How Marketing Automation Can Set Your 3PL Company Up for Success


Inbound Marketing, Strategy, Technology
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When it comes to the supply chain, automation is often associated with robots on the warehouse floor, or automated business operating processes and procedures. But in this case, we’re talking about marketing and sales automation.

Think about this: How much time would be saved if even 10 percent of your Sales and Operations communication was executed automatically? How much more would those teams be able to do in their newly-found free time?
If you’re looking to tighten up the processes within your organization to create more effective teams, the most impactful aspect you can address immediately is automation. Here are a few things that can be automated:

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Answer Questions From Clients and Prospects Quickly With a Chatbot or Live Chat

According to Juniper Research, by 2022, 75-90 percent of queries are expected to be handled by chatbots. And, according to Chatbots Life, chatbots can cut operational costs by up to 30 percent. These are some pretty powerful stats. While chatbots certainly won’t replace the need for team members in Sales and Operations to take care of customers, they can certainly lighten the load and help address frequently asked questions. This applies to not only prospective and current customers, but also prospective employees. Many companies choose to address the most commonly asked questions with a chatbot, and transition to live chat once the conversation extends to a deeper level of engagement. 

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Integrate Your Marketing Efforts and CRM Through Automation 

A CRM can operate separately from marketing efforts, but ideally would be connected for maximum impact. By connecting the CRM or TMS to your marketing platforms (like HubSpot or SharpSpring) you can automatically update prospects and customer profiles within your CRM based on the content those users are consuming on your website. That insight can then be leveraged by the sales team to initiate conversations. 

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Create Email Workflows to Nurture Prospects and Clients Automatically

Nurturing workflows are a very effective way of taking semi-warm leads and bringing them to the finish line. This can be especially useful when bidding for large, long-spanning projects. Automated emails can deliver relevant content based on the user’s behaviors on the website. Imagine if a prospective customer is on your capabilities page and clicks through to a subpage about heavy haul loads. What if, based on that action, the contact was delivered an email with a case study on heavy haul loads you’ve done in the past? That is the power of automated emails. 

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Automate Your Marketing Efforts, Like Social Media and Blog Posting

Consistency is key when it comes to publishing content or building a social media presence. This can be hard to do if every post is one-off, or scheduled a week at a time on native platforms. Instead, implementing a powerful marketing automation tool (like HubSpot or Hootsuite) can shave off hours of time spent each month by making it easy and efficient to schedule posts on social platforms and within a blog. The more robust platforms will also allow you to schedule out email communication and control paid media as well. 

Need help connecting your technology? We've got your back. Get in touch. 

 

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These points scratch the surface of what can be accomplished to amplify your freight brokerage business. If you’re looking for key insights and actionable advice, check out our full feature resource: Top Tactics to Grow Your Freight Brokerage Business in 2021

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