Marketing automation is a way to organize and unify your campaigns and is the central place where everything connects and expands.
You’ve heard of marketing automation and you understand the concept. But you may need more information about how it actually works and impacts your business. In this article, we will discuss marketing automation in more detail so that you can decide whether or not to adopt a marketing automation tool.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a technology that allows companies to centrally organize and manage customer inter actions and automatically handle marketing campaigns and processes across multiple plat forms. Software is used to schedule and complete routine marketing tasks.
Marketing automation allows companies to target customers with automated messages across email, web, social, and text. Messages are sent automatically according to a set of instructions called a work flow. Work flows can be defined in templates, custom built from scratch, or modified mid-campaign for better results.
Automation is efficient, saves time and money, and increases a brand’s ability to get the right content in front of customers at the right time, all of which can lead to higher marketing ROI.
Tasks that can be automated include sending emails, social media posts, A/B testing, lead scoring, and ad retargeting. Good marketing automation software integrates with other platforms, such as CRM, to unify marketing and sales.
What does marketing automation do for your business?
In its most basic form, marketing automation is a set of tools designed to streamline and simplify some of the most time-consuming responsibilities in modern marketing and sales roles.
From automating the lead qualification process to creating digital campaign creation hubs, automation is designed to simplify a business world that is be coming too fast and too complex.
Marketing automation allows you to execute your digital marketing strategy without having to manually hit “send” every time you create an email, message, campaign, or post. A good automation tool will help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on your schedule and customer behavior.
Once the campaign is launched, you can focus on other tasks, then analyze and fine-tune your marketing plan once results begin to show. Automated marketing strategies save time and resources, allowing you to focus on growing your business while increasing revenue and ROI.
How does marketing automation work?
Marketing automation tools also allow you to test how your target audience receives your messages and adjust accordingly, ensuring that you always deliver great content. These tools send triggered content to your customers, allowing your marketing team to stay in close contact with them and keep them up to date. As priorities change, content can be scheduled for future dates as needed.
Collect customer data through a number of interactions, including email, website visits, app usage, and social media. This data helps create a 360-degree view of each customer.
Streamline the segmentation and targeting process to determine the right audience quickly and at scale. Automatically tail or messaging based on each customer’s profile; create highly relevant, personalized messages for email, mobile, social, web experiences, and more in a few clicks; whether you have 100 or 100 million customers, deliver personalized experiences to your customers efficiently and effectively.
The benefits
By leveraging marketing automation, your team can provide superior, personalized service to your customers and stay ahead of the competition.
Here are some of the benefits of marketing automation:
- Saves time. Marketing automation allows teams to spend more time on more advanced tasks because it handles tasks that would otherwise have to be done manually. Teams can spend less time searching for leads and more time actually engaging with them.
- Cost savings. Because automation handles some of the tedious tasks, teams can do the same work with fewer resources. It also allows you to scale your marketing efforts without increasing head count or work hours.
- Supports personalization; A/B testing, customer segmentation, and content retargeting allow for personalized messages on personalized timelines to deliver a better customer experience. This is expected to increase brand loyalty.
- Optimal content can be prioritized; A/B testing allows teams to gather data on which content is most effective and which content should be adjusted. Marketing automation can help teams quickly change content priorities to maintain a loyal customer base.
- Always be in the right place at the right time. Teams can schedule and use triggered content to automatically engage with customers at any time. By understanding your customers’ top priorities, you can create engaging content and keep them engaged with your brand.
Marketing automation best practices
While individual business needs vary, there are several approaches that can generally be followed to get the most out of marketing automation technology.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when developing an automation strategy:
- Build a great customer journey. While there are many benefits to using marketing automation in your company, setting goals related to the customer journey will put the customer experience at the forefront of your marketing efforts.
- Have goals. Goals can help point your marketing team in the right direction, influence the metrics you measure, and ultimately demonstrate the ROI of your efforts. This information can be insightful and help inform up coming campaigns and budgeting.
- Collaboration across teams. By getting everyone on the same page with your marketing automation software, you can increase the data you collect and deliver a better experience no matter which team interacts with your customers.
- Automate the tasks that provide the greatest benefit to your team. Consider which tasks take the most time and bring the greatest value to the team. Prioritizing high-impact tasks will help you deliver results and demonstrate the value of your marketing automation software more quickly.
- Choose the right tool for your business. Based on the goals you have set for your team, choose software that will help you reach the number of customers you want to reach in the time frame you need to reach them. Choose the tools you need as part of your marketing automation software based on your goals, such as automated emails, social posting, lead management, etc.
Is marketing automation easy to use?
Yes, it is! Marketing Automation is all about ease of use. Create campaigns with one click. Centralize all aspects of your digital marketing strategy. Simple user interface and drag-and-drop functionality lets you leverage the familiar features of other apps you use every day.
Automation makes it easy to manage all marketing tasks, from basic emailing to complex campaign management and data analysis.
Best tools to automate marketing campaigns
Marketing automation tools can handle different parts of your marketing campaign and simplify the process for your entire team. Here are some of the best tools for marketing automation solutions:
- Scheduling tools. Whether email, social media, or other media, marketing automation tools allow you to schedule content and deliver it to your customers at the right time.
- Retargeting and triggered content features. When a customer takes an action, you can immediately follow up to continue the engagement and move the customer forward in the pipeline.
- Customer Personas and Segmentation. Automation tools can automatically collect data about customers and present that information in a way that allows teams to make data-driven decisions.
- Recommendations and optimization capabilities. Having the right data to drive conversations around a customer’s top priorities can make each customer interaction meaningful.
- Automated emails. Emails with a similar look and feel, such as a welcome message or an email reminder that an item is still in the cart. These repetitive and actionable emails can also be handled through automation.
Get started with marketing automation
Marketing automation saves time and money and provides a better customer experience. If you think your team could benefit from marketing automation, please share this article with your key stake holders.
Then, evaluate the tools and technologies your company needs and create a list of the most valuable actions to automate. If you’re still undecided, check out our eBook, 10 Reasons to Consider Marketing Automation.