing automation process by creating guidelines and triggers.
• There's no more muddled lead handoffs: Marketing automation can help unify your marketing and sales teams. You can prevent your teams from going back and forth about "warm" and "weren't-actually-warm" leads by setting up a lead scoring system that automatically ranks how sales-ready a lead is.
• Make loyal customers with autopilot: Use your automation platform to create emails that promote upsells during purchases or contact old customers with offers. In addition, marketing automation allows you to create loyalty programs to make your customers feel valued and special and result in repeat business.

  Automated Testing is a great way to test and Improve Your Marketing Strategies to Get the Most ROI  

There's no one perfect marketing campaign--just one that you experiment with and then improve upon as time passes. "Measuring ROI" is merely an elaborate way to measure the extent to which your marketing efforts brought you to your ultimate objective. Marketing automation is used to test the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and send out marketing emails using two headlines in order for comparison of open rates.

Determine Your Goals for Marketing Automation

Utilizing marketing automation to get many more students into the school is just the beginning. Automation also helps your business/organization keep students engaged, improves retention rates, and decreases churn. Making sure that your costs for customer acquisition are lower through giving them an exceptional learning user experience can positively affect your profits!

Here are the most critical metrics for email marketing that you must be tracking with your marketing automation system:

  Sales Conversion Rates  

As SEO is becoming more competitive, and the cost of advertising increases every year, one of your top priorities should be optimizing the sales funnel. Consider your sales funnel as the way to attract your ideal customers automatically.

It is possible to think of a sales funnel as a procedure that you guide your prospective students throughout, culminating in their choice to take the plunge (or decide not to enroll) in your course. It is your responsibility to use your marketing automation system not just to draw more customers to your sales funnel but to measure your conversion rate so you can adjust and improve.

The measurement of your sales funnel is dependent on the complexity of your sales funnel, but the best starting point is looking at the overall efficiency of your conversion. Your overall conversion rate represents the number of potential buyers that make it to the bottom of your sales funneland become paying customers.

To measure the conversion rate of your business, divide the number of paid students by the number leads who came through your sales funnel. multiply the result by 100.

  Customer Success (CS) Metrics  

You're probably already familiar with the term "customer service" however, the business-to-business (B2B) market has its own terminology: the customer's satisfaction (CS). Think of CS as a more complex conscious version of the traditional customer support.

Customer support is a service that answers inquiries and resolves issues on the frontlines, success for customers is the result of a relationship you build with your clients. It is a partnership where you anticipate their challenges and ensure they are satisfied as your strategy to retain your customers.

Below are the key measures that can tell you if you're succeeding in your CS initiatives and also how you can utilize marketing automation in order to increase these metrics:

• The course is completed: To get the transformation you promised, students must be able to reach the end of the course. Engaging students throughout your course can be difficult, particularly when they are busy professionals juggling many tasks. Utilizing marketing automation, you can send periodic emails that encourage, provide helpful resources, and make sure your students are accountable.
• Time from course completion: Even if your course is self-paced, you should to keep track of the amount of time, in average, it takes your students to complete your course. The addition of additional assistance can help speed or accelerate your course's completion. You can think of other resources you could offer to them in order to help them get through information more efficiently and also help them remember the material more efficiently.
• Failure rate of participants (for the certification course): By understanding what causes students to fail, and which places where they have the most difficulty it is possible to enhance your class and give them extra assistance. Send automated marketing emails encouraging students to retest.

  Customer Retention Rates  

With it being harder than ever before to attract new clients (especially in highly competitive B2B marketplaces) This is the perfect moment to focus on retaining and churn prevention. Retention of customers is a fancy way of increasing student engagement while deepening connections to your brand. The happy students can result in good referrals, and will provide valuable word-of mouth advertising opportunities for your company or company.

Your communications should help your paying students feel valued and well-informed (especially if you have a membership or subscription model). Utilizing marketing automation as part of your customer retention strategy is well worth it, especially since B2B marketing professionals report that the latest features and product announcements in marketing emails are the most clicked-through rate. (HubSpot Blog Research 2021)

  Cross-sell and Upsell Revenue  

Upselling isn't simply soliciting a student to purchase the item again. There are multiple ways for your students to be satisfied should you wish to boost the lifetime value. Marketing automation can solve the most common reason for the churn of customers and students: lack of engagement and concentration. Use your marketing automation platform to sustain existing customers or upsell them onto different offers, or cross-sell them to other programmes.

Three ways that automation in marketing can help facilitate upsell and cross-sell opportunities:

Easy onboardingBuyers aren't perfect, and some students begin to feel it within minutes of purchase. That's why sending messages immediately after students are enrolled is crucial. The clearness of your messages puts buyers' minds at ease, reassuring them that they made the right decision. Create an email trigger to welcome your customers. welcoming email trigger in your automation system for marketing so that users can understand the following steps and what to expect.

Provide students with the information they'll need What are your methods of delivering the tools, support, processes, and resources to help them get started? An email welcoming them will help in making your student feel ready to start studying. Include all the links, attachments, as well as the resources they'll need to start right away without confusion.

