Marketing Automation

The book I read to research this post was Marketing Automation For Dummies by Mathew Sweezy which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. This book is about simplifying you marketing processes for your business with it concentrating on the different types of online marketing. It isn't going all your marketing into a turnkey that can just be left running despite the title but will simplify it. One example is having templates for your e-mails and letters so people working for you haven't got to write them from scratch. Another thing is having CRM software and a database so salespeople which this book tends to concentrate on, can stay in touch and access important information. Salesforce.com & SugarCRM are examples of CRM software and the latter one is open source although if you need support you have to pay for it. You also need a host to run it. Yet another thing is if your company is organizing an event have a micro-site specifically for that event and have a specific site name tied to that event. This is better than merely promoting the event on your company website. There are companies like http://data.com & http://equifax.com that have solutions that will tidy up useless records in your database. When you consider many companies have up to 30% of useless and outdated records this is essential. You should have an e-mail autoresponder that will just confirm you received someones e-mail so you can answer it later and obviously this needs a predefined message for them to receive. With all this automation it gives you time to do things like write blogs to promote your product and these need a e-mail and newsletter lists for people to subscribe to. Of course with a newsletter it should contain a link for them to unsubscribe.