How To Automate Your Marketing Funnel In Singapore

Marketing funnel automation is all about spending your time right. As a seasoned marketer with a business to manage, the time you have is limited. You have to dedicate an ample amount of your time to sifting through emails and responding to them. You have to talk to your sales reps, manage your team, and figure out how to maximise the profits you rake.

There’s plenty in your action plate, and each task eats an inordinate portion of your day-to-day time. So why not look into the possibility of automating some of these activities?

You could start by automating your marketing funnel process. And did you know who else automates their marketing strategies? Well, 76 per cent of all the SaaS companies you see floating about, particularly the large ones.

So why not take a cue from them and offload the burden of handling every aspect of your marketing process manually? It sounds easy because it sure is.

All you need to figure out how to go about it is a detailed step-by-step guide on how to automate buyers’ sales funnel journey. It’s, however, important that you’re more strategic with the approach you take to avoid coming off as robotic.

Super Effective Ways to Automate Content Marketing

Content marketing is a time-consuming activity, and for this reason, you should look into how you can automate content marketing for your business. There is a general misconception about how content marketing automation works. In this article, we look at the seven super effective ways you can automate content marketing to increase website traffic and increase sales.

1. What Is Content Marketing Automation?

This is the approach of identifying repetitive content marketing operations and then automating the operations by using applications or tools. The major reason why you should automate content marketing is to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

One of the reasons why you should automate content marketing is that you can apply it in any phase of the content marketing strategy process right from planning to implementation.

2. Effective Ways to Automate Content Marketing

Content automation is not as complicated as most people like to make it seem. Here are the 7 effective ways for you to automate content marketing.

3. Know Which Type of Content You Should Create

Before you start content marketing automation, you need to have the right content that will lead to more traffic for your website and conversion of browsers into visitors. Google Alerts can help you know the types of content being created that touch your target keywords.

Such insight will come in handy when creating visual content such as videos or infographics. Buzzsumo is a paid tool that allows you to set up content alerts. On top of this, you could subscribe to a blog writing service.

Such a service identifies the relevant keywords for your business that are also popular with your audience. Furthermore, they can go ahead to suggest content ideas based on your audience’s preferences.

4. Choose the Right Content Marketing Automation Tools

Content marketing automation tools will help you identify the content that you should upload, and they have alerts that notify you when it is the best time to upload it. More so, they will push your content to social media platforms and your WordPress website.

It might take you a while before you get the right content, marketing automation tool, but you should not rest until you do. We recommend these tools for your content marketing automation, Skyword, Contently, DiwyHQ, and NewsCred.

5. Engage In Social Media Management Practices

Social media is the best thing that has happened to digital marketing since it allows you to reach out to a wide audience. With that said, you do not have to do it manually; there are tools such as Hootsuite that automatically shares content from your website’s RSS feed to social media platforms.

While Hootsuite might not work for every business, you can compare the different social media management tools on sites such as Sprout Social or Buffer.

6. Promote Your Content

There are millions of websites trying to break out from online obscurity, and this makes it essential that you promote your content. A tool such as Outbrain will help you identify the best opportunities where your content can appear on authoritative publisher sites.

Another tool to consider is SimpleReach; it alerts you of the best performing content on social media in real-time. This will help you decide on the best way to automate content marketing, which is whether you should use sponsored ads or boost your posts on social media.

7. Automate Your Email Newsletter

Sending out a newsletter to your emailing list once you have made a new blog post can be a tedious process. However, with a tool such as MailChimp, you can automate the personalisation and email nurturing your leads.

MailChimp is one of the most acclaimed and competitively priced email marketing tools on the internet today. However, you can also use tools such as GetResponse, HubSpot, Marketo, Aweber, and Constant Contact.

8. Connect Your Content Marketing Platforms

The only way to hack this is by using tools such as Zapier. It automatically adds all the leads collected from your website and adds them to your main newsletter list. This content marketing automation tool will also help you monitor your social media platforms by sending notifications to your email whenever you get a reaction or comment on your social media posts. You could also use IFTTT.

