How Does Marketing Automation Work - Benefits & Uses in 2021
We live in the age of automation where modern marketers are using automation tools to optimize their marketing efforts. In this blog, we will discuss how you can automate your marketing efforts like a professional. Marketing automation is an extremely effective tool used by companies to leverage marketing resources more efficiently in order to generate the most ROI for their efforts.
Marketing automation software provides companies with the ability to analyze and manipulate huge amounts of data, which then allows them to make smarter business decisions. Marketing automation is an essential tool that can be used by all types of businesses to achieve maximum results.
Marketing automation helps you reach out to your audience better and more about using the best marketing automation tools. Automation platforms can help you manage email, social, and advertising campaigns. It's important to know what kind of marketing automation tools your competitors are using in order to maintain your competitive edge.
Definition of Marketing Automation
We've put together this comprehensive guide to enlighten you on the subject of Marketing Automation from A to Z, from identifying the activities to automate, the tools to use, and the best practices for success. Technology has made it possible for businesses of all sizes to automate much of their marketing activities.
A fully automatic approach is not desirable, however, as it takes the human aspect away from your marketing, and your users and customers ultimately communicate with you, not your brand. However, smart businesses know that some marketing activities don't have to be handled manually, and in practical terms, attempting to manage all aspects of marketing manually can take up more time and resources than you have available.
Automating repetitive tasks frees up time that you can then spend on activities that need to be handled by humans - or that are simply more effective when given a personal touch. Marketing Automation is the set of processes, systems and tools that automate your web marketing and deliver a better customer experience.
What Is Your Experience With Marketing Automation?
Even though most marketers are familiar with the term, often used to describe a category of tools, this definition does not give the big picture, although tools are an integral part of Marketing Automation.
So, in other words, software solutions are the tools you use to make it happen, but the term marketing automation really refers to the process of making activities that are usually manual more efficient through the implementation of systems to facilitate these same activities without direct human intervention.
At the data level, the huge advantage of Marketing Automation systems is that they can automatically connect every contact acquired with marketing operations and their effects. Thanks to this, we know exactly how we acquired a contact, how they performed in all marketing and sales processes, and when they became our customers.
Thus, it is easy to determine the return on investment (ROI) indicator, for each executed trade, because we are able to calculate this indicator for each trade. We, therefore, benefit from a global view of all the marketing and sales operations carried out by our company. We can see what works, what not and what needs to be improved.
Marketing Automation Best Practices
How Marketing Automation Impacts Your Business?
Marketing is no longer an activity related to art, it has become a form of science. It can provide the results of performing operations that are based on mathematics. In addition, we are now able to show the precise impact on the turnover of campaigns carried out in a company. In summary, it is easy to justify how much of the income a marketer's work generates.
More specifically, the incredible performance of marketing automation comes from different sources:
Continuous Maturation of Leads and Prospects
Only a small portion of your website visitors will follow your intended action on the first visit. This is why it is crucial that you direct them to your funnel where they can become leads until they are ready to convert. It's no surprise that Forrester data shows that companies that grow their leads are making 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost compared to leads who haven't been warmed up with automated marketing.
Marketing automation takes the manual step out of this process, as I'll describe in more detail in the next section on sample campaigns.
Resource Savings
Maturing potential customers is not the only process that can be improved through marketing automation. When implemented correctly, this approach allows you to:
Save dedicated sales and marketing hours that are needed when doing manual operations
Build a marketing campaign once and deploy it infinitely, automatically Reduce your outbound advertising spending by maintaining a steady flow of qualified and mature leads.
Better Performance Indicators
Finally, one of the least used aspects of a good implementation of marketing automation is the data it generates. Since the system tracks - in detail and with granularity - what actions prospects and potential customers take at different stages, you can use its analysis functions to find out:
Which posts get the most reactions from people in your funnel?
The optimal number of touch points needed for a conversion
Studies show that marketing automation is incredibly effective. Businesses that use marketing automation to develop leads see a 451% increase in the number of qualified leads.
