Marketing automation is the process that involves automating certain marketing actions and tasks with the help of software.
The primary aim of marketing automation is to boost marketing ROI and increase overall revenue. This can be easily achieved by creating a highly personalized customer experience that reduces friction and encourages purchase.
Keep reading this guide to understand how does marketing automation work, its strategies, and implementation, so that you can make your business even more profitable with it.
Why Automate Marketing?
Don’t you think that you need marketing automation? Check out these reasons and stats before taking a stand on it.
Personalizing Customer Experience: With marketing automation, you can build better, more personalized marketing experiences for your customers. According to Econsultancy, 93% of companies see an uplift in conversion rates from personalization.
Scaling Marketing Campaigns: Automation makes your marketing campaigns scalable beyond the limits of your team. By creating an extensive series of campaigns, you can increase revenue at every stage of the buying cycle.
No More Repetitive Tasks: With marketing automation, your team will not have to do repetitive marketing tasks. In fact, marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity. This will also help streamline the team so they can focus on high impact tasks.
Track Marketing Reports: With marketing automation, comes reporting capabilities. This makes your team more accountable since you can quickly see how your marketing activities help your sales funnel. Also, 88% of marketers said that automation reduces the time spent on preparing reports and analysis, which can be spent on formulating strategies.
Generating Demand: You can use marketing automation to generate demand, drive conversions, and increase revenue. With automation, you collect data that will help you predict what your customers do next and encourage them to spend more.
How to Create a Marketing Automation Strategy
56% of marketers blame the ‘lack of effective strategy’ as the most important barrier to marketing automation success. Here’s how to plan a marketing automation strategy:
Lead Generation Strategy
It is very important to expand your customer base and acquire new prospects. To get more leads into your automated journey, you can do the followings:
- Keep your lead generation forms simple
- Make a compelling offer
- Keep the text concise
- Track and connect CTA to a relevant page
- Capture the data you need
Lead Nurturing
You want your target audience to move through the customer journey. This lead nurturing can be used in a marketing automation strategy.
- Create and send personalized content
- Curate content according to the customer stage
- Go beyond email with multichannel marketing i.e. SMS marketing, missed call marketing, etc.
Customer Engagement
Improve engagement with customers and let them feel like they’re a part of your brand. You can do this by
- Integrating customer-centric functionality (like LiveChat) along with your lead management system CRM and be there for customers when they need you.
- Creating useful content that your customers can benefit from. Automate your email marketing campaigns with this content.
How to Automate Your Marketing?
Automating your marketing means being able to automate a particular action in response to a trigger. Simply put: If this happens, then do that. In terms of marketing, it could be:
- If a user subscribes to you, send a thank you email.
- If a user visits a product, add them to the ‘interested in the product’ list.
- If a user is on an ‘interested in product’ list, personalize the homepage with that product and so on.
You can capture all user data, map out entire user journeys and build a web of triggers and actions. The effectiveness expands further when you add filters that act as an extra layer on top of the “if this, then that” scenario.
For example, if a returning visitor comes to a website, the home page should display personalized content.
While building any campaign, a vast number of triggers and actions can be created. To control them and handle the data, marketing automation uses workflows.
With workflows, multiple actions can be bound together and even include “gated triggers”. These gated triggers are the triggers that can only be activated if all previous actions in the workflow have been completed.
Here is a complete guide on workflow automation for your small business.
This is how marketing automation works. As for ways to automate marketing, you can do so by automating email marketing campaigns, social media marketing, and artificial intelligence.
How to Automate Email Marketing?
The beauty of email marketing is that it is pretty easy to automate.
First and foremost, you need a compelling offer ( whitepaper, ebook, etc) on the website that will entice users to give you their email address.
Add them to the list and start sending them a steady cadence of emails that will help move them through the buying journey toward conversion.
Always make sure to check where your leads are in the decision-making process and then match the messages you communicate with them.
For example, for the awareness stage, send them options to help them solve a problem. Likewise, for the consideration stage, educate them on why your product is the best solution.
How to Automate Social Media Marketing?
Social media websites are tempting and you can probably waste hours before realizing it.
Automating social media marketing helps keeps you focused on the task at hand. With social media dashboards like Hootsuite, you can schedule your shares in advance.
The important part here is to look at the analytics ( which social shares are getting more likes, shares, and clicks). Use this data to shape your future campaigns.
