The call for today’s marketers to embrace digital power is profound in many ways. There has never been a more important time to have that discussion than now. Marketers today face constant pressure to get more done. At the heart of all modern-day marketing efforts must sit an intentional automation system.
Automation should not just be about unmanned software or robots; it is much about workable and simplified processes that get results than it is about the former. They end goal is productivity with little or no human intrusion.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a technology or software that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns across multiple channels, automatically. With marketing automation, businesses can target customers with automated messages across email, web, social media and text. Messages are sent automatically, according to sets of instructions called workflows. Workflows may be defined by templates – custom-built from scratch, or modified mid-campaign to achieve better results.
Marketing and sales departments use marketing automation to automate online marketing campaigns, social media posting, email marketing and sales activities to both increase revenue and maximise efficiency. When automation is used effectively to handle repetitive tasks, employees are free to tackle higher-order problems, and human error is reduced.
Running a B2B tech and SaaS business is in itself a challenging task. However, to succeed there is a need to automate more work so as to ensure efficiency. It’s important that marketing automation be adopted to optimise a client’s sales strategy and marketing efforts.
Boost leads, conversions and revenue by utilising the latest technology. The fact is that the most advanced marketing automation platforms offer support and change the role of marketers by eliminating tedious tasks.
Personalised messaging is key to marketing success, but small businesses don’t have time to schedule every email and converse individually with each customer. Instead, small businesses should use marketing automation software. Automation takes care of time-consuming, menial tasks and allows marketers to focus their efforts on developing and refining their marketing strategy.
The most successful marketing strategies are those that rely on automation. Statistics reveal that sales productivity can increase by up to 14.5 percent when you automate marketing.
How does marketing automation work?
Marketing automation software serves two primary functions: It completes mundane and repetitive tasks through templated workflows, and it integrates all marketing channels into one seamless programme. Its many integrations include dedicated platforms for email, social media and analytics. The system tracks multiple simultaneous schedules and reports the effectiveness of all marketing activities through three core operations.
Customer profiles
Marketing automation software records all customer interactions with each brand touchpoint. Customer profiles update whenever they engage with an email, website form or social media page. A consumer’s journey with your brand is always detailed through analytic reports.
Visual outlines
Marketing campaigns continue to grow in complexity, with an increasing number of digital touchpoints. Users of marketing automation software can view campaign timelines in accessible visual interfaces. The customer journey can also be viewed as a road map to help marketers identify the engagement path taken by their customers.
CRM integrations
Finally, marketing automation streamlines communications between the sales and marketing teams by enabling them to work within the same database. Marketing automation is one of the known Customer Relationship Management tools. Pulling data from the CRM, it builds on layers that rely its own information atop the original sales profiles. Sales teams receive qualified leads as marketing campaigns further personalise each prospect.
What are the main features of marketing automation?
Marketing automation software can overwhelm users with their massive number of features.
Email campaign management
Email campaigns can be prepared, created and scheduled months in advance. These schedules can follow static timetables or use advanced features. Diverging email paths based on customer interactions with your other integrated channels can trigger more personalised emails. The ability to stagger large email blasts also boosts your Search Engine Optimisation – one area that has become a Waterloo for businesses.
Social media dashboards
With so many accounts and networks, it can be difficult to juggle the slight variations on campaigns or track customers across networks using different usernames. The social media dashboard displays all of your social networks and their marketing calendars. Schedule posts in advance, link customers to each of their profiles and avoid repeatedly messaging them, and review engagement analytics across all applications.
Workflows
Users guide all automation processes with workflows. These are simple coded instructions that are the building blocks of automation. Visual dashboards often map these workflows to demonstrate their effects in the context of the overarching marketing campaign.
Customer segmentation
Automated marketing tracks all campaigns to deliver detailed analytics; such as conversions, click-through rates and website statistics. This behaviour informs new criteria for customer segments. More precise segments boost the personalisation of every customer interaction. Many automation platforms include advanced segmentation tools that organise much of this data.
