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Marketing automation leverages software to handle customer communications and internal business tasks that typically require manual effort. For small businesses, this means you can bring your marketing strategy to life without draining your resources or mental energy.
This technology shines when you already have an audience and a plan to nurture them. Marketing automation tools also help attract new customers and generate leads. This blog post will discuss seven benefits of automating your marketing efforts.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is like having a “full house” for your marketing game. Commonly, it’s a type of marketing automation software that lets companies focus on targeting customers with automated messages through various channels like email, websites, and social media. Roughly speaking, this tech is a slice of the bigger CRM “pie” and usually helps marketing teams ditch the mundane, repetitive tasks, boosting their overall digital marketing mojo.
Brands often juggle multiple marketing automation tools, creating what’s known as a martech stack. These platforms are the MVPs in lead generation, whether it’s through email blasts, chatbots on social media or websites, or good old-fashioned SMS.
With marketing automation tools, your campaigns get a turbo boost and attract inbound traffic. This approach, sometimes dubbed inbound marketing by vendors, is all about hunting for prospects from the top to the middle of the sales funnel.
In practice, they do this with personalized pitches, fine-tuned by analytics tools that slice and dice customers into different segments for a tailor-made touch.
Furthermore, these tools let you fine-tune your customers’ experience, tailoring it to their actions, likes, shopping habits, and more. Plus, profound audience segmentation and this personal touch turn your customers into raving fans. No wonder marketers are seeing a 451% bump in qualified leads with digital marketing automation in their corner.
What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
#1 It Helps You Personalize Your Marketing Strategy
All customers crave consistency and love a touch of personalized service. People usually feel it when a company delivers quality service and genuinely tries to solve their problems. Likewise, people feel it when it’s all about making money and selling more. Thus, when they get that personal touch, they’re much more likely to come back and refer others.
So, what role does marketing automation play here? It provides you with a universal toolkit so that you’ll never forget to send greetings and offers on clients’ birthdays, anniversaries, or any other VIP perks. After all, personal connections matter, especially if you want to stay on top of your marketing game.
For instance, as a business owner, you can offer your primary clients access to the presale (way earlier than it is announced on the website) and exclusive events. You’ll definitely make them feel unique and willing to return there.
This kind of personalization isn’t just a nice touch; it’s a gold mine. According to a 2022 report, 80% of customers are more likely to splash out on brands that serve up customized, relevant experiences.
And what’s next? Repeat customers build friendly relationships with the company: they are eager to tell more about themselves and give more information about their preferences. Thus, you can piece together a picture of your buyer persona. It involves things like:
- Age,
- Gender,
- Occupation,
- Income,
- Frequency of purchasing,
- Average check.
Do you have to remember it all? Of course not. Automated data analysis carries on precise customer segmentation so that you can tailor marketing strategies according to your customers’ needs and wants. Additionally, automated marketing processes help you upsell: you can set up a regular email newsletter suggesting things your customers may like.
Let’s put it in a rough but simple formula: satisfied customers = repeat purchases = more revenue = business growth.
#2 It Gives You Better Audience Insights
This section echoes ideas from the above-mentioned one. However, here, we want to highlight the importance of using marketing automation tools for customer behavioral analytics. Simply put, every business operating in the digital space needs to know how online users interact with its website and whether their customer journey is smooth and intuitive.
Therefore, automation tools are good at collecting user data related to various actions people perform:
- Creating an account,
- Filling out a form,
- Submitting a form,
- Adding an item to a shopping cart,
- Abandoning a shopping cart,
- Signing up for a newsletter,
- Purchasing an item or subscription.
Different digital intelligence solutions track the data and analyze it so that you can spot the weak points and fine-tune your approach. For instance, if a customer abandons their shopping cart, you can pinpoint exactly why they left it.
These deep-dive insights can help you refine the customer journey and work on conversion optimization.
Behavior Analytics Tools
Here are a few examples of behavior analytics tools to use for scaling your business:
- Google Analytics. Overview: Just a basis. This service provides detailed statistics and insights into website traffic and user behavior.