Gartner's research shows that companies that automate customer relationship and lead management experience a 10% (or more) increase in revenue within 6 to 9 months. Gartner also predicts that companies will manage 85% of their relationships without human interactions by 2020-21.
According to the Forrester Research Institute, companies that develop leads through marketing automation generate 50% more hot leads - for just 33% of the cost. A report from DemandGen reveals that mature leads produce an average of 20% more business opportunities, compared to unmatured leads. HubSpot confirms the benefits of lead maturation, emphasizing that mature prospects make 47% more purchases than their unmatured counterparts.
The Biggest Marketing Challenges for Small Businesses
VentureBeat finds that 80% of marketing automation users see an increase in the number of leads generated, while 77% also see an increase in conversions. According to data from the 2018 HubSpot survey, 63% of businesses say generating traffic and leads is their number one marketing challenge, followed by the rationale for ROI from their marketing activities (40%).
Important marketing challenges for your business -
Generate traffic and leads 63%
Experience the return on investment of our marketing activities 40%
Guarantee a sufficient budget 28%
Identify the technologies adapted to our needs 26%
Manage our website 26%
Target content for an international audience 21%
Train our staff 19%
Hire the best talent 16%
Find a framework partner 7%
Fortunately, the right marketing approach can help overcoming top small business marketing challenges . The need for marketing automation is growing, due in part to the growing number of interaction channels between customers and brands.
This is especially true for growing businesses, which find it increasingly difficult to maintain a 1: 1 ratio with every potential customer, prospect, or customer. Coupled with the increase in the number of marketing channels that marketers are required to manage, at some point, any business reaches a tipping point where it is not realistic - or even possible - to continue to manage and to monitor all these activities.
Their associated data using excel files and other outdated tools. It's time to consider marketing automation if:
Potential customers are not managed consistently
Your sales processes are not well defined
The time it takes for your team to acquire and develop leads increases
Each request from a prospect or a customer is managed manually
Customer loyalty must be improved
By leveraging marketing automation, you can send the right message to the right customer at the right time - in less time and with better accuracy thanks to the ability to better integrate your data, build behavioral profiles, and understand customer needs, your audience at some point.
You'll respond to leads faster, drive leads through the conversion funnel with efficiency and better personalization, you'll be better able to convert leads to customers, and ultimately grow bottom lines.
The 5 Main Components of Marketing Automation System
Of course, there are several things (data, process, etc.) that make up a marketing automation program, but each initiative shares four main elements:
Lists/segmentation: lists and segmentation are the pillars of effective marketing automation. Your business already uses lists in some way (every business does), but without quality lists, automation is not possible. Lists feature your target customers - whether they are potential customers, existing prospects, or existing customers - whom you want to build or with whom you want to build a relationship.
Lists can be broken down by buyer profile, by potential customer transformation channel, by product or service line, or by any other demographic or geographic information. To achieve this, we use “tags” which are similar to labels that we will add to the profiles of people in our database according to their respective progress. Using these “tags” it is then possible to personalize the experience.
The evaluation of prospects: the evaluation of prospects is a method which makes it possible to assign a value to a contact based on his probability of converting into a customer. This is an essential process for marketing teams so that they can determine if a potential customer is suitable to be passed on to the sales team.
Effective lead assessment requires marketing to continue maturing leads until they're ready to buy, so that only the most qualified leads are passed on to the sales team - thereby saving money. sales team valuable time by letting them focus exclusively on the leads who have the highest potential value to the business.
Triggers: triggers are defined thresholds that trigger a specific action in the marketing automation tool. For example, a trigger can be used to indicate when your automation tool should email a prospect and offer them a product trial. Another trigger could be used to ask your software to send a promotional offer to a prospect who is close to the point of purchase, but who has not yet converted.
