The term “automation” has always been a lifesaver in every respect. It always means getting assistance to carry out tasks. Digital marketing is known to have so many benefits to businesses all over the world. The thought of having your marketing operations done automatically should excite you.
Marketing automation is an aspect of customer relations management. It is simply the use of software to automate marketing tasks. It is a process where companies use different software to manage multifunctional campaigns across different platforms with limited human assistance. It includes social media marketing, email marketing, customer segmentation and website personalization. It is aimed at streamlining repetitive tasks and to ensure efficient marketing.
Key Features of Marketing Automation
Here are just a few of the many features of marketing automation.
- Lead management; leads are potential customers. It involves acquiring and managing leads until they make a purchase
- Social marketing: automation software that helps to integrate your social media channels. With this, you can track and analyze your customers’ activities. It helps you post messages on all channels at once.
- Email campaigns: most customer communications from the initial interactions to purchase are via email. It offers a centralized means of sending emails to leads and customers on schedule continuously. It helps to boost interactions with customers and build strong relations.
- Contact Management: with marketing automation, you can acquire a list of subscribers. It makes the acquisition of contacts easy. In addition to that, it helps you filter, sort and organize this list. Contact management enables marketers to optimize and target their strategy to the right set of customers.
- Data analytics and Reporting: This feature helps you analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. It also provides information on leads that may become clients. You can use this to learn about the behavior of your customers. Obtained data can be used to generate relevant reports and relationships that would inspire marketing decisions.
You would agree that marketing automation indeed helps to handle so many operations. It relieves the marketing staff of so many duties. Such technology will undoubtedly have numerous benefits for businesses.
Benefits of Automated Marketing
Time-saving: Automated marketing helps you handle the regular marketing process. Multiple campaign strategies can be sent on schedule to different customers on various channels. It is as simple as using one dashboard to send messages to all your social media handles at once. The speed and accuracy of marketing automation give you opportunity to face other projects. This way, you can achieve more in less time.
Reduced Repetition and Enhanced Creativity: it saves marketers the rigours of going through repetitive tasks. Sending messages to individual customers, across different platforms can be tiring and somewhat boring. With such tasks successfully off the books, marketers can have time for creative and strategic thinking. You can channel your skills to other productive activities that would help to build your brand.
Improved task flow: automated marketing keeps things in order. It helps to sort out transactions, handle schedules and other processes systematically. This makes marketing tasks flow smoothly in organizations.
Reduced cost of staffing: with an automated marketing strategy, one employee can handle the task of about 50. This saves you the cost of staffing your company.
Faster Returns on Investment: It has been established that marketing automation saves time. Everyone knows that time is money in the business world. Less of your investment would be directed towards the employment of labor. It gives you time to focus and invest in other profitable marketing strategies. With good strategies on the ground, marketing automation may be the basis for faster returns on investment.
Convenient tracking of contacts: it provides a platform for your company to track contacts on different channels with ease. It enables you to track your customers’ web activities and buying attitude. This enables you to send messages in a good time to attract their attention.
Updated Customer Data: you must know how important it is to keep your customer data up to date. Your customer relations data can be connected to your marketing automation tool. This would help to capture more of their information and it will be automatically updated. Knowing how important it is to have up to date customer information, you must consider this a blessing.
Strengthened Customer Relations: the tracking of customer activities gives more insight on how to attend to their needs. It helps you build and manage user interactions to meet their needs. Such a strong relationship will help to develop loyalty and strengthen your business.
Increased Sales: Research shows that marketing automation drives an increase in sales and productivity of companies. It also shows that when companies use marketing automation to nurture leads, there is an increase in qualified yields. These nurtured leads bring about an almost 50% increase in customer purchases. It helps in the achievement of the goal of marketing which is to create awareness and increase patronage.
Convenient Report Production: the data provided by your marketing automation software will help you to create comprehensive reports. With the systematic data presentation, reports can be organized with ease. Statistical analysis and graphs used to monitor the success of campaigns can also be made with ease.
Current Marketing Automation Software
You have now seen how beneficial it is to adapt marketing automation in your business. It is believed that every digital marketer would be on the look for software. Provided below is a list of relevant software you can use for marketing automation.
- Hubspot marketing
- LeadSquared
- Marketo
- Active Campaign
- Exponea
- IBM marketing cloud
- Icontact pro
- Wishpond
- Adroll
- Salesfusion
- Ontraspot
- Intasky
- Genoo
- Integrate
- Marcom Central
- Buzz Portal
- Active Conversion
- Alateral
- Cascade
- AdRoll
Things To Consider In Purchasing Marketing Automation Software
Digital marketers must analyze and decide what features to incorporate into their business. Some of these concepts include:
- Have marketing strategies and goals on the ground: this forms the basis for every decision you would make. You must have your plans in place before considering any purchase.
- Suitability of features. The marketing automation software you choose should align with your marketing strategy.
- Cost and Payment terms: automation may cost you a lot, you need to weigh your options to select the most cost-effective and revenue generating marketing feature.
- Reviews: always look out for comments from existing users. Ask questions from users of the software in order to gain more insight on the choice to make.
- Usability of the system: Automation software will be useless to you if your team does not know how to use it.
- How user-friendly the tool is: Complicated software may give you more challenges than benefits. Many of the available online automation software offer free demos. You should try them out before making a choice.
- Integration: customer relations management and marketing automation are closely related. The tool you select must allow you to integrate both processes. Tools like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Pardot offer opportunities for such integrations.
Marketing automation is a trend that is helping to shape the future of digital marketing. As digital marketing grows, so does marketing automation. As long as you select the right tools and use them well, marketing automation is to your advantage. Your company stands to gain a lot from the automation of marketing processes.