In the marketing world, it pays to stay on top of new technological advancements like marketing automation. Marketing automation tools make it easier to understand your client’s needs and form stronger relationships with them.
As a result, you no longer need to rely exclusively on manual efforts, particularly for repetitive tasks. Instead, you can use automation to streamline your processes and improve the customer experience.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation involves using tools to streamline specific time-consuming advertising and customer service processes. Some examples of tasks that can be performed with the help of marketing automation are:
- Emailing your customers
- Notifying them of current shipping statuses
- Posting on social media
Companies can either combine different marketing automation platforms to perform these functions or use a single, dedicated software.
Most automation tools involve establishing a set of workflows that determine the following action to take. For instance, a company might set up an established workflow for customer orders that looks similar to the below:
- The customer places an order and provides an email and phone number
- The company sends an order confirmation and receipt to their email address
- The client is notified their product is en route and is given a ship-tracking link
- After receiving the item, the customer is sent an automated feedback survey
When handled manually, these tasks are pretty time-consuming. Employees need to prepare a receipt and make sure to send it to the correct email address. They also need to physically track the item’s shipping process and send manual text updates. That could take hours, especially if the company has numerous orders daily.
Through marketing automation, all these steps follow a logical process. There’s no need for human intervention. Once the workflow is established, everything proceeds in the proper order.
Best Practices for Marketing Automation
Implementing marketing automation into your organization starts with identifying where you spend the most time on routine tasks. Often, those areas are where you’ll see the most value from automation.
Once you understand what those are, you can establish a clear workflow for an automation tool to follow, eliminating the need for human intervention. Some areas where marketing automation is particularly beneficial include all of the following.
Personalized Email Campaigns
Email is one of the primary tools organizations use to keep in contact with their customers. However, people often receive hundreds of emails daily. Getting them to open yours can be a challenge, especially if you send repetitive messages that don’t add value or reflect their interests.
Marketing automation can improve your company’s email open rate simply by providing customers with content that reflects their activities with your company. For instance, if a client signs up for your email newsletter, sending them a thank you confirmation message is customary.
And you can do this automatically with the correct automated workflow. They’ll receive the email within seconds of their sign-up, increasing the likelihood that they’ll open it. Had you sent the same email several days or weeks later, they might have forgotten all about signing up to receive your content and assumed it was a spam message.
Other common areas where automation can help with email personalization include status updates, order receipts, abandoned cart reminders, and product recommendations. When clients perceive that your email is relevant because they recently interacted with your company, they’re more likely to read it.
Lead Nurturing
Sometimes, clients will interact with your company but won’t take the next step — making a purchase. Through marketing automation, you can implement a robust lead-nurturing campaign that urges clients through the purchasing journey.
A lead-nurturing program typically relies on email, SMS, and phone calls. You’ll need some information about the client before you begin, as well as their consent to contact them using those methods. Once you have their consent, you can establish a workflow that moves them through the purchasing process.
For instance, an e-commerce company might establish a lead-nurturing campaign that sends automated emails of items the customer recently browsed. Once clients review the email, they’ll remember what they were shopping for.
They might take further action and decide to purchase, or they may not. Your company can give them additional incentives by sending an SMS text containing a one-time discount to use on any item in your store.
Lead nurturing ensures that your company remains top of mind with the customer. It improves brand awareness and keeps them engaged with you. However, if you try to handle the process manually, you probably won’t see the same ROI for your efforts.
Instead, you’ll spend hours on tasks that are much easier to complete through automation. There’s also no guarantee that a lead will become a buyer. Your manual efforts could result in no sales and no value added to your company.
Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation used to be extremely arduous, and companies that continue to handle it manually face an uphill battle. Keeping track of your buyer’s preferences, traits, locations, and demographics is quite challenging, especially when you have more than a handful of regular clients.
Through marketing automation, it is much easier to gather customer data and assemble buyer profiles for your clients. With the proper workflow, tools can collect the data that a human normally would. However, since there’s less room for subjective bias, the results are often much more accurate, with fewer mistakes.
Using the data provided through automated customer segmentation, marketers can design their campaigns to meet the specific needs of their buyers. For instance, if the automation tool determines that 20% of clients are between 20 and 25 years old, working in their first job, and living in Charleston, SC, they could tailor their ads to meet that demographic.
Additional segmentation can occur based on a customer’s interactions. Suppose that a client downloads your executive recruiting company’s e-book on interview techniques. In this case, it’s fair to assume they’re seeking to hire future employees and want to ensure they have a firm grasp on the process.
You can use that information to send them materials that are relevant to those interests. For instance, you might show them information on your executive recruiting services and explain how they can benefit from finding the right person for their open role.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Through marketing automation, companies can realize a host of benefits, including the following.
Streamlined Marketing Campaigns
Without marketing automation, you’ll likely have an array of techniques that don’t necessarily align with one another. The result is an ineffective process that doesn’t capture as many leads or sales as you potentially could.
If your customer segmentation efforts are lackluster, you might miss out on opportunities to tailor your ads to meet your clients’ needs; instead, you end up spending money advertising to people who don’t fit your typical buyer profile. These actions reduce the cash available in your marketing budget.
With the help of marketing automation, you’ll find it easier to develop cohesive marketing campaigns that fit together seamlessly.
Increased Efficiency
No company wants to spend money on activities that don’t add value to the organization. Routine marketing tasks are common money drains. When a company doesn’t take action to replace them with more effective tools, the result is lost time that could be better spent on creative and strategic endeavors.
Through marketing automation tools, you can quickly establish workflows that scale your organization’s processes. Instead of concentrating on minute tasks that are prone to error, your team can move on to tasks requiring more brain power.
Foster Stronger Customer Relationships
Today’s marketing automation tools can do the work of several full-time employees. For companies on a budget, this is a highly attractive prospect. It enables you to embark on a high-quality marketing campaign by simply selecting the right tools.
With the help of software, you can easily form connections with clients that would be nearly impossible to achieve on your own. As a result, you’ll see:
- Stronger engagement with your clients through automated emails
- Social media posts
- Greater personalization
In combination, these elements eventually translate into more sales.
Marketing Automation Is Key to Scaling Your Organization
In the early days of your business, spending money on marketing automation tools may seem like another unnecessary expense that cuts into your profits. However, marketing automation has a strong ROI. In fact, one study found that lead quantity increases by nearly 80% and that 75% of companies see an increase in sales from their marketing automation tools.
Those are powerful statistics that no organization can ignore. If you’re on the fence about marketing automation, learn more about its benefits. Chances are you’ll find it can add tremendous value to your company.
