Customers are flooded with targeted ads wherever they go. They appear when you scroll through Instagram or watch YouTube videos.
And this constant bombardment leads them to block-out all ads they don’t want to see. That leaves today’s marketers with a problem. How to make an advertising campaign stand out in a world where no one wants to see ads?
Marketing departments are increasingly under pressure to come up with innovative concepts. They need to be better and more successful than their competitors.
Yet, coming up with new ideas every day and managing day-to-day marketing operations isn’t a piece of cake. Most marketing departments don’t understand how to juggle both these key responsibilities simultaneously.
But marketing automation might be the answer they’re looking for.
Already know you need marketing automation? At Iterators, we can design, build, and maintain custom software solutions for both startups and enterprise businesses.
Schedule a free consultation with Iterators today. We’d be happy to help you find the right software solution to help your company.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a form of software that automates marketing processes conducted repeatedly.
It uses technology to make time-consuming tasks more efficient. It’ll allow you to provide a more targeted and customized experience to your customers.
Marketing automation software also allows you to create marketing reports to track performance. It helps optimize your strategy over time. It can help you generate new leads, establish, and cultivate customer trust. Marketing automation allows your business to scale to higher heights.
But all that aside, how can marketing automation help your business?
How Automation Can Help Your Business
Generating leads and keeping customers engaged are top priority for companies. They do that throughout tracking customers buying decisions. But these goals also pose the biggest challenge to a company’s growth.
This brings on an onslaught of data (also known as “big data“) that must be sorted before being used by an enterprise.
Marketing automation software can assist businesses overcome these challenges by turning data into meaningful information.
Making Smart Use of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is often regarded as a technique for acquiring leads through scheduled email messages. It can be implemented through email marketing.
Companies need to adequately connect current and potential customers to the company as they move from advertising to sales to customer service. Otherwise, companies run the risk of having a disconnected experience with the company.
This can happen when you don’t adjust to specific customer needs.
Potential customers shouldn’t feel bogged down by too many touchpoints and irrelevant communication.
In contrast, when carefully and smartly integrated, automated marketing strategies can be used throughout the customer lifecycle. It can provide an encouraging foundation to build strong, long-term customer relationships.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation saves marketers time and money while launching more campaigns more efficiently. Founders of young start-ups often wonder if their company is ready for automation. That’s why we decided to put their minds at ease.
Let’s look at how marketers can get the most out of a robust, effective marketing automated process.
1. Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns Increased
With automation, you can save money and allow your team to focus on more critical, strategic issues.
Marketing automation software also streamlines the process of manually posting to social media. Your staff will be able to focus on more creative tasks. Such as planning and generating ideas for new campaigns and initiatives.
Using an automated platform will help your team reach their marketing goals faster. They can use the same automation software to post on social media, create a robust email campaign, publish blogs, and build a landing page.
By automating unnecessary tasks of the day, your marketing team can free up time to focus on ideas and strategy instead.
2. Bringing Marketing and Sales on the Same Page
It may seem like most companies’ marketing and sales teams coordinate well together. But that’s not the case. You can align your sales and marketing efforts with the help of automation. Finally bringing them on the same page.
Don’t believe us? Statistics tell us that marketing automation can boost sales productivity by 14.5 percent while lowering marketing costs by 12.2 percent.
3. Conversion Rate of Marketing Campaigns Boosted
When it comes to increasing conversion rates, marketing automation software can help your team work more efficiently. It can assist you in increasing your conversion rate and better managing your leads.
Marketing automation software will track your leads, help you retarget non-converting website visitors, and increase your conversion rate.
4. Rolling Out Targeted Advertising Communication
Data obtained through marketing automation can be used to ideate and implement strategies. This can help the company create more personalized experiences for their customers.
Using automation can help you figure out your customer persona. Therefore better focus your marketing communication. You can also reach your customers through social media, search engine marketing or email campaigns.
Marketing automation turns site visitors into potential customers. And once you know who they are, you can categorize them based on their behavior or attributes.
5. Generating Leads (Upon Leads Upon Leads)
Marketing automation software can also help set up lead scoring. This can alert salespeople when a lead is warm and how to proceed accordingly.
This can also lead to greater coordination between your marketing and sales teams.
The software also automates the process, making it easy and convenient to navigate in real time. With everything automated, no time is lost. Your sales team can contact prospective clients or customers right away.
Marketing Automation vs. CRM
It’s easy to mix up CRM software and marketing automation software at first. But their functions are fundamentally different. That’s why it’s important to understand what each type of software does and how combining these technologies can help your business grow.
What Are Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs)? How Do They Work?
