Marketing automation is one of the current “trendy” subjects in digital marketing industry, but what exactly is it and how can it help you in marketing efforts, drive more visitors, convert more leads and increase your ROI. In simple words, marketing automation is a powerful tool that allows businesses to "automate" repetitive marketing efforts such as emails, social media and other website actions across multiple channels. It will help you to elevate your business processes and get you much better results than running everything manually.
In this blog, we have covered 20 key considerations before pulling the trigger on the marketing automation campaign for your company. (Click to Tweet!) Let's take a glance on these important points to have a good understanding of marketing automation.
Creating an engaging digital marketing experience is not an easy task. However, the marketing automation is a natural fit with any marketing strategy. It does not only improve your conversion rate, but also help you do more in this ever-transforming marketplace.
At its best, marketing automation brings great value and returns on investment for all marketing efforts.It helps you target customers based on interests, stages of the sales cycle, location and more. When you implement marketing automation properly, you can increase the chances that prospects will revert in the future. In this way, you can keep your business ‘front of mind’ and keep things moving along the sales cycle.
This makes it easier for businesses to function well. Actually, the marketing and sales teams need clear communication, that is where the marketing automation is clearly defined processes and provide bird’s-eye vision reporting for the company’s sales pipeline. In fact, the marketing and sales department are generally not aligned for proper communication which leads to loss of conversion and ROI. Marketing might qualify hundreds of leads, but if they are not being forwarded to turn into sales-qualified leads, that might be completely fruitless.
With marketing automation system, this concern can be removed by instructing marketing and sales teams to observe what each team is doing. They can access the same information at anytime they want. So, there is less chance of misalignment between teams. Likewise, you can improve accountability of teams and departments.
Whatever your business type, there are a set of resources to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Automation system allows you to adjust your marketing strategies, from the planning and execution of promotions to leveraging marketing to enhance your profits.
Sometimes we all just want our tasks to be creative. With the smart marketing automation system, your task can be as creative as you want. It simply replaces your manual repetitive work with automated rules and campaigns. Therefore, you get much time to focus on more creative tasks instead of mundane repetitive tasks.
Marketing automation allows marketers to be more effective and achieve a higher ROI on their smart activities. For that reason, as a marketer you have to think about your customer journey and marketing strategy in a funnel and expand your marketing practice around them. In this way, you can see where your sales-ready leads hand-over in your nurturing process and make improvements in this case.
With automation system, you can reach customers in a personalized way across multiple channels – online and offline. Using behavioral inputs from various channels like social clicks, viewing a pricing page or consuming a piece of personalized messages, you can create framework to understand lead generation challenges.
A good marketing automation helps you collect data from multiple channels and use those various channels to send your marketing messages as well. It means that the success of your marketing campaign relies less on the email and entirely prefer the multiple channels that influence the decision of your buyers.
Marketing automation offers tools for easy A/B testing in email campaigns. You can split test all your campaigns once or twice prior to send it out to your mailing list. This way, you can minimize underperforming emails. Eventually, the incremental expansion of your marketing activity will produce a significant perfection at every stage of your marketing process all the time.
Through marketing automation, you can take advantage of up-selling and cross-selling feature by setting automated rules. You can use highly personalized up-sells and cross-sell to introduce a new category of products by offering a free trial or drive your pay-as-you-go customers to monthly memberships. Ability to set up automatic cross-sells, up-sells and customer follow ups make your marketing efforts much more effective and help you increase customer retention.
It provides a framework for your marketing efforts to target, plan, execute and measure the success of your targeted marketing campaigns. This is a great opportunity for marketers. With automation solutions, you can easily track your marketing efforts and push them into targeted campaigns. Ultimately, you can recognize what is working, improve your efforts on-the-fly, and noticeably boost your marketing ROI.
Some marketing automation solutions have social sharing built in which allow you to post a variety of social updates on multiple accounts in one go. So, you do not have to jump between different platforms to share your data. Likewise,, you can save your time and work on making your marketing campaigns more effective or even come up with new strategies to attract the attention of new prospects.
