Marketing Automation is a type of software that is used to automate marketing and sales processes.

The platform includes a range of built-in tools, such as powerful customer relationship management (CRM) technology, contact management, sales pipeline management, email marketing, social media marketing, campaign landing pages, task management, visitor tracking and in-depth analytical dashboards.

By using Marketing Automation technology, you can drive new business from your website and other digital platforms directly into your database and then automatically continue to nurture your leads through the sales funnel in a personalised way that extends far beyond manual methods.

Marketing Automation focuses on driving return on investment by enabling people to interact with a brand and its offering from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. It can be programmed to segment your audience, send out communications and respond to enquiries – and it can do this all on a massive scale.

The platform has been designed to help marketers to market more effectively across multiple online channels and to automate repetitive tasks. It provides a real-time view of online interactions and in-depth performance feedback across your digital ecosystem.

Using marketing automation, you can automatically activate highly personalised communications and increase engagement throughout the customer journey.

Yes, we offer full training to our clients on how to operate the SharpSpring software.

Usually, a client selects how much they want to do themselves and then asks us to do the rest (which typically includes the more complicated tasks).

We develop and supply automated marketing systems, which includes setting objectives and key results, conceptualising and mapping campaigns, setting up the automations, activating the campaigns and providing campaign performance reports.

We create a visual map of all the stages and touchpoints your customer experiences online, all the email communications, sign-up and data collection forms, landing pages, content, integrations and task notifications. Once the map has been approved, we set up the automations, as per the map, using the SharpSpring CRM and automation engine. Then, upon approval, we make the automations live and activate the campaign.

Yes, we provide advice and assistance to SharpSpring clients on how to strategise their campaigns - from setting the overall objectives and targeted key results, to providing regular performance reports with observations and recommendations to optimise their campaigns.

It’s not possible to perform marketing automation with email service providers (ESPs). ESPs, like Mailchimp, send emails and offer modest analytics, whereas a marketing automation platform can track exactly where contacts have travelled through a website, score these behaviours, and automatically provide relevant, targeted content based on those behaviours. A marketing automation platform provides an end-to-end picture of the customer journey, from first interaction to conversion and beyond.

Customer Relationship Managers (CRMs) - like Salesforce, Sugar and Zoho - mainly serve as organisational tools for tracking marketing and sales communications and housing data on prospects, leads and customers. Simply put, a CRM does not generate leads or help convert them to sales. Marketing automation, on the other hand, provides a whole suite of tools for generating and qualifying leads and converting them to sales. Marketing automation and CRMs work very well together, as they each offer specific functionalities. The SharpSpring platform comes with a CRM built into the platform but it also integrates easily with third-party CRMs.

Most definitely! With marketing and sales efforts growing increasingly interconnected, clear communication and visibility between departments has become more critical than ever. Unlike CRMs and other traditional management tools, marketing automation offers a whole range of capabilities that help improve communication between teams and maximise productivity - so you can get the most out of your efforts, in one easy place. Marketing automation uses forms, behaviour tracking, email automation, lead scoring, sales notifications, analytics and more to feed leads into the sales funnel. It then optimises the sales cycle by tracking leads closely throughout the journey.

A marketing automation platform will send follow-up emails based on a lead’s activity, allowing you to deliver the right content to the right person, at the right time.

For example: A lead visits a particular product page on your website three times, indicating that he or she is interested in making a purchase. At this point, the system sends the lead an email (which was pre-programmed to be sent upon the lead’s third visit to that page) offering a discount on that item, and he or she moves further down the pipeline.

The SharpSpring platform notifies salespeople of leads’ activities, so they can be ready at any moment to turn a lead into a sale.

For example: Your client operates an apartment block and has unoccupied one-bedroom units to fill. By setting the platform to notify a salesperson as soon as a lead has visited three pages about one-bedroom units, you can ensure that salespeople are spending most of their time targeting leads who are likely to convert.

Every business needs some form of marketing in order to survive. This platform is extremely affordable. You may be spending thousands of rands on a PPC (pay per click) campaign that is only driving a handful of leads. This platform will identify your core issues quickly and help you redirect your budget towards productive campaigns.

With the robust set of features and easy integration capabilities, you can consolidate all your existing data and operate from a single, affordable platform. By replacing multiple apps and contracts like MailChimp subscriptions, you can find the budget for marketing automation and provide more value for your money.

We also help you evaluate your processes and investigate how the platform can help automate frequently repeated communications. By setting up a series of drip campaigns and emails for new customers, you could relieve staff of cumbersome tasks, freeing them up for client service tasks that cannot be automated.

We provide graphic design, content writing, website development, social media services, target market research, performance reporting and campaign consulting services.