Engage students in each course module: Make sure your students feel supported and acknowledged when they complete the module. To keep students interested, you can set up regular checking-in emails. The check-ins provide students with opportunities to share struggles or ask for assistance so that you are able to troubleshoot issues before they result in churn.

How Does Marketing Automation Perform?

Marketing automation is a combination of tools to make it easier and less complicated to complete the more time-consuming chores in the modern day sales and marketing roles. From automatically qualifying as well as "tagging" leads, to ensure that you give the time they need as well as creating an online hub for marketing campaigns, automation makes it easier to manage the online educational process so that it can expand and grow.

Imagine not needing to hit "send" on every message, email, campaign, or post you create. In the end, emails are transmitted in a way, automatically, based on a set of directions referred to "workflows."

A marketing workflow is an order of actions your automation software automatically follows to finish a job. The platform you use may have pre-built templated workflows, or you can build them from scratch if you're looking to alter the workflows.

To understand how marketing automation will work in your specific firm or company, you must first understand the three primary features you'll be using to meet your goals related to course enrollments and sales:

•    Triggers  
•    Journey of the customer (conversion funnel)  
•    Segmentation and personalization  

  Triggers  

Triggers are the commands that your platform's marketing system receives, so it knows whom to deliver the email to and at what point. Your platform will operate in accordance with "if/then" rules. These rules look like this: If an interested buyer downloads our how-to guide the user will immediately start receiving our weekly informative email on the same subject.

Triggers create a more personalized customer journey--the contrast to the generic 50% off emails you receive from your favorite clothing retailer. Based on the Smart Insights the triggered emails can achieve 71% more open rates and 102% higher rate of click-through than standard email newsletters.

  Using Marketing Automation to Direct the Customer's Journey  

In an age where inbox zero is the most wanted by many, providing your email address is no small act. Email subscribers are more likely to buy and engage because there's more at stake in giving your email versus giving a 'like' or a 'follow.' In other words, the inbox is valuable real estate for marketers.

The most common entry point for prospects is opting in to (usually free) information that is valuable. The free piece of value (also called a gated asset) you provide could include a webinar, a free download, or some other promotional content that piqued their interest enough for them to welcome you into their inbox.

Once someone has opted into your mailing list, make use of your marketing automation platform to nurture them at each phase of their journey. Make sure your message is tailored to the following stages to ensure that your customers feel valued, acknowledged, and valued.

  The Awareness Stage (Top of Funnel)  

Once you've captured a lead's interest by offering value, they enter the first stage of the customer journey, that is, when they are conscious of your brand and services. This is when these leads are considered "top of funnel." Common ways to transform someone from acquaintance to an expert are

• Organic or social media content
• Paid advertisements
• Blog posts
• Education videos (YouTube or LinkedIn)
• Newsletters

  The Interest Stage (Top/Middle of Funnel)  

The interest stage represents when a potential lead moves from just learning that you exist to gaining an interest in your service or service. With the information they learned in the awareness stage and a realization that your course couldfit the requirements of their situation and assist them accomplish their goals. They would like to find out more.

Don't make the common marketing mistake of thinking that when you've got an interested pupil on your list, it's a free pass to bombard your prospects with promotions and offers. You must continue to provide value that keeps them engaged and curious about the changes you could assist them in achieving.

In some cases, as in Miss Excel's case are using an email-based newsletter to nurture their subscribers. There are however all sorts of ways to keep new subscribers happy, such as

• Email drip campaigns
• Catalogue of products
• Demonstrations
• Free samples
• Guides, whitepapers and guides

  The Desire Stage (Mid/Bottom of Funnel)  

Once you've been on the radar of your potential customer, their they'll be looking for a reason to purchase. When a lead is in the desire phase, they'll be more proactive regarding requesting details about your product while they think about making a purchase. This can also be referred to as the "consideration" phase.

Optimizing the mid-to-bottom stages of your conversion funnel allows you to provide the right educational content, information as well as support for your prospects in crucial decisions.

  The Stage of Action Stage (Bottom of Funnel)  

The stage where action occurs is when a lead converts into a customer who pays. Leads at this stage are ready and intent to do business with you. Therefore, it's your job to please your leads with the last push. Some examples of the content that will convert someone from desiring your direction to taking action and purchasing are:

• Case studies and testimonials
• Pricing pages
• Special offers

  Enhancing Your Marketing Emails to Resonate with Personalization  

Personalizing the "first name" of subscribers to email is not a new strategy to boost conversion. With more information than ever to hand Marketing automation allows users to deliver their subscribers regularly scheduled emails relevant to their interests and on the basis of their actions.

Below are the best three methods to customize your email to keep your readers engaged.

1. Let users auto-segment by using an online survey

Based on the industry you're in and the subject of your course, you may not want to provide "101" content to subscribers seeking more sophisticated techniques. If so, consider making an email in your welcoming emails a survey asking the reader what type of information they'd prefer to get in light of their experience.