Marketing automation can help you schedule a variety of social media posts and your campaigns to promote your services and products. It means you can stay organized in straightforward way as well as save time that you can spend on your core business.
Marketing automation is a powerful solution that helps you to give your existing content a new life. You have to just set up automated rules for recommending useful content that converts prospects to customers and turn them into loyal customers. This is a wonderful approach in order to bring best and most interesting stuff in front of customers' eyes by reusing your blogs, articles, and news content across all your websites. That do not only save your time, but also give you the opportunity to create relevant content based on your customers’ interests and push them further down the sales funnel.
With good reporting capability of automation, you can track everything from marketing to sales cycles to ensure which campaigns influenced more sales and what kind of marketing campaigns can convert a lead or close a sale. Actually, the integrated reports are automatically pulled from different data sources of your CRM system. This tracking is made in real time and is always accurate every time you run them. It is a key for the success of your team.
Using a marketing automation tool, you can automate incentives and rewards based on specific customer's purchase milestone. You can also setup a referral plan that rewards customers and encourages them for more purchases or promoting your products and services by offering free merchandise, coupons and discounts or even advance released products.
By leveraging marketing automation, your team will get a 360-degree view to see how your prospects interact with you and even prioritize how you can turn them into loyal customers. This means that you can automate your marketing and sales effectively to qualify your incoming leads based on actions and information. This enables sales teams to focus on converting pre-qualified leads in place of chasing unqualified leads. Moreover, if your leads do not meet your scoring, you can nurture them before allocating them to sales.
It is hard to keep CRM system up-to-date, but CRM with marketing automation is more effective r and works best. When you paired both systems, you will really capture something powerful. You can automatically get more data about your leads over time, whether it is a new form submission, email in your inbox or collected business card at a conference. Ultimately, this process is not a daunting task, but it is a process to get practical experience on how the two systems will interact with each other.
So, whether your CRM data is not up-to-date, you have to take your time to clean and manage it before layering on more data inflow from the marketing platform.
When implementing this automation system, you can make your sales and marketing more effective as well as efficient. And that will greatly increase the probability of lead conversion without spending more time. There is no need to connect with each lead manually. Therefore you can save business time as well as resources and even maximize the chances to boost your revenue.
Through marketing automation's real-time visitor alert, you can discover a snippet of code for your website that helps you to know exactly when your leads visit your business website. Thus, when you set up this alert, the automation tool immediately notifies your team when a person or company visits a target webpage or performs a specific action.
Marketing automation is buzzing in the marketing industry. It allows you to create the sequence process of automating follow-up with leads, which brings your potential customers back to your site, build lifelong relationship with them and saves you untold time. And this is mostly done through social media, emails and other contact points.
It is not as expensive as you think. The above listed time savings and efficient marketing automation efforts tend to lead to cost saving benefits. Most importantly, these efforts lead to higher conversions and revenue generation which will in return lead to more people in your funnel who are ready to buy. Essentially your automation platform allows you to get the most out of the available resources and as a result, free up money for other marketing ventures. This is a key adoption point to adopt any marketing automation system.
These days, more and more businesses are rolling out marketing automation systems and it is taking place very quickly. It is the key to offering a more holistic, scalable management of the customer life cycle. I believe the above described reasons have armed you with a good understanding and actions which can be implemented to utilize automation system for your business.
When you build a campaign integrating your marketing automation system, it should map out to your CRM, as a result so you can drive closed deals back to the campaigns. That capability lets you bring revenue to campaigns and more precisely measures returns on investment as well as helps you in data-driven marketing decisions.
Once you become aware of marketing automation system and how to maximize its use, the next step is to search for the right marketing automation platform. If you have decided that it is something that will promote your business, you should make sure that you have the fundamental marketing personnel, processes and data structure ready to make the investment successful. From that point on, it gets easier.
If you are looking for digital marketing consultancy services, just contact GlobalYogi to see how we can help you increase more leads and better align your marketing and sales teams for maximum efficiency.