Landing pages and forms
Make it as easy as possible for customers to download your content and subscribe to your newsletters with landing pages by generating simple fill-out forms for previously registered customers, removing the need for them to input any information. These downloadable assets and pages can be stored within the database. Even if hosted independently, they can be tagged with tracking URLs generated by the software.
Budget management
When linked through the CRM and an integrated accounting system, campaign costs can be updated in real-time with every proposed adjustment. Calculate the cost-benefit analysis of each additional email or purchased content piece to always stay a step ahead of the budget.
Top 5 marketing automation software for growing business
Marketing automation covers a broad spectrum of tasks: prospecting, engaging with leads, understanding their preferences and maintaining lasting relationships to convert them into paying customers. Managing all these aspects of marketing isn’t an easy feat; there is need for a streamlined process that helps you increase your productivity. Marketing automation software enables you to put all your menial tasks on autopilot, so you can save more time and focus on high-intent leads.
Here are the top 5 software to save more time and focus on high-intent leads:
- Marketo
Marketo Engage by Adobe is a leading marketing automation tool that offers numerous automation features for every growing business. It’s a powerful marketing automation tool with salient features such as email marketing, lead nurturing and scoring, and analytics. Marketo also offers advanced features like mobile engagement, web retargetting and content personalisation. This marketing automation system is mainly ideal for enterprise customers; however, businesses of all sizes can implement Marketo.
- Salesmate
Salesmate is an all-inclusive CRM software that empowers teams and helps them drive more revenue by automating their entire business process. Salesmate’s robust marketing automation feature enables you to create multiple processes without any hassle, and it is considered one of the best marketing automation software for small businesses.
Salesmate offers advanced features such as email automation, trigger-based automation, contact management, built-in calling, power dialler, team inbox, web forms, messenger, sales sequences, sales automation and sales reports that help you forecast your revenue.
- Mailchimp
The ever-popular Mailchimp is one of the best marketing automation platforms for growing businesses. It helps you automate the repetitive tasks so you can focus on closing more deals. Mailchimp offers features like automated marketing emails, targetted ad campaigns, building landing pages, personalised engagement, and reporting and analytics. Mailchimp is ideal if you want to build a lasting customer relationship, as it offers a user-friendly tool that is AI-powered.
- HubSpot
When it comes to marketing automation tools, HubSpot is the one leading the market. HubSpot marketing automation helps you create powerful automated workflows with a simple visual interface.
It automates repetitive tasks and helps your business grow with automated email drip campaigns, personalised workflows, lead scoring, analytics and much more. HubSpot’s powerful marketing automation tool provides an all-inclusive plan that works for every business to scale their revenue
- Pardot
Pardot by Salesforce is yet another robust B2B marketing automation tool. Pardot enables the marketing and sales team to collaborate, engage buyers, close more deals and build lasting relationships.
Pardot possesses powerful features – including lead management and generation, email marketing, sales alignment, Artificial Intelligence and insightful ROI reporting to close more business and shorten the sales cycle. Pardot helps improve marketing efficiency and is preferred by large-scale enterprises.
Marketing automation can help boost business revenues and grow through:
Fully automated welcome programmes
One of the ways through which marketing automation can help your business is by fully automating the welcome programmes. To keep the customers coming back, it is crucial to develop a lasting relationship with them. This is where a welcome programme can help.
An initial email allows to start out on the right foot. It provides the perfect tool to encourage new customers to start shopping. Besides, it can use welcome emails to gather more information about the newest customers. If customers request more information, the data generated will provide additional information about them. Then, customise the page to provide personalised incentives to them through automation.
Effective customer retention programmes
Another way marketing automation helps businesses is by offering advanced lifecycle campaign automation. Since abandoned and win-back cart campaigns have a massive impact on the bottom line, it is crucial to enforce effective customer retention programmes. Otherwise, you’ll lose out on sales.