1.    Send emails based on location and time  

For the best results from your marketing campaigns To maximize your marketing efforts, it is important to mail out emails on the time and days those who are your clients are likely to read the emails. Separating your emails by timezone enables the scheduling of emails to ensure more click-through and open rates.

1.    Segmenting emails on the basis of demographics  

The most basic segmentation strategy marketers start out using is demographics. Demographic data is collected automatically using the opt-in form to sign up on your opt-in form. The demographics you'll need to gather on your opt-in forms include age, gender, company place of work, and income. This is not a revolutionary tactic, demographic data will help you customize your messaging to individual buying needs.

The more data you get about your audience in the registration process, the more deeply you'll be able to define your audience. But be careful not to request too much information can scare individuals away not to register.

Execution What is Marketing Automation

If you've a better understanding of the concept of marketing automation and the impact it can have on the growth of revenue and retention, it's time to execute. Following the four steps below, you'll soon have the opportunity of having the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of students every year.

  Step 1 Create a segmentation of your list of email addresses by using tags  

Personalization is the key to segmenting your subscribers. One of the best places to start looking for segments is the way subscribers enter the funnel. This means that you're determining 'how did they get on my list of email subscribers?' then tailoring your contents to suit them.

Marketing automation could help in automating the segmentation of your list by the ability to tag users according to websites they visited.

  Step 2: Distribution  

Distribution is simply an elaborate method for emailing pertinent content to your customers. For example, whenever you make a blog post on your site and you want it delivered automatically to your readers. You can set your email frequency to once a week or once twice a week, contingent on the frequency at which you release content.

  Step 3: Set up automated sequences  

  Step 4: Configure your funnels that are automated  

Your funnel is the series of steps you lead your prospects through so that they become customers when they are done. Your automated funnel will include an array of marketing via email, social media, and landing pages.

  See It in Action The Ecommerce Course Funnel Snapshot  

Imagine you're hosting a webinar promoting your course on eCommerce success techniques. For promoting your webinar, plan some promo Tweets and LinkedIn posts prior to the scheduled webinar. Social posts can send people to your registration page which is where attendees can fill in the necessary information in order to sign up for your webinar.

After registering in the online webinar session, the automated marketing platform will tag them in the form of "interested in eCommerce" and "registered for webinar.' Instead of just waiting for them to attend the webinar, you can make an autoresponder that is sent to identified leads. The sequence can include useful material that's relevant to eCommerce in turn, nurturing them further and improving the conversion rate of your webinar.

Although some leads may not convert from the webinar, providing them with valuable information will ensure they stay on your email list in which case you'll be able to keep them engaged by nurturing them with other automated sequences. This creates an engagement loop that makes them sales-ready to take on your next campaign.

Avoid These Top 3 Marketing Automatization Sins

Your email marketing involves a significant amount of time and energy, therefore you want to avoid potential pitfalls that could sabotage your success. In the best case, these mistakes could prevent you from getting maximum return on the investment in automation for your emails. If you're not careful, you might unintentionally turn people off, sabotaging your email list growth.

  One mistake: Doing not create a goal and strategy before getting into marketing automation  

  Instead, do this Start by setting goals for your marketing email strategy.

  Second error: You're focussed on sales instead of nurturing  

Your attention may be focused on selling if you're sending too many emails or your email messages do not offer sufficient value to keep your subscribers engaged. The most costly errors in email marketing is to create messages that focus on your own company instead of helping your customer to solve their problems.

"A shocking 78% of those interviewed with HubSpot Research have unsubscribed because the brand sent an excessive amount of emails."

  Instead, Prioritize quality over the quantity of your emails to avoid sending sloppy emails.  

Before sending any email, consider if the content of this email be enough for my customers to want to read more Do I follow the rules of email marketing and make sure that you've added value prior tobefore marketing your product. Make sure you strike the right balance between educational, value-based email and sales messages.

  The third error is sending one-size-fits-all campaigns  

Your database is full of leads that are qualified, however you're using your marketing automation platform to blast out the same email to every subscriber. If you don't segment your leads method, your subscribers will be lost since your messages won't be appropriate or beneficial to them.

  Instead: Start with a basic stage of segmentation. Then, scale up at your own pace  

The entire purpose behind segmentation is to provide the most relevant information to your recipients via email. But, you may not yet have the experience or capabilities for deeper segmentation. For example, if you're operating a slim marketing department the team might not have time to create a variety of email sequences for different audience segments. In that case, you should start with the most basic segments like the geographical area so your emails are delivered in the times that those people are likely to be viewing them.

  The Final Word on Marketing Automation and Course Entrepreneurs  

As a business offering online courses, you're focused on high-level activities that generate revenue. Automation in marketing is an essential element in your productivity and growth, by streamlining processes that divert your attention away from the larger overall picture.

Integrate your Marketing Automation System Through a Flexible, Dependable LMS

With Plus, you can create, design, sell and offer online courses which are accessible to your customers and your business allies. What's the best part? It integrates with your marketing automation program that can make a significant part of increasing your income potential by offering courses, memberships, or even certifications.

You can choose from multiple Marketing Automation Platforms available on the App Storeor integrate it with one that you have created your own.