Marketing automation is a process that allows software to automate often repetitive marketing tasks. Many marketers automate activities including social media posting, and scheduled email send-outs.
Marketing departments of companies use this process to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities to increase revenue and also maximize efficiency.
Why Is Marketing Automation Important?
Marketing automation helps your business work at its most efficient and productive levels. Your team will have more time to dedicate to more pressing tasks if other simpler more time-consuming tasks can be automated.
5 Benefits Of Leveraging Marketing Automation
There are a few key advantages of using marketing automation in your business.
1. Target a Specific Target Audience
Automating marketing tasks enables you to target specific demographics of people. You could target people based on their location, preferences, age-range, and purchase history. This means you reach the right people at the optimum time.
2. Build Your Brand and Improve Your Conversion Rate
Allowing software to take care of time-consuming repetitive tasks means more time for building your branding strategy and improving your business’s overall conversion rate.
3. Boost Your Customer Loyalty
Automating marketing tasks helps you understand your customers. More customer interactions mean you’ll have a better knowledge of what your target consumers want. Advanced tracking provides you with more details on which strategies are most effective.
4. Save Time and Resources
Marketing automation helps you save time and make your marketing budget stretch further. If your team isn’t consistently caught up doing the same tedious activities they’ll have more scope for developing strategies and other creative tasks.
Saving time ultimately provides a boost to your bottom line.
5. Improve Your Marketing ROI
By linking your marketing automation to a tracking service, you’ll be able to accurately view your marketing ROI without having to guess.
Essential Marketing Automation Tools
Effective marketing automation is dependent on choosing the right tools for your business and its marketing goals.
Users can set up email drip campaigns and choose triggers, conditions, and actions that ensure each message is sent to the right lead at the pre-selected time.
There’s a visual editor that lets you build workflows to personalise your email efforts, and you can create simple follow-up prompts or complex customer journeys.
Users can also use workflows to manage leads, set off team notifications, and add tasks to the main HubSpot CRM.
Drip’s email and SMS automation tool makes it easy to create email campaigns, select which messages are sent to prospects based on their actions, and collect valuable analytics about your marketing initiatives.
E-commerce stores can use Drip to reactivate abandoned purchases with email reminders, and shoppers may be sent discount codes and product recommendations.
You can use A/B testing to learn what works and which marketing campaigns need to be improved, and there’s a workflow builder that lets you create drip sequences like a welcome series or win-back campaigns.
Omnisend is an email and SMS marketing automation software that drives sales across multiple channels from one dashboard.
There’s a library of pre-built drip campaigns with subject lines, messages, and settings for a variety of e-commerce use-cases; all you have to do is tweak them to suit your needs.
Users can leverage web push notifications in addition to email and SMS, and workflows can be optimised using a drag and drop editor.
Omnisend also provides advanced reporting, with built-in message reports to track engagement data without leaving the editor.
Leadfeeder is a visitor tracking tool that shows who visited your website, how they found you, and what search terms led them to your site.
The software can be used to automate customer journeys and find perfect-fit prospects.
After collecting information about the companies that visited your site, there’s a Custom Feeds feature on Leadfeeder that automatically narrows down the list and picks out visitors that best fit your ideal customer profile.
These leads are then sent to your team for nurturing and micro-targeting.
Constant Contact has an email marketing automation feature for small businesses and nonprofits. Users can create email sequences to welcome new prospects, nurture leads, engage an audience, and expand their organisation’s reach.
You can also set up automated messages that are sent to contacts on birthdays and special anniversaries, enriching their brand experience with personalised communications.
There’s A/B testing to optimise subject lines and email content, smart segments to target the right customers, and intelligent reporting to improve your marketing initiatives.
Other tools include: Automizy, Mailchimp, Later, AdRoll, Pardot, etc.
How Do You Leverage Marketing Automation?
Follow a few simple steps to effectively apply marketing automation to your business.
1. Work Out Your Marketing Goals
Gather all the available data you have on your current marketing strategies and think about what you want to achieve with marketing automation. Do you want more targeted leads? Do you want more newsletter subscribers?
You can use the original data to measure the success of your automated marketing campaigns.
2. Make Your Audience Segments Specific
Marketing automation is most powerful when it’s highly targeted. Segmenting your audience is key to reaching the right people with the right campaigns.
Spend time thinking about whether you want to segment based on categories like location, interests, or age ranges. This is particularly relevant if your business has different services that may appeal to different segments.
3. Test Your Strategy
Consistently monitor your campaigns with A/B testing so they’re at their most efficient. Test different posting times, language style and messaging.
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