9. Track Your Content Marketing Automation

The worst thing that you can do is to go for days without checking whether you are getting from your content marketing automation processes. The best thing about using tools to automate content marketing is that they are highly customisable.

For example, Google Analytics send a monthly report to your email that shows you the best and worst-performing pages and content. Armed with this information, you can then go ahead and take the necessary measures to boost the content and pages that are performing poorly.

---

Why Should You Automate Your Sales Funnel Stages?

It takes a lot of time investment and resources to grow your sales funnel to its full potential. But once you’ve succeeded to get it there, the rewards are more worthwhile than anything you could have spent the time on.

Here are a few reasons you’d want to automate your sales funnel:

• To reduce the time you spend on menial tasks:

You could pay someone to help you with all the humdrum that translates to updating your sales database, writing emails. Why waste your resources and time on stuff like that when you could easily automate all these procedures?

This should also allow you to let your team focus on more important tasks like closing deals and building customer relationships.

• To cut on cost:

You don’t need to hire anyone to help you with these menial jobs. That should be able to save you lots of your hard-earned money. That also means that your labour cost will be significantly reduced.

According to one recent research finding, marketing automation can help you reduce your overhead cost by up to 12 per cent.

• Capture more data on your customers

Automation makes it a whole lot easier to capture lots of data on customer behaviour and other aspects of their buying journey. With an organised data capture system, it’s possible to keep all this data in a centralised database for easy access.

• Better leads, ROI, and conversion

Quality leads translate to a better conversion rate, which translates to better ROI. It all starts with understanding the nature of the prospects you’re interested in. With this information, you should know how to set up your funnels and automate the entire process for a better quality of leads and all that.

Now that you understand the value of automating your sales funnel process, let’s zoom in on how you can get the job done.

How to Create an Automated Marketing Funnel Strategy

Stage 1: Automating the Awareness Stage of Your Sales Funnel

The most sure-fire way to raise awareness around your business is through killer content. Content like infographics, blog posts, and videos are the prime vehicles to use in educating your visitors on various topics as you direct them around your business.

It’s that simple. Visitors get to know you through content when they’re searching for a solution to a problem. It’s then that they discover a link to your site, and while going through your content, get to know about a pain point that you solve.

While working on raising some awareness around your brand or business, you might want to steer clear of any content that’s pushy or sales-y. Your goal should be on providing your readers with a real solution that they’ll be using to better their lives or improve on the various aspects of their business and everything else.

The content you write must respond to a specific query you suspect your users have. So how can you automate this stage of the buyer’s journey:

• Through Blogging

This is the mainstay of the awareness stage of your sales process. Your primary focus should be on publishing useful content for your prospects regularly. That way, you’ll be sense to explore your brand and find out more about what it does.

You also get to grab the attention of the prospects that are looking for information that relates to your products or services.

In a recent study conducted by DemandMetric, organisations that blog are more likely to increase the number of leads they generate by a whopping 67%. And the more you blog and the content piles up, the more people your organisation will be attracting.

Better yet, there are tools that you could use to automate some parts of the blogging process, and they include:

• BuzzSumo

You win it big with content when you can get one of your articles to go viral. Don’t sweat the simple stuff. With a tool like BuzzSumo, this shouldn’t be that much of a hassle.

What Buzzsumo does is that it scours the internet for a list of posts that have been shared the most on social media for a specified time range. This clues you on what topics have the greatest potential so you can figure out how to come up with a blog post around them.

Of course, you have to figure out how to put your own spin on it and come up with something that’s totally unique and worth sharing.

• Grammarly

Grammatical errors have a way of rearing their ugly heads on a nicely written piece of article. The good thing is that you don’t have to hire an editor to help you out with the simple grammatical mistakes that slip through to ruin your article.

With a tool like Grammarly, you don’t have to worry about the grammatical errors that escape your eyes to ruin the party for you. The tool is also designed to help you improve on sentence structure for an even better piece of writing.