CRM manages contacts and sales, as well as client relationships for companies. It can also help stay connected to the customer throughout the sales funnel. From sales and marketing through customer service interactions.
This software also tracks information. For example, how long a customer has been your client, their purchase history, and other notes from their interactions. This can help improve customer interactions, and boost customer satisfaction.
A CRM tracks the actions of current and prospective consumers through your company’s social media accounts, email, or website. It collects information and follows each contact. It sends a prompted email when relevant or letting the sales team know of a lead that can be pursued.
What Is Marketing Automation? How Does It Work?
Marketing automation, as the name implies, automates important marketing activities. The software’s goal is to free up resources in your company. Saving you time and expense while allowing you to experiment with better targeting tactics.
The four key components of marketing automation software are:
A Central Database for Marketing
All data about potential leads, client relations, and user behavior is saved and evaluated in the central database.
A Marketing Engine for Engagement
Your marketing processes are formulated, managed, and automated in the marketing engagement engine.
An Engine for Data Analysis
Data analysis allows you to test, measure, and optimize your marketing ROI. It also has revenue effects and identifies opportunities for improvement.
A Marketing Technology Stack
The marketing technology stack (also known as the martech stack) is a collection of all additional apps. The martech stack can be utilized to achieve your advertising objectives, such as SaaS platforms, social media tools, and content management systems.
The Difference Between CRM and Marketing Automation
Marketing automation oversees digital and email campaigns, lead gathering, scoring, and landing sites.
On the other hand, CRM is in charge of the sales funnel process. Which includes individual emails, lead tracking, task management, opportunity monitoring, and pipeline reporting.
Let’s look at the differences between these tools:
Target Audience
A CRM platform is geared toward salespeople. A marketing automation system, on the other hand, assists businesses in focusing on marketing their product/service to customers.
Goal
Using established conditions and triggers, a marketing automation tool can help you automate campaigns. It’s typically utilized for short-term purchases.
On the other hand, it assists you in managing sales processes, assigning responsibilities to sales representatives, and maintaining a well-organized database.
Objective
You can better manage customer connections, sales rep effectiveness, and efficiency with a CRM solution.
On the other hand, marketing automation can help you keep track of overall ROIs, generate leads, and boost sales of the company.
Is It Necessary for Your Company to Have Separate CRM and Marketing Automation Software?
Short answer: it depends. Depending on where your customers are in the buying process. You may require distinct CRM and marketing automation tools.
Most marketing automation tools let you link your data to your CRM, letting you see all of a customer’s interactions in one spot.
You can sync data in either direction so that your marketing team is aware of what’s going on in sales. Your support and sales teams are aware of the marketing history of each prospective and current customer.
Several CRM software companies have developed or bought marketing automation software. That means you don’t have to purchase two different software products. Therefore, there are a few CRM systems that can integrate both functionalities into one.
Examples of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is intended to make your entire digital marketing team’s email campaigns much more efficient.
These programmed emails are extremely effective, achieving 86 percent higher open rates, 196 percent higher click-through rates, and 320 percent more income than ordinary promotions. Marketers can’t ignore the value of marketing automation when statistics like these are available.
Here are some great examples of how marketing can be automated:
1. Series of Welcome Emails
Your company’s welcome email is your first opportunity to create a positive impression on your readers or subscribers.
With marketing automation, you can provide your subscribers with a wonderful one-time welcome email that is both engaging and detailed.
You can also send them a sequence of succession of emails that can help bring them on board.
A good example is Broadway.com (experience it for yourself), which sells tickets to Broadway musicals online. They’ve a subscribe form at the bottom of their website that can be filled out. After the form is filled out, customers receive a welcome email with substantial discounts to encourage them to make their first purchase.
Broadway.com maximizes clicks and transactions by delivering the email shortly after someone signs up. This allows the subscriber to take advantage of discounts while their interaction with the business is still fresh in their minds.
2. Rewarding Loyal Customers
You should go above and beyond for your most loyal customers. Loyal customers can help increase your brand’s reach and increase your customer retention rate through word-to-mouth assurances and reviews.
Creating a marketing automation pipeline can help reward repeat customers. These are customers who have purchased a certain number of times in a particular period or for more than a certain amount of money in that timeframe.
Give them first access to sales or a 20 percent discount on the category where they generally buy their products. When you launch a new product on the website, you may guarantee that VIP clients will receive a certain percentage discount if they want to try it out.
The following are some examples of scenarios that could lead to VIP status:
- Paying a certain amount of money
- Clicking and opening a marketing email
- Making a certain number of purchases on the eCommerce store or via the newsletter
Plenty of companies boiled down great loyalty email marketing campaigns to a science!
