By now, we’re all at least pretty familiar with the concept of marketing automation. It’s gaining more and more space as one of the most popular tactics in customer generation.

Still, from the point of view of a small business owner, marketing automation can be a pretty challenging process. And this is especially true if you’re not sure where or how to start.

The growth of marketing automation means that an estimated 49% of businesses now use some form of email automation.

So, why not try?

Let’s get straight to the point by first answering one of the major questions that you may have:

What Makes Marketing Automation with Customer Service so Useful?

Well, many factors come together and make marketing automation with customer service an awesome strategy today. In this post, we aim to explore some of the major perks that your business can experience from the amalgamation of the two, plus the main steps of the automation process.

#1: Focus Exclusively on the Essence of Your Business 

In other words, marketing automation saves your time and the effort that you’d otherwise have to put in annoyingly monotonous and repetitive tasks. Product or service development, attractive content creation, strategical thinking… these are only some of the business aspects you get to pay more attention to if you rely on marketing automation with customer service.

#2: Increase the Chances for Your Business to Grow

Apparently, of those who prefer live chat, 79% said they did so because they get their questions answered quickly, 51% did so because they could multitask, and 46% agreed it was the most efficient communication method.

The use of live chat software can help you automate your support process and even end up delighting your customers. So, when you help your website visitors reach your business in no time, you increase the chance of spreading the word about your brand further. Being able to interact with customers faster while at the same time engaging with a larger number of them will make your business expand faster. 

#3: Monitor Your Business Performance More Profoundly

Marketing automation brings you new possibilities of staying on top of your business metrics and statistics. On the one hand, you get to create more accurate and profound reports of your current performance thanks to machine learning and AI-based tools. On the other hand, you also get to forecast your future campaigns and customers’ behavior having in mind your historical data.

Marketing And Live Chat Automation: How to Improve Data Collection Process

To enjoy the above-mentioned advantages, it’s not enough to simply integrate marketing automation with customer service. You have to understand how it really works and adjust its settings to avail increased efficiency. 

Let’s check how it works and what steps you should pay attention to when qualifying data automatically.

1. Use live chat software to collect contact details from your visitors that initiate interaction

With the use of the best live chat software solution, you can effectively collect relevant data that helps your business improve services and personalize individual customer journey hassle-free.

2. Using your marketing and live chat automation software, set up the criteria that will help you qualify them and turn them from leads to customers

When deciding what details to capture and what criteria to use, think about the information your sales team may need to convince them to make a purchase successfully. Don’t overwhelm your potential customers with excessive questions. Stick to those that are really relevant to your business.

3. Rely on automated lead assignment to speed up the process

Depending on your leads’ feedback, you should be able to automatically redirect them towards the teams that can deal with that specific feedback. For instance, if you’re qualifying leads based on the industry they come from, you can automatically assign them to the department that’s in charge of that specific industry.

4. Use live chat automation to capture qualified data proactively

With live chat automation, you can easily figure out what pages of your website are frequently visited. And if you know which of them has the highest conversion rates, you can place proactive live chat invitations on them. This way, you’ll be able to connect qualified visitors to your sales department instantly. Besides, you can also use the data you possess to automatically show your message exclusively to certain target groups that will be more likely to react to them.

5. Increase live chat automation using pre-chat forms

In 2019, 24% of businesses used some type of form to capture customers’ preferences. So, if you want to join those businesses while at the same time staying sure to do it efficiently, consider automating your pre-chat forms. 

This way, if your live chat comes with pre-chat forms, you can use them as lead qualifiers. They’ll let you get additional info about your website visitors in no time, with minimal effort invested.

6. Improve marketing automation by integrating live chat software with CRM

Making it pretty simple to exchange data between two systems, this integration improves the organization of your leads’ data history. Practically speaking, it increases the efficiency of analyzing and tracking visitors, generating leads, and determining optimal follow-up tasks. 

Simplify Qualified Data Capturing with Marketing and Live Chat Automation

Capturing qualified data is a demanding task, and you’d better learn how to use your software knowledgeably for this purpose. 

Luckily, while only 27% of businesses consider marketing automation with customer service difficult to use, 53% of them agree that this is the most effective solution.

So, to get the most out of your marketing automation with customer service, when it comes to capturing qualified data, you should consider a set of different tactics.  You can:

  • automate contact collection with live chat software, 
  • automatically assign the leads to relevant departments,
  • capture qualified data based on live chat automation and the use of chat forms, 
  • integrate marketing automation software with CRM to additionally improve performance, etc.

Finally, what matters the most when capturing qualified data is to set up relevant criteria for their qualification. Only that way, you’ll be able to really get the most out of the implemented automation and improve your business results.

Author Bio

Jason Grills is a technical writer currently associated with ProProfs. He enjoys writing about emerging customer support products, trends in the customer support industry, and the financial impacts of using such tools. In his spare time, Jason likes traveling extensively to learn about new cultures and traditions.