At this point, you’re working on creating a good first impression on the prospects you attract, and the last message you’d want to send is that you’re not professional enough to even edit your own piece of article.

While blogging, a simple trick would be to focus on some of the common questions your prospects query into search engines. Focus on teaching your users how to do something or how to respond to a certain situation in life, and they’ll surely start checking you out in droves.

• Through Social Media content

You could use social media to create some awareness around your brand and grow the number of leads your site is attracting by a significant amount. Social media also creates an avenue for you to interact with your prospects, forge important relationships, and share branded messages with your followers.

Social media demands that you engage your followers on a personal level. Refrain from taking a professional stance by being, umm, social. That’s the only way you can be sure your social media strategy will have a huge impact on your marketing campaign.

And as with blogging, it’s possible to automate some parts of your social media strategy. Here’s how:

#1 Hootsuite

Here get it: you don’t have the time to post on social media regularly. So why not take advantage of this simple tool and schedule all the posts you’d wish to post in a week or month. Just prepare all the posts and feed them into the tool, specifying the date and time you’d want to post them and let the tool work its magic.

#2 CoSchedule

CoSchedule operates a whole lot like Hootsuite, with an option to schedule up to 60 posts at a go. The tool features a calendar that you’ll be using to specify the date and time that you wish to see your posts published.

You could also use it to respond to comments directly from the tool’s dashboard, without necessarily logging into Facebook.

#3 SocialFlow

SocialFlow allows you to keep tabs on what’s happening in the social spaces. It’s what you use to find out what’s happening and the conversations that people are having for a rough idea on what to post.

It’s the tool you need to capture the attention of your leads most effectively, instead of publishing random stuff with no sense of direction.

Stage 2: Interest and Evaluation

At this point, you’ve managed to grab your visitors’ attention through awareness. Now the most logical thing to do is to show them your offer. Not yet time to be sales-y, but there’s no harm in promoting your business. There’s no harm in letting your site’s visitors know you’ve got a solution to the problem whose answer they were seeking in the first place.

In other words, you should be working on how to install a lead magnet in place. By a lead magnate what we’re implying is that you should be thinking of offering something for free in exchange for the contact information of your leads.

You’re simply building some little bit of excitement around your products or services so you can get them to take action.

You have to be more specific on some of the benefits your users are likely to realise when they choose to sign up with you.

That said, here are a few suggestions on what you could use as a lead magnet:

A case study or Industry report

This is some crucial information that you may only want to reveal to the people that are close to you. Your subscribers or online community may be part of it.

You can start by preparing a detailed industry report or some case studies you suspect is valuable to your users. This also comes as an opportunity for you to establish yourself as a thought leader.

Thought leadership can also have a significant impact on the buying decision your prospects make. As a matter of fact, it’s been revealed that about 51 per cent of the buyers that you’re likely to meet factor this in the decision they make while choosing a vendor.

Ultimate Toolbox

This is another popular lead magnet that you would want to take advantage of today and factor into your marketing campaign. Ever thought of compiling all the useful resources you have, including how-to videos and other resources, and sending them in bulk to some of your users.

Here’s your opportunity to try this on the condition that the user leaves you an email or any other important piece of contact information.

• A Webinar

Allow your prospects to view your webinar, with the only requirement being they should sign up and submit their contact information. A simple trick to pull this off and get a greater number of people to sign up for the webinar is to make it exclusive to a limited number of users. Once you hit this count, you close everything until the next webinar.

• Opt-in Tools

Where you suspect your visitor is about to leave your page, you can lure them back in with an opt-in page that will be asking them to sign up. Make good use of opt-in tools such as opt-in monster, and you should be good to go.

It doesn’t matter what lead magnet you choose, but how you incorporate your personality into the whole thing. People want to know that they’re responding to a request that’s been made by a real person and that that person has something valuable to offer to them.

