It’s the job of marketing teams to come up with new and innovative ideas to attract more potential customers and capture the market. In addition to this, there are various day-to-day marketing activities, data analysis and audience engagement, which take up a big chunk of employees’ productive time. Most of these secondary activities are often mundane and repetitive in nature.
In order to focus on what matters the most and automate mundane tasks, marketing automation can prove highly beneficial. In this blog post of the Business Transformation series, we highlight the benefits of marketing automation along with a few common examples. But before we dive in, let’s first understand what marketing automation is.
The process of using technology for automating, streamlining and measuring the day-to-day marketing tasks and associated workflows, in an effort to increase operational efficiency and support business growth, is known as marketing automation. The purpose of marketing automation is to align the people, processes and tasks using technology, which makes it easier and quicker to achieve the set marketing goals. It’s helpful in effectively managing and scaling marketing activities, without the need to stretch your budget or get additional resources. This includes:
Needless to say, lead generation is one of the most important marketing activities for any business. When you automate the many steps of lead generation, it gives your sales and marketing teams more time to focus on executing the strategy and converting the leads. The marketing automation software can be configured to data from multiple touch points in the lead’s journey, including but not limited to their social media interactions, website visits, email open rate, content preferences and downloads. This can help your sales team understand where in the purchasing life cycle is the lead currently and the level of their interest in your product or service offerings. Apart from lead generation marketing automation tools can also support the lead scoring and nurturing part of the sales process. No longer does your sales team need to manually keep tabs on the leads in your sales funnel.
Most marketers know that personalised content leads to better conversion rates. In fact, around 4 out of 5 buyers would prefer unique highly targeted content at every stage of their journey. With the help of marketing automation tools, it becomes effortless to analyse what kind of content your potential customers are engaging with and which pieces of content would get you the best results. This way you can simplify the highly complex process of delivering the right kind of content, in a suitable format, to the right prospect at the right time.
For marketing to be effective you need to take into account where the customers are coming from, what they are looking for and where to reach them. As more and more data gets collected, stored and analysed through your marketing automation software it becomes easier to offer your potential customers a rich multi-channel experience that caters to their specific needs. By the time you convert them from a prospect to a customer, you already know a good deal about their requirements and background. As a result, your teams can give them the best customer experience and assist them in getting exactly what they were looking for.
Sales and marketing teams often use different tools and have separate goals in their work. No wonder why bringing together your sales and marketing teams on the same page can be a little tricky. However, when you implement marketing automation systems, it becomes effortless for them to collaborate and get the best results. This often results in improved lead quality, higher revenue, automation of manual processes like follow-up and lead assignment, and increased productivity.
Marketing automation makes your marketing team more efficient by significantly reducing the need for manual effort or human intervention in tasks that are repetitive in nature and can be easily automated. As a result, you can let your teams focus on tasks and projects that are more crucial for the business and save countless man-hours in the long run.
When setting up marketing processors and systems, it’s important to consider the scale of your activities and see if they can support the ongoing growth of the company. If something is not scalable, then it may be hard for your business to expand.
With that being said, scaling requires plenty of additional resources for most companies. If you want to scale your marketing campaigns effortlessly while minimising the need for additional resources, marketing automation is the way to go.
Tracking the leads and identifying their intent manually can not only be very time consuming, but also challenging at times. When you use marketing automation software, it becomes easy to track your leads, identify their level of interest, deliver personalized content to them, find the best channel to reach out to them and have a 360-degree view of the prospects in the sales funnel. This typically results in a better conversion rate compared to manual processing of leads.
From collecting and storing valuable data to analytics and dashboarding, everything can be automated with the help of marketing automation platforms. Gone are the days when you had to manually measure the campaign performance, predict consumer behaviour based on the limited amount of data available, and work on the reporting part as well. Now, you can rely on marketing automation tools for all this and much more, while also getting valuable insights on campaign performance without having to lift a finger.
Feedback form
A feedback form can be sent out automatically after the sale happens in order to capture feedback from the customer.
Customer onboarding
When you automate customer onboarding through personalised, automated welcome emails, there’s no need for welcoming every new customer manually.
Gated content and lead capture forms
By setting up lead capture forms, you can reward your prospects for providing their contact information by offering them something of value to them. Since this is fully automated, your prospects receive instant gratification and you get to capture a verified lead.
Customer loyalty programs
In order to reconnect with your past customers and improve your customer retention rates, you can automate your customer loyalty programs. You can use marketing automation tools to target customers who haven’t purchased with you in a while.
Social media management
Social media management is one such expendable task that you should rather automate, as far as possible. You can schedule posts, republish popular content, automate responses, and boost follower engagement with the help of marketing automation software.
Customer surveys
To be able to understand the needs of your customers and support your market research activities, you should make use of customer surveys which can be sent out to your existing list of customers automatically with the help of automated marketing tools.
Minimise abandoned shopping carts
It’s very common for customers to add items to their shopping cart only to later forget about it. By sending out automated notifications and giving them offers to go ahead with the purchase, you can minimise shopping cart abandonment and grow your revenue.
Order updates
Most e-commerce systems send out automated updates, such as the following, to keep their customers informed about the latest purchase:
You can integrate marketing automation tools into your existing systems to do the same and much more.
The potential of marketing automation is virtually limitless. Considering the significant benefits and massive amounts of data available at your fingertips, what could be a better time to implement marketing automation in your workflow than today?
If you wish to automate your marketing processes or want to learn more about how it can benefit your organisation, get in touch with our team of automation experts today!