One of the simplest examples of a trigger is that of a form for subscribing to a newsletter. When someone adds their email address or completes the form, a trigger instructs your tool to send that person a series of welcome emails. It wouldn't make sense to let the tool send out a series of welcome emails to an existing customer, and that's why having well-defined triggers is crucial (we'll talk about triggers a little later).
Actions: actions are things that happen after a trigger. An action can be broken down in several ways. It can take the form of an email, text message, mailing, internal notification and more
Automations: At a minimum, a trigger and an action are necessary to create an automation. Depending on the number of channels, audience, buyer profiles, potential triggers, and actions, a business can have thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of possible automation. In its simplest form, automation has a very basic structure: if X, then Y.
Marketing Automation Examples Businesses Should Use
Marketing automation can be used to automate lead generation and lead nurturing . Lead generation is the first step in nurturing a potential customer’s interest in your product or service.
Marketing automation can be used to streamline the lead generation process, which is often highly complex, time-consuming, and repetitive.
1 - Automation by Subject
Primary triggers: the number of pages viewed or downloads of content offers. Action: Send emails Automation: Create email automation for the main topics of your website. The right automation is triggered when one of your contacts visits a page or downloads an offer related to that topic
2 - Welcome Automation
Primary trigger: stage of the life cycle Actions: Sending emails (and/or text messages) Automation: Define a series of welcome emails when a contact becomes a customer, which you can trigger when a customer's lifecycle stage changes to “customer”
3 - Automation for Maintaining Contact
Main triggers: visits, clicks and form submissions Actions: Sending emails (and/or text messages, webchat) Automation: Creating a dynamic list that updates automatically to include contacts who are very close to you. Then create email automation to leverage that list as a way to promote your best content
4 - Automation for the Maturation of Prospects
Primary trigger: multiple occurrences of top-of-the-funnel conversion Actions: Sending emails and webchat Automation: If a contact has downloaded several of your flagship marketing offerings like eBooks or webinars, it can be a strong sign that they're expecting more.
Establish automation that will help these contacts move up the funnel
5 - Sales Representative Notification Automation
Primary triggers: bottom-of-funnel pageviews / conversions events Actions: Sending emails and/or text messages to the sales representative Automation: Use automation here that triggers a notification to your sales reps notifying them of important activity performed by a potential customer.
Use personalization, give sales reps all the information they need about the prospect
6 - Follow-up Automation
Main trigger: inactive contacts Action: Send emails Automation: Wake up inactive contacts with dunning automation, enrolling contacts as soon as they meet certain criteria.
For example, you can set conditions such as how long since their last form submission, website visit, or click in an email, triggering an email when enough time has passed since their last interaction with you.
7 - Cart Abandonment Automation
Main trigger: cart abandonment Action: Send emails Automation: If you are an e-commerce business, you will surely benefit from cart abandonment automation. The concept is simple: when someone adds an item to their shopping cart but leaves the site without finalizing the purchase.
You can trigger email automation that reminds them of the purchase they made. It motivates them to complete the transaction by offering them a special discount code or any other purchase incentive
8 - Automation of Complementary Products/services
Primary trigger: past purchases Actions: Sending emails and / or internal notification (s) Automation: Communication with your customers should not stop after their purchase. This is especially true if you are selling a variety of different products and/or services.
Use automation as an opportunity to move your existing customers up your value ladder, or sell them additional products and services based on what they have already purchased
9 - Customer Satisfaction Automation
Primary trigger: a high or low NPS score Actions: Sending emails (and/or text messages, webchat) Automation: If you are conducting NPS customer satisfaction surveys, you can use your customers' Net Promoter Score as a basis for triggering automation. Simply determine your ideal customer satisfaction score, and use that as the threshold for your growing list of satisfied customers.
Then trigger automation for customers with “satisfied” scores and reward them with exclusive content, offers or discounts
10 - Automation of Low Product Use
Main triggers: the use of a digital product Actions: Sending emails (and/or sending webchat) Automation: If you track digital product adoption with your customers or use of certain features, you can trigger automation for users who show low product usage, by providing them with resources that teach them how to use product features that they are not using.