Stage 3: Lead’s Interest

This is where you grow your leads’ interest to the point that they’ll have no option but to proceed with a purchase. Your prospects might be well aware of your offering, but you haven’t enticed them well enough to get them to take the bold step of taking action.

So at this point, you should be focused on nurturing a solid relationship that will see to it that that they finally decide to commit. And the best way to pull this off is through email marketing.

You have to keep sending email sequences to your leads until they finally make up their mind and do the necessary. Here are the email sequences you may want to look into:

• The Welcome Email

 This is the first email you send to a new subscriber immediately they sign up with you. It’s meant to introduce yourself to new users and thank them for making the bold decision to join your email network. Make sure the email features a CTA button just in case one of them decides to complete a purchase.

• The Lead Magnate Email

This email should be delivering what you promised your new subscriber. It’s a link with details on how to download or access what was initially promised to the email subscriber.

• The Social Proof Email

This is where you talk about your brand’s popularity and success story. You can talk about reviews, testimonials, and even throw in some of the big names that have benefited from your services or products.

• Ask Us Anything Email

Your users have concerns, and this is how you address them. You’re simply giving them a little nudge to open up and talk to you about the reason that’s holding them back from taking action.

• Last Chance Email

This email creates a sense of urgency. It tells your prospects to speed up their decision-making process. Works in situations where you think your prospects are stalling.

For this, you have two email marketing tools that you might want to take advantage of – and that is, MailChimp and Drip Campaigns.

---

Top 6 Sales Funnel Software to Increase Sales in 2022

If you’re thinking about using sales funnel software, good for you. It can give your business a boost over the competition, and it may be a step in the right direction.

To make it in today’s economy, you need an effective digital marketing strategy. Sales funnels could provide an excellent way to use technology in your business.

For many small businesses, sales funnels are a great way to increase their revenue and encourage more repeat business. But there are some critical questions you need to ask before implementing them in your strategy. 

The way a sales funnel is set up can intuitively guide customers through the buying process from beginning to end. But before we dive into using them, we need to see how well they work and what it takes to start using one.

In this article, we are going to review sales funnel software, point out its flaws and strengths, and direct you towards a software solution that will work for your business.

It’s worth noting from the start that some sales funnel software doesn’t include all the features you might need. 

For example, if you want to use email marketing to draw visitors into your sales funnel or host webinars to promote your products, such tools may not contain these features. Even though such software may be designed to create sales funnels, this can be true.

What Could a Sales Funnel Do for Your Business?

To help you understand what a sales funnel is, let’s look at an example: your web browser. This simple tool is often the starting point for your research about a product or service—how you view it influences how interested you become, ultimately leading to whether or not you buy.

Therefore, a sales funnel is a series of content designed to educate your target market in a step-by-step process while motivating them to purchase your product or service.

There are many stages to the buyer process—and it might take months or years to move a prospective customer into a repeat customer.

Setting up a sales funnel can help you streamline bringing customers to your site and hopefully give them a good experience. That can lead to repeat sales and build customer loyalty.

Hopefully, you’ll use a bunch of online marketing tools to help you encourage more people to buy your stuff.

Sales funnel software can help you keep tabs on your marketing and sales efforts, giving you a ‘big picture view of where the revenue is coming from.

Example of Sales Funnel

A sales funnel for someone offering online marketing courses might be something like this:

• Hey, can you believe it? My new guide to SEO is finally ready. Download your copy right now at this unique link.
• You can download the guide and opt-in to receive the entrepreneur’s emails.
• Soon after signing up for the newsletter, the user receives an email that contains a link to the courses offered.
• Users then sign up for any of the courses they want online.
• The user keeps getting the e-newsletters and re-enrols.

The sales funnel software will track all of the customer’s behaviours and actions, enabling the entrepreneur to see where they are losing customers. As sales funnel builders often include multiple tools that can help you drive traffic and conversions, you have everything you need under one roof.

If your marketing efforts are scattered all over the place, it might be time to consider sales funnel software that includes a CRM. But don’t cancel your other subscriptions until you’ve tried this new opportunity.