Key Features: Tracks visitor demographics, behavior flow, conversion rates, and goal completions. In addition, it offers powerful segmentation and custom reporting options.
- Crazy Egg. Overview: A smart tool that focuses on visual analytics to improve website usability and conversion rates.
Key Features: It offers heatmaps, scrollmaps, and overlay reports to visualize user interactions. Plus, A/B testing capabilities help in optimizing page layouts and design elements.
- Adobe Analytics. Overview: Part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, it provides comprehensive data and analytics for digital marketing purposes.
Key Features: It does the same things as others for tracking. Plus, it integrates with other Adobe tools for holistic marketing automation.
- HotJar. Overview: This tool stands out because it combines behavior analytics with feedback tools to understand how users interact with websites.
Key Features: Provides heatmaps, session recordings, and conversion funnel analysis. Furthermore, it enables surveys and feedback polls to capture user sentiment and preferences.
- MixPanel. Overview: The same as others but focusing more on user interactions with web and mobile applications.
Key Features: Apart from the same as in the above-mentioned tools, it offers advanced querying capabilities and A/B testing for optimizing user engagement.
Obviously, tracking customer behavior can’t be performed manually. Therefore, integrating behavior analytics into a comprehensive digital marketing automation platform lets you fully grasp your customers’ actions, challenges, and choices throughout their entire online journey. Then, you will make strategic adjustments and enhancements that elevate the user experience and scale business.
#3 It Helps You Nurture, Segment, and Qualify Leads
Most of the customer journey happens after someone shows interest and becomes a lead. However, surprisingly, many businesses are caught flat-footed when it comes to nurturing, segmenting, or qualifying these leads.
Enter marketing automation. With it, you can effortlessly send out email campaigns or text messages and use other marketing channels designed to turn every online user into your lead. Furthermore, you’ll tailor your lead nurturing efforts to what they’re interested in, their customer lifecycle stage, or any other tidbit you know about them.
Lead generation software can help you guide users smoothly through their buying journey, taking them from a casual browser to someone itching to make a purchase. What is more powerful you can do here is to break down your leads into targeted groups for different stages of lead management.
Imagine you’re running a spa center and have a form on your website asking visitors what services tickle their fancy. You can automate list creation based on their answers, so you know exactly who’s keen on facials, massages, or manicures. That’s how customer segmentation works.
Lastly, you can automatically update a contact’s lifecycle stage based on their actions or any info you gather about them. This lets your marketing and sales teams focus on the hot leads, prioritizing outreach to those who are primed and ready to buy.
Numbers don’t lie: 80% of marketers see a spike in leads thanks to automation, and 77% of companies report a bump in conversions, boosting conversion rates by 15-20%. You’re missing out big time if you’re not using lead nurturing software and other automation tools.
#4 It Saves Your Time
Using marketing automation software, businesses can “employ robots” to complete their regular marketing tasks without getting tired. Well, when digital marketing intelligence tools carry on various processes simultaneously, marketers and other employees free their hands to concentrate on other business growth strategies.
What does marketing automation software do to save you time?
- It creates multiple email marketing campaigns to send scheduled and customized emails to segmented groups of customers.
- It sets up auto-responders for daily follow-ups.
- It automates messages for various social media channels.
- It schedules meetings with sales prospects.
- It nurtures leads and boosts customer retention.
- It delivers detailed reports on your marketing performance.
Moreover, when companies employ business process automation tools, they guarantee that leads are nurtured properly, sales prospects are followed up on, and service tickets are handled promptly. Does it speak about efficiency? We think so.
#5 It Helps You Personalize The Customer Journey
Giving your customers an experience tailor-made for their desires should be your top priority. If you know all the “hows” and “whys,” you can deliver engaging content that feels like it was custom-crafted just for potential clients.
To illustrate, you can have emails filled with products your user has viewed recently or services they’ve shown interest in. Additionally, you can ping them with more info on topics they’ve explored on your site.
What is more powerful in personalizing this experience is that you can design emails with their name and other personal (“you might like this…”) details to make people feel like they are having a one-on-one chat.