3. Customer Retention Campaign Based on Repeat Purchases
How can you get additional value from an existing customer? According to a recent survey by Adobe, existing customers are responsible for 40 percent of an eCommerce store’s earnings.
They’re more likely to convert than new customers as they’re already familiar with your brand and goods.
However, you can develop customized ads with an incentive-based on particular triggers generated from user behavior. This will increase the perceived value of the offering. It’ll motivate your customers to make repeat purchases.
4. Behavioral Marketing Campaign
A marketing automation platform will gather a large amount of data about users and their usage patterns across multiple channels.
You can put together your customer’s buying habits based on demographic characteristics and internet browsing activities. This is very beneficial for segmenting your consumers and sending relevant, personalized messaging to them.
5. Campaign to Promote Cross-Selling
Cross-selling is the practice of selling related and complementary things alongside a product. Amazon, the eCommerce giant, has had great success with this strategy, with cross-selling accounting for about 35 percent of its sales.
By utilizing cross-selling, you can send personalized messages to your consumers after each transaction. This will encourage them to return. This is simple to accomplish using a marketing automation platform and data from a customer’s purchasing history.
Marketing Automation Tools in 2022
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is perhaps the most user-friendly and customizable optin-campaign software available. It gives you the ability to test and adjust your marketing strategy in real-time.
It converts visitors about to leave your website without making a purchase into subscribers and buyers using Exit-Intent® technology.
What’s the Purpose of OptinMonster?
OptinMonster makes sure that visitors don’t abandon your site without taking some action, even if you already have substantial traffic. It’s also the best tool for turning visitors who have abandoned your site into subscribers and customers.
2. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is an automation and email marketing solution with a lot of capability. It automates all email marketing so you can focus on your company’s growth.
What’s the Purpose of Constant Contact?
Constant Contact allows you to create appealing, high-converting email marketing campaigns for your subscribers. It also assists you in expanding your email list. You can send emails quickly by using Constant Constant’s pre-made email templates and customizing them.
You can use Constant Contact to send emails in response to user behavior and actions on your website. You can also segment your audience so that you can send the correct message to the right person at the right time.
The software also keeps track of non-responsive users and instantly resends emails to them.
3. Sendinblue
Sendinblue offers several digital marketing tools to assist you in automating your marketing campaigns. It comes with a comprehensive toolkit that enables you to easily connect with your audience, generate leads, and manage marketing campaigns.
What’s the Purpose of Sendinblue?
Sendinblue offers a diverse range of solutions for communicating with your consumers. Email, SMS, layouts for landing pages, ads, and other services are all included. Everything is automated, allowing you to focus on building your business.
It sends out customized messaging to your target audience automatically. You may also broadcast transactional emails to your subscribers’ mailboxes in less than a minute.
4. Drip
Drip is a professional customer relationship management (CRM) software and an online marketplace. It collects client data and allows you to create powerful automated marketing campaigns for each customer journey stage.
What’s the Purpose of Drip?
By using Drip, you can track each of your subscribers’ activity on your website and tailor your email marketing to their preferences. Drip also integrates with other eCommerce marketing solutions, allowing you to learn even more about your customers.
5. HubSpot
HubSpot is a marketing, sales, and service platform that helps you automate your business’s strategy. It offers a ton of resources that can assist you in mastering marketing automation with the help of experts. The platform also offers certifications and training.
Other Notable Mentions
- Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) software that assists with marketing automation.
- Pardot is a marketing automation company that focuses on B2B clients.
- Marketo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that lets businesses automate their advertising and engagement operations.
- ActiveCampaign – It’s a marketing automation platform for all types of enterprises. ActiveCampaign also aids in the development of meaningful relationships on social media, email, marketing, and chat clients.
- Keap (previously known as InfusionSoft) is a marketing automation solution that provides smaller companies with an email marketing and sales platform.
- Mailchimp – It’s a marketing automation platform that is most known for its email marketing capabilities.
Conclusion
Marketing executives still make high-level decisions about the marketing mix and resource allocation themselves.
But it’s increasingly evident that using automated software makes the decision-making process more efficient and accurate. It allows businesses to target other avenues of concern, such as customer service.
In fact, it seems as though software, analytics, and data sciences models will be performing human intensive work as soon as 2025. Some of the tasks that will be automated will be creating brand personas and selecting marketing agencies.
This begs the question: are marketers going out of fashion? Of course, not — but redundant marketing activities are. Marketers who still rely on manual campaigns can no longer contribute to business success in the same way that big data analysis-based software can.
Marketing automation, without a doubt, can lead to better and more dependable judgments.
Automation can help figure out how to use limited marketing resources to create brand equity and boost financial results. It could also lead to some fascinating jobs for those marketers who can accept innovation and its changes.