---

Here’s When Your Sales Funnel Software Is Useful

Sales funnel software can be an excellent investment when you’re launching a new business and on a tight budget. You won’t need to hire an expensive web developer or sign up for an expensive suite of tools. But to find the best software for your needs, it’s essential to understand what each offer.

As your business grows, it’s a great idea to move from manual processes to automated sales funnels. Depending on the number of online tools you already use and your budget, you may have to decide whether adding this tool to your list is worth it. While the sales funnel software can be integrated with other apps, this may affect the user experience and add extra hassle.

Look at the products below to see which one best fits your situation.

 Best Sales Funnels Software

• GetResponse

GetResponse offers a wide range of features related to email marketing. It will be easy to sell your products through their software or even integrate your GetResponse account with your existing e-commerce.

The Conversion funnel from GetResponse can be set up in minutes and displays precisely how leads filter through it. You can also choose from a variety of modern-looking landing pages and newsletter templates.

GetResponse could be an excellent choice for your online business if you use webinars.

Pros 

• • There’s a free version of the platform, and it can be used for as long as you like.
  • It gives you a lot of different options for automating your marketing.
  • The flexibility of its data segmentation makes list management quick and easy, a significant plus compared to competing products.
  • GetResponse’s webinar functionality is solid and a genuine USP for the company.

Cons

• • The drag and drop interfaces for creating landing pages and forms could be improved from a user experience point of view.
  • GetResponse could provide users with an option to switch off its popup signup forms on mobile devices.

• Systeme.io

Systeme.io is a complete sales funnel software that can manage your email campaigns, automate your websites and run an affiliate program for you, plus gives you 11 free Sales Funnel Templates.

When you first log in to systeme.io, you’ll be greeted with a comprehensive dashboard. This covers your sales and leads. It also covers the activities of your affiliates and vendors, as well as the health of your email marketing campaigns.

The dashboard can be set up to show you how much money you are making from affiliate marketing and your own marketing activities.

You can also see where you are ranked overall and how much you have earned this month as an affiliate, along with stats on click-throughs and conversions.

Pros

• • The platform is designed to make it as easy as possible for anyone to use all of its tools—even with no prior experience or technical knowledge.
  • When you sign up, you’ll get a series of step-by-step emails on how to start using the software right away.
  •  With marketing automation features on the platform, you can automate many of your marketing tasks and make them easier or less time-consuming.
  • The All-in-One tool saves you time and money, and it is also extremely convenient to use.

Cons

• • The sheer number of features available on the platform can be a blessing and a curse—they are so extensive some people might find them overwhelming.
  • This program doesn’t support third-party integrations, meaning you can’t connect it to any tools you use in your marketing or sales process.
  • The platform is limited in its design flexibility, so more experienced users looking to customize their pages may find the platform limited in this respect.

• Kartra

Kartra is an all-in-one online solution that helps its users create and manage their online businesses. It doesn’t require the use of third-party tools or apps because Kartra has everything a user needs in one place.

Kartra lets you manage all your business functions on one platform. From email marketing to web hosting to accounting, everything is in one place and accessible from any computer with an Internet connection.

Kartra is made up of a set of business-oriented tools designed to provide you with customizable options for running your business. Kartra is new—but its team boasts a lot of experience in the digital marketing space. 

It’s also helpful in keeping track of the goals you’ve set for your marketing campaigns. It helps the managers manage their time because they can do everything in just one place.

Pros

• • It provides users with essential tools to show off their products, offering such features as testimonials, call to action, and countdown timers.
  • You can easily make a funnel by using the drag-and-drop option. 
  • Tracking the flow of funnels can help you identify the exact journeys your customers take when doing business with your company.

Cons

• • Due to Kartra’s limited number of integrations, users looking to carry on using several tools may find Kartra more of a burden than a solution.

• Clickfunnels

ClickFunnels is designed for entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to create and systemize their online marketing and sales funnels. Unlike some of the competition, this tool won’t break the bank.