It’s hardly possible to conduct it manually. It’ll take a whale of time. However, it becomes a routine task with smart marketing automation software. Imagine that your virtual assistants send personal emails or make direct calls to every single contact while you’re working out a new lead nurturing strategy.
To conclude, personalizing the customer journey with automation tools makes each interaction feel warm and personal without breaking a sweat.
#6 It Gives You Accurate Reporting
Reporting your analytics can feel like climbing a mountain with so many little steps to take. However, with a marketing automation platform, it turns into a walk in the park. Your software can easily measure marketing performance and churn out automated reports. No more headaches over complex graphics and lists of different numbers you can’t piece together.
Plus, marketing automation software gives you a bird’s-eye view of your entire process. This makes it easy to spot any bumps or snags along the way. Indeed, with smooth and precise reporting, you can pinpoint where things are going off track. For instance, it’ll show you whether your leads are slipping through the cracks during your email nurturing campaigns or dropping off during the sales pitch.
Wondering if marketing automation for small businesses brings the same results? Certainly yes. Utilizing automation tools is even more important for small businesses as it helps them scale up and gain a profound customer base.
#7 It Helps You Make Data-Driven Decisions
As we’ve already mentioned, marketing automation tools come loaded with powerful analytics and reporting features, which makes them a real gem for B2B companies. This means they can closely monitor their marketing campaigns and see exactly how well they’re performing.
Leveraging marketing automation allows B2B companies to generate more leads, nurture them more effectively, and operate with greater efficiency. Furthermore, with automation tools, these companies can expand their reach, strengthen their customer relationships, and ultimately scale up their business.
Which Tools Are Used For Marketing Automation?
When picking your automation tools, keep your business goals front and center. Let’s take a look at possible ways to automate common business processes:
1. Email marketing automation: Automate single emails, like a welcome or abandoned cart message, to take the repetitive grunt work off your hands. Once customers meet the criteria to enter your automation, they’ll automatically get all the emails in the lineup.
2. Customer journey: This tool is like your brand’s GPS. It lets you visually plot out how you want customers to interact with your brand over time. You can set up emails to send when customers hit specific points in their journey or remove them from a segment group if they’ve moved past it.
3. Scheduling: No need to be always present. Whether it’s emails, social media posts, or even postcards, you can plan ahead and set the date and time for your content to go live. This way, you can stay ahead of the game and keep your marketing strategy running smoothly even when you have gone on vacation. Sounds very convenient.
4. Retargeting: Think of retargeting as a friendly tap on the shoulder. Remember, not everyone buys on their first visit—they might get sidetracked or just not be ready. Retargeting keeps your products in their thoughts until they realize they can’t live without them.
5. Optimization and recommendations: With tools like product recommendations, dynamic content, send time optimization, and A/B testing, you’ve got the full kit to make each interaction count.
Wrapping It Up
Marketing automation is like having a magic wand for your marketing tactics. It automates a lot of the heavy lifting, making everything run smoother, saving you precious time and money, and paving the way for business growth and increased revenue.
By embracing marketing automation software and sticking to these strategies, businesses can build stronger customer relationships and nail their marketing objectives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. Who Uses Marketing Automation?
Lots of professionals use marketing automation, like marketing and sales teams, and companies looking to make their marketing game slicker. It’s used everywhere to boost efficiency, nurture leads, and keep customers happy. For e-commerce businesses, marketing automation software is a gem.
Q2. Which CRM Do I Need for Automating Marketing Processes?
Marketing automation often hooks up with CRM systems. The kind of CRM varies, but one that fits the bill and plays nicely with marketing automation tools is usually the top pick. The one that you have been using before should integrate well with new tools. If not, choose a CRM with a good reputation.
Q3. What Are the Drawbacks of Using Marketing Automation Software?
However, one big hitch with marketing automation is it can strip away that personal touch. Automated campaigns stick to set rules and algorithms, which might not always get what makes each customer tick.
This could mean messages end up feeling bland and not hitting home with the right leads. Plus, setting up and running marketing automation is a real-time and money challenge. You’ve got to plan out workflows, create content, and keep tabs on how well your campaigns are doing.