There is a difference between marketing activities that can be automated and those that should be automated. There is no one-size-fits-all for choosing which tasks to automate. One business may require a more personalized approach to certain marketing activities, while another may automate the same process without risking their relationships or opportunities.
Also remember that you don't necessarily have to automate an entire channel or process, but the repetitive tasks that are part of it. In general, good candidates for automation are: Time-consuming tasks / Repetitive tasks
Tasks That Can Reasonably Be Triggered by Uniform Rules
Start by identifying the repetitive tasks and processes that take the most time, then determine which underlying activities are the best candidates to receive standardized, universal trigger rules that apply to them. If this list is too long, you should start with the activities that take the most time or those that may have the greatest financial impact.
The bottom line is, you're looking to improve your business performance - better-qualified leads, more conversions, cost per lead, response rate, and so on. As with any marketing initiative, when implementing marketing, you need to choose your goals, define key performance indicators (KPIs), then measure, refine, and repeat.
It is important to gain not only buy-in but also complicity, from the sales teams. Marketing automation can play a valuable role in enabling this subtle alignment between marketing and sales. So involve the sales team from the start and work together to establish a system for scoring potential customers and setting thresholds (like score who constitutes a qualified prospect for the sales team) can simplify the entire process from the outset.
Marketing Automation FAQ
What Is the Definition of Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is the set of processes, systems and tools that automate your web marketing and deliver a better customer experience.
What Are the Advantages of Marketing Automation?
The advantages of marketing automation are the continuous maturation of leads and prospects, the savings in resources and the wealth of data collected on your contacts.
What Are Some Examples of Marketing Automation?
7 examples of marketing automation that can help your business: Welcome message automation Lead maturation automation Sales representative notification automation Inactive contact automation Inactive contact automation shopping cart abandonment Complementary product/service automation Customer satisfaction automation
What Is a Good Marketing Automation Strategy?
There is no one-size-fits-all for choosing which tasks to automate. One business may require a more personalized approach to certain marketing activities, while another may automate the same process without risking their relationships or opportunities. Also remember that you don't necessarily have to automate an entire channel or process, but repetitive tasks that are part of it.
In general, good candidates for automation are: time-consuming tasks, repetitive tasks, and tasks that can reasonably be triggered by uniform rules. Start by identifying repetitive tasks and processes that take the most time.
Now you know how marketing automation can help you in your digital strategy. We would like to know what you think of these processes. Brand Marketing Solution can help marketers build successful marketing automation strategies.
Conclusion
Automation is the new buzzword in marketing and it is transforming the way marketers interact with leads and customers. If you are thinking of automating your marketing, then you are thinking well ahead. It is the next big thing in marketing and is slowly taking over manual marketing activities performed by the marketers. If you want to gain a competitive advantage in the market, then you need to automate your marketing and take your business to the next level.
Many businesses today are turning to marketing automation software in order to boost their lead generation and sales efforts. This software is designed to allow greater control over each and every lead, whether it’s from social media, SEO, email marketing or other sources. By analyzing, storing, segmenting and converting leads into sales opportunities, marketing automation software makes promoting products and services much easier and more effective than ever before.
In this post you have learnt how marketing automation works . Marketing automation is the next big thing. It is the set of tools and techniques that businesses use to streamline marketing activities. This is done by automating tasks and workflows, so that every team member can focus on the most important things.
It’s the age of marketing automation, and marketers are working tirelessly to keep up with the tech that drives it. We’re constantly adjusting our strategies to stay competitive in today’s market, but the automation revolution isn’t slowing down anytime soon. In fact, there will be a major shift in how we measure the success of our marketing automation in the coming year. There’s a lot of confusion around marketing automation and its true value to your business.
Marketing automation isn’t just about drip campaigns, it’s a strategy to improve the way you market your business. By transforming your approach to segmentation, content marketing and lead nurturing, marketing automation can help you overcome the challenges of the new digital landscape.