Marketing includes a fair share of monotonous tasks. For instance, building and maintaining customer relationships involves creating email campaigns, sending follow-up messages and gathering customer data for interaction personalization.
That's where marketing automation comes in. It takes care of the repetitive work, freeing up marketers' time so they can focus on the creative side of the job.
This article will explain what marketing automation is, and how it streamlines redundant tasks and enables data-driven decision-making while improving marketers' efficiency.
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What Is Marketing Automation?
The simplest marketing automation definition perfectly explains its essence:
Marketing automation is a process of optimizing and simplifying repetitive marketing tasks using advanced software technology.
Instead of doing them manually, marketers can pass time-consuming tasks to the software, which will perform them much faster, more efficiently and with minimal possibility of error.
Here is the list of common responsibilities that can be relied on marketing automation software:
- Email campaigns management
- Follow-up messaging
- Social media management
- Lead generation
- Customer segmentation
- Customer communication personalization
- Behavioral tracking and triggering
- Landing page optimization
- Social testing (including A/B and multivariable testing)
- Customer retention
- eCommerce automation
- SMS marketing
- Web personalization
- Analytics and Reporting
By performing all these (and many more) tasks, marketing automation tools serve as your silent, reliable and confidant assistant, which is why they are among the best customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
Choosing the right marketing automation software can level up your business operation and bring numerous benefits, regardless of your company’s size and niche. However, if you need help selecting or implementing a customer relationship management platform, contact top-ranked Salesforce consulting companies to help you meet your business goals.
To better understand how marketing automation can streamline your tasks and improve performance, it's helpful that you know how it works; we’ll break it down in the following section.
How Does Marketing Automation Work?
As mentioned, the marketer's job includes many creative duties determining the campaign's outcome and less exciting but equally important "side" tasks.
These tasks are not demanding but draw attention from more specific responsibilities.
Once you set the marketing automation tool to take over these tasks, you'll be free to focus on more dynamic and creative projects. You won’t need to monitor the tool since it makes no mistakes; revisit it if you need to change the default parameters.
Marketing automation tools operate by following these basic steps:
- Data collection: marketing automation tools collect customer data from all available sources - comments and interactions on the business’s website, social media accounts or email communication. It uses gathered data to create individual customer profiles to develop a personalized approach.
- Lead scoring: The marketing automation tool evaluates each lead's worthiness based on their engagement with the brand. The lead's level of interest in the brand determines its ranking during classification; naturally, more focus is given to higher-ranked leads because they're more likely to convert to customers.
- Lead nurturing: During this stage, marketing automation keeps potential clients engaged with various personalized offers sent through different communication channels. The goal is to slightly push the lead through the sales funnel.
- Marketing campaign creation and management: using single marketing automation tool marketers can create and monitor social media posting, email and ad campaigns.
- Monitoring, reporting and analytics: marketing automation tool provides detailed reports about campaign success. Marketers use this information to optimize campaigns and improve overall performance.
In summary, marketing automation streamlines and automates many manual, repetitive marketing tasks, freeing up marketers' time to focus on more strategic, high-level initiatives.
What Can Marketing Automation Tools Do?
World-famous conglomerates and small businesses have something in common - they face the same challenges — generating leads and maintaining the interest of existing customers.
Getting the first through the sales funnel and keeping the second entertained requires a lot of personalized communication through various channels. Companies face immeasurably amounts of data that employees, without the help of automation, could not analyze and use.
That’s where marketing automation comes to the scene and saves the day. These tools collect, analyze and organize data, putting it to work and simplifying the entire workflow. Collaborating with top IT service providers can also significantly enhance the effectiveness of your marketing automation strategy.
Marketing automation helps businesses automate redundant tasks, like email marketing, to engage with potential customers more efficiently. However, relying solely on email marketing can lead to a disjointed experience for customers as they move through different stages of the sales process. To create better customer relationships, use marketing automation throughout the entire customer journey, not just during one phase.