Artificial Intelligence
This is marketing automation in terms of chatbots. With AI, shoppers can ask the chatbot questions to find out whether a certain color or size of a product is in stock.
They could also ask to be notified when a product is available or to get suggestions based on past purchases.
How to Implement Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a new way of marketing, a new mindset, and it requires a fresh look at your operation before you begin.
When considering implementing anything as disruptive as marketing automation, you should take a good look at your current operation to draft a solid plan.
To implement marketing automation smoothly, begin with answering these questions.
Step 1: What Are Your Goals?
As any good marketer knows, you always have to start with a goal. Getting into marketing automation is no different.
Start by getting a grip on your current marketing situation. Start at a very high level.
What are your goals for marketing?
Do you want to generate more leads?
Do you use email or SMS marketing?
Do you leverage SEO?
From there, get more granular around techniques and mediums. Outlining your goals will help you to see what your real needs are so that you can pick tools that help you accomplish those goals.
Step 2: What Are Your Current Processes?
Analyze why you do the things you currently do. You likely have many processes that can be eliminated with new technology.
This will help you identify your real needs and enable you to correctly leverage marketing automation.
Step 3: What Are Your Ideas?
What are your plans for the future?
What type of goals are you trying to accomplish?
How do you want to accomplish them?
What are the crazy ideas you want to try?
How do you plan on marketing in the future?
Write all of these items down and refer to them while you are assessing the features of different marketing automation tools.
Step 4: Forget Everything
Now, this may sound odd but follow along.
With traditional marketing, you probably had leads and you had sales-ready leads.
In this way, you used ROI to track when leads became sales-ready and used ROI to identify those campaigns.
With marketing automation, you get behavioral-based tracking and lead scoring will enable you to see exactly how close leads are to being sales-ready. This makes marketing more targeted.
You can have campaigns designed to take someone from ‘lead’ to ‘lead stage 1’ and so on. The immediate goal of a campaign isn’t to end in purchase but to nurture someone to a new stage.
This is why the ROI for the campaign is a failed metric, but this doesn’t mean the campaign didn’t create value.
When implementing marketing automation, you need to have a solid idea of how to nurture leads and also how to report on those campaigns.
How to Use Marketing Automation?
Now that you know how you can implement marketing automation, here are three ways your business can leverage marketing automation:
1. The “Get To Know Me” Campaign
When someone opt-ins on your website, they should begin with your “Get To Know Me” Campaign.
- Ask your leads to whitelist your email. This will help make sure your emails get through to your new subscribers.
- Set their expectations by letting them know what they can expect from you.
- Let them know what you stand for and stand against.
- Share some of your top content.
- Let them know how you can help. After you’ve delivered value and set the tone for the relationship let these new leads know how they can get more through buying your products and services.
2. The “Engagement” Campaign
To improve engagement, you must deliver relevant content. That’s why the subscribers gave you their email address in the first place. So this email marketing campaign should:
- Deliver the content they requested
- Deliver content to educate and nurture leads
- Ultimately, engage these new prospects, and get them to buy
3. The “Onboarding” Campaign
What happens when someone buys from you?
The relationship is actually in the fledgling phase. So, your onboarding campaign should contain the following:
- Whether it’s a service or product, make sure to point out how your new customer can get more value of the product/service purchased.
- Ask for a referral. The best time to get a customer to give you a referral is right after they buy.
How to Choose a Marketing Automation Platform?
Consider these major things when evaluating and choosing a Marketing Automation Platform.
Business Objectives: What are your main goals? Do you want to send out more email marketing campaigns effectively? Whatever it is, make sure that you clarify with your team what you are looking for not just for today, but in the next 24 months.
Affordability: Evaluate start-up costs such as deployment, implementation, training, integration and system migration. There can also be ongoing costs for customer support, training, and additional modules.
Usability: How easy is it to implement and use the product? Marketers are constantly on the move and seriously multi-tasking. So, you need a marketing automation system that can support the way you work.
Results: A marketing automation system should help you get a better lead to customer conversion rate, higher transaction price, shorter sales cycle, and an increased opportunity to close rate.
Choose Teleduce for Marketing Automation
Ready to implement marketing automation?
Use Teleduce as your marketing automation platform. This cloud-based platform comes with powerful features that help you to scale your business.
With its intuitive user interface, you can easily create workflows and triggers and begin automating various campaigns like email, SMS, missed call marketing, etc.
A robust, highly customizable integrated sales and marketing platform that’s second to none in performance.
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