Regardless of how great your website, product or brand might be, life can get in the way of customers making their final decision. The easiest way to raise profits is through customer retention.
As the customers are brought back, they will re-engage with the brand and be more likely to make a purchase. Thus, lost revenue will be recouped with minimal effort. An abandoned cart email is one great strategy to retain existing customers. Simply email them to remind that they forgot to check-out. Make the email as persuasive as possible by including images, CTAs and promotional offers.
Coordinated multi-channel campaign automation
Marketers today have to ensure that their campaigns coordinate across multiple devices, channels and platforms due to the fact that shoppers today jump from one platform to another. As customers are everywhere, brands need to follow suit.
With marketing automation, it is possible to become omnipresent. It allows marketers to target customers with smart segmentation, conditional content and hyper-relevant product recommendations using targetted ads, push notifications, text messages, social interactions and the like. As all of the marketing tactics work together through automation, it will be easier to provide customers with the best experience.
Improved personalisation
Everyone wants to feel special, especially by their favourite brand. The marketing automation software will automatically and continuously update profiles to make sure that the information you use is up-to-date. This will help save valuable time, as marketing teams will no longer need to sift through a huge amount of data. SaaS companies will do well to remember personalisation in their product, marketing and their SaaS business model for higher conversions and customer loyalty.
Helps businesses test and optimise
Although the above ways help businesses run better, the main benefit of marketing automation is that it allows businesses to test and optimise. It helps businesses stay one step ahead of the competition, as they can experiment and see what works best.
As marketing teams know exactly which message resonates best with each audience, they will be able to test and optimise marketing efforts for optimal results. They get to continuously test and optimise different messages and create new campaigns. Information offered by the software will enable them to test new ideas and make necessary changes to save time and money.
Marketing automation is suitable for businesses of all sizes. When it is effectively executed, it allows the company to achieve its marketing goals and boost profitability. The following metrics help highlight its importance.
Marketing automation increases sales productivity by as much as 14.5 percent.
Around 80 percent of marketing professionals believe that implementing marketing automation helps them increase revenue. Over 90 percent of the most successful marketers agree that it is very important for businesses to consider marketing automation. This demonstrates that marketing automation makes for a sound investment. Now, it’s about finding the right tools that fit your business and its needs.
Some best practices to keep in mind when designing your marketing automation strategy
- Define and present your goals. Use real numbers to justify the investment in a marketing automation platform to your stakeholders.
- Collaborate with other teams. Your marketing automation strategy will touch several teams in your company. Get their input and buy-in before you begin.
- Create process visualidations. Use detailed diagrams of your marketing automation workflow to relay your big picture objectives to your entire organisation – efficiently and effectively.
- Prepare for database segmentation. Consider your customer data. Think about who you’d like to engage, and why.
- Prepare your content strategy. Build your content library. Create interesting, engaging, and relevant messaging designed to reach all stages of the customer lifecycle.
- Plan for a slow roll-out. The world’s most successful marketing automation firms stagger their launches. Test early and optimise the next block of programmes to give yourself the best chance of success.
- Analyse as you go. See what’s working and what’s not. Use some of the time you get back from automation to dig into the analytics and make the changes that will grow your business.
Marketing automation lets you implement a digital marketing strategy without having to manually press ‘send’ on each and every email, message, campaign or post you create. Good automation tools help you identify your audience, design the right content and automatically trigger actions based on schedules and customer behaviour. Once your campaign rolls out you can focus on other tasks, then analyse and tweak your marketing plan as results start coming in. An automated marketing strategy can save time and resources, driving revenue and ROI while you focus on growing your business.
Additional information Sourced from: Businessnewsdaily, NYU Dispatch, Salesforce.com, Hubspot.com, Neilpatel.com, Salesmate.com, Marketo.com, Campaignwizkard.com
>>>The writer is a seasoned Fireball Brand, Marketing and Digital Banking Professional. Her almost two-decade illustrious professional journey has seen her working with brands to successfully drive Equity and ROI.
