With all the e-mail, gmail and hotmail flooding our inboxes these days, I find it refreshing and somewhat exciting to get snail mail. For the record, I’m not suggesting pre-approved credit card offers thrill me. I’m talking about the relevant stuff you enjoy getting like cards, special promos, magazines, etc.

Recently, I received a birthday card in the mail, not from my parents or a friend, but from Southwest Airlines! They remember me every year and the card acts as a friendly reminder of why I choose the airline when traveling for work or pleasure.

Even though it was a generic card, this sort of personal touch with your customers is important, especially in the B2B world. Whether it’s via mail, phone or e-mail, staying in touch with both clients and prospects alike will let them know you are there and you care. Nurturing relationships ultimately helps to earn new and repeat business. Remember at the end of the day, we’re all people working with people to make our businesses profitable.

What are you doing to make your customers feel special? Want to send me some snail mail?

In this day and age, we have the ability to automate a lot of the processes that we previously did manually. But did you know that you can automate your marketing communications? It’s true! With marketing automation software, you can implement automated lead nurturing programs that play in the background on websites, e-blasts and other online communications. You can even be notified automatically when a prospect is ready to buy.

Sound far-fetched? Here’s how it works:

Say someone finds your website through a Google search. If they find an item of value that they’re interested in on your site (say, a research report on cloud computing), they type in a few bits of information like their name and e-mail and then the asset is ‘automagically’ e-mailed to them.

Once they raise their digital hand and volunteer this information, you are able to use marketing automation software to track their activity on your website and their responses to e-mail communications.

You can also send them automated marketing campaigns based on their behaviors. For example, if they visit the section of your website related to cloud computing, you can set up an automated e-mail invitation to a webinar on (you guessed it) cloud computing. You can also find out if they attend the webinar and send an e-mail to have them evaluate the content.

Now here’s the best part. As they’ve been exhibiting these behaviors, their activity is not only being tracked, but scored, so you have a quantitative measure of how likely they are to buy your cloud computing product based on their web track record. In addition, all of the follow-up e-mail communications happen ‘automagically’ so you didn’t have to manually set up these campaigns, view the tracking reports, assign them a lead score based on their behaviors and pass the lead on to a sales rep. The marketing automation software did this all for you. For more information, contact me and I can show you more amazing things you can do.

Are you using marketing automation software? Do you need help selecting the right marketing automation software for you? Do you have any marketing automation success stories?