Marketing Automation Benefits
When used consistently throughout all stages of the sales funnel, customer relationship management solutions provide many benefits, including:
Improved Marketing Efficiency
One of the primary advantages of marketing automation is increased efficiency, which allows for better time management and resource allocation.
These tools enable marketers to focus on more creative and demanding strategies and marketing initiatives by automating repetitive tasks based on data entry. Another advantage is that the marketing automation tool will complete all tasks with maximum accuracy while adhering to the predetermined deadlines.
With marketing automation, businesses can achieve their marketing goals faster and more efficiently, leading to improved overall success.
Enhanced Personalization
Improved personalization is one of the key benefits of marketing automation.
With the ability to collect and analyze significant amounts of customer behavior and preferences data, marketing automation enables businesses to deliver highly targeted content through personalized email campaigns, targeted social media ads or customized landing pages.
Personalization helps build stronger customer relationships and increases engagement and conversions. It demonstrates that the business understands customers' pain points and needs and provides personalized solutions followed by an individual approach.
Personalization can also result in increased customer loyalty.
An Aquia survey found that 75% of Americans claim that they are more likely to return and make additional purchases from a business that understands them personally and makes an effort to meet their unique needs.
Lead Nurturing and Scoring
Marketing automation tools collect large amounts of prospects' data, using them to create personalized content that helps convert prospects into paying customers. That's lead nurturing. Without automation tools, evaluating which content will "push" leads to making a purchase decision would be much more complicated.
A marketing automation tool can improve lead scoring as well. The tool will inform the sales team when to take over and complete their conversion process by tracking the lead's online activities and engagement.
By automating lead nurturing and scoring, the company's marketing and sales teams may work together more effectively while still maximizing their productivity.
Increased Conversion Rate
By nurturing a personalized approach marketing automation tool sends leads targeted and relevant content, which helps them move further through the sales funnel.
It also scores leads based on their behavior and engagement, dedicating more attention and efforts to the most promising ones.
A marketing automation tool can conduct social testing to determine which marketing approach delivers more conversions and even retarget prospects that show interest but don’t convert.
Marketing and Sales Objectives Coordination
Aligning marketing and sales teams can help achieve better business results and reach the company's goals. The best way to do it is by using the same marketing automation tools, which will turn a potential customer into a paying one faster.
Marketing automation boosts sales productivity by 14.5% and reduces marketing expenses by 12.2%. It also helps businesses get more leads and achieve better sales results.
This way, the marketing team can focus on developing strategies to improve sales while the sales team can work more efficiently. It's an excellent solution for everyone.
Automatic Reporting and Facilitated Data Management
A marketing automation tool will simplify even complicated analytics reports.
Instead of struggling with reports, it will generate them for you, giving you an overview of the entire process to identify problems and find a solution. Accurate reporting will provide insights into your marketing strategy performance, so you can adjust any steps that aren't delivering.
Thanks to the great accuracy, the tool also facilitates data management, automatically updating it, so you can adherence your further marketing or sales decisions.
Improved Scalability
Another significant marketing automation benefit is improved scalability.
By automating manual and repetitive tasks, marketing automation increases scalability and frees up time and resources for the marketing team to concentrate on high-level strategic goals.
Automation provides insights into performance metrics, allowing the team to make data-driven decisions and improve efficiency. Additionally, marketing automation systems can be easily integrated with other technologies, which enables scalability as the company grows.
By reducing manual work and increasing efficiency, marketing automation enables the marketing team to handle a larger workload and scale their efforts as the company expands.
What Is Marketing Automation: Key Takeaways
According to a Hupspot survey, 58% of marketers use marketing automation to simplify task management so that they can use their time and resources more efficiently.
Consider these as tools to collect data, conduct research, and provide targeted content to your leads. At the same time, you can concentrate on developing innovative campaigns that are the backbone of your company's success.
Regardless of the size of your business, a marketing automation tool can help you level up. It will score and nurture your leads through the sales funnel, increasing conversions and enabling better collaboration and greater marketing and sales team productivity.
Start with marketing automation today and if you need help, contact some of our top marketing automation consultants who will assist you with automating, measuring and streamlining your marketing activities to achieve the best possible results!