The most popular way to describe ClickFunnels is that it’s a marketing funnel software used by thousands of internet marketers to sell products and services online. The platform also makes it easy for businesses to create marketing and sales funnels that can help to ensure leads and deals are funnelled in a highly visual fashion through the system.

With ClickFunnels, you can create and customize your own website, as well as create sales funnels to engage customers while driving sales.

Pros

• • It’s easy to set up a funnel using the funnel builder. The site’s ‘Cookbook’ is helpful for beginners, providing tutorials and examples.
  • ClickFunnels gives users the ability to integrate shopping carts with other services via its API.

Cons

• • They offer a suite of products to build an email list, but most beginners will be better off with MailChimp or AWeber. Their landing page templates look very outdated and overly salesy, quite a lot like their own marketing. 

• Wishpond 

Wishpond is a user-friendly platform for creating and managing online marketing campaigns. Businesses use Wishpond to generate leads, optimize social marketing, and more. It uses a convenient and easy-to-use technology, allowing you to better understand your customers and grow your business.

Wishpond can also be used to run viral campaigns generate leads with marketing materials like website overlays, opt-in bars, pop-ups, and landing pages.

The software is easy to use, with plenty of features to choose from. It also allows you to conduct A/B testing on your email campaigns. The Wishpond software offers features you will find useful if you already use email marketing services like MailChimp. 

Pros

• • Wishpond’s many marketing software features help you run powerful and successful campaigns.
  • You’ll find a range of resources, including Infographics, webinars, marketing eBooks and blog posts.
  • Wishpond can integrate with many apps.

Cons

• • Top-level domains cannot be used to host the main page of the website; sub-domains are required to be set up instead.
  • Pre-existing fields in forms are not present.
  • The Zoom for webinars feature is not yet available.

• Leadpages

Leadpages is a suite of digital marketing tools which makes it easy to build and design websites as well as high-converting landing pages, all from your browser.

The platform provides a way for people to create a following and build relationships with their subscribers. It also helps them sell products and services, engage with their audience, and convert them into paying customers.

There are no limits to the number of leads you can collect with this sales funnel software, and you won’t be charged for any.

The product was built for anyone who wants to brave the world of digital business and marketing. We try to solve this problem by creating software that allows easy access to a variety of features and functionalities. The only problem with the software is its lack of accessibility due to the fact that it only offers functions tailored to various online marketing tasks.

Pros

• • You can use Leadpages’ site builder to design websites. It’s a drag-and-drop interface that makes designing easier. There are also website templates available if you don’t want to design something from scratch.
  • For non-technical users, Leadpages is both intuitive and easy to use. Leadpages’ tools are tailored to suit the skill level of your average entrepreneur. 
  • The software has great features to help you create successful marketing materials. It’s not only about design, but it gives importance to how they convert and perform in real-time. As such, they added a special feature, including a real-time analytics tool.

Cons

• • Basic subscriptions do not include the A/B testing feature, but you can purchase the Advanced bundle if you want to have access to it.
  • Although you can’t customize their templates, you can choose from among two kinds of available page designs, each of which can be customized fairly extensively.

---

Bonus Tip

Well done for reaching the end of this lengthy sales funnel software comparison. You should have by now a good idea as to which piece of sales funnel software will be best for your business needs.

As a whole, all of these sales funnel software solutions can help you sell more products to more people. 

While some might have more features than others, the basic plans are usually enough to get you going, even if you’re just getting started with your online marketing and sales strategies. Multiple plans are available to suit both big and small businesses, so you will find the right sales funnel tool to successfully maximize your conversions.

The Final Thought

This is how you automate your marketing funnel. With everything set right, you don’t have to worry about handling some of these things manually. It will take you some time to automate some of these things, but once you’re done, the benefit will surpass all the money and energy you’d have pumped into the project by far.

Still, stuck on the marketing funnel tools that you could use to automate your sales funnel project? Check out with us at MediaOne Marketing and find out more about some of the solutions we offer.