Marketing & Advertising, Marketing Strategy
How Marketing Automation Helps Marketers: Examples & Tools
Apr
From chatbots and stock emails that say ‘Thank you for your purchase!’ to in-depth market research and marketing campaign development, marketing automation is having its heyday.
By the looks of things, this is a trend that’s only going to get more and more popular in the future.
What better way to introduce a new marketing strategy than to let a smart computer run a bunch of info through its robotic brain and figure out the optimal approach that can save you money and get you the best results?
In this article, we’re going to talk about marketing automation and how it can be massively helpful for furthering your cause as a marketer.
When used in accordance with your own ideas and your vision for the future of your business, marketing automation can help you reach new heights.
Read on to learn more.
What is Marketing Automation?
Simply put, marketing automation represents a bundle of software tools that can help marketers automate a large chunk of some of the menial and repetitive tasks of running a website, or some other type of online business.
It’s a major emerging global marketing trend that has taken the world of e-commerce by storm.
Let’s say you’ve made a sale and you wish to keep that client.
Now, if your business is doing well, you may have thousands of clients, so sending every single one a digital ‘Thank you!’ after every sale would be a time-consuming, if not impossible, task.
This is one of the areas of running an online business where marketing automation comes in.
If you’ve set up a checkout system on your website that has incorporated some sort of marketing automation tool, you can rest assured there will be an automated message for every customer when a sale’s been made.
One of the other major areas where you can use marketing automation would be troubleshooting.
Rather than engaging with every single customer that has a problem with your product or service, you can set up a chatbot that will tackle some of the easier, more common problems.
This can free up a lot of your valuable time to do something else that’s more creative and worthwhile. At the same time, it means having to hire fewer customer support representatives, which means working in smaller, more dynamic teams.
What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation helps you run an online store in several major areas.
Customer relationships, data analytics, and as well as marketing campaigns are some of the areas where you can get some fantastic results if you decide to take the road to involve marketing automation in your online business.
You can use marketing automation to schedule social media posts in advance, make automatic responses for your troubleshooting page, or make highly-personalized, impactful messages that will help you catch new prospects hook, line, and sinker.
In the passages below, we’ll showcase the most important benefits of using marketing automation as an integral part of your business. (To see the benefits of marketing automation for your business, it is necessary to use it continuously for an extended period.)
Here’s the deal.
Understand Customers Better
If you’ve ever managed to sell something, you know that it takes some dedication and hard work to go from having a product in your hands and no one around first off and then the joy of dealing with a satisfied, paying customer later on.
As your business grows, scaling your unique and personalized relationship with every customer will pretty soon become impossible to keep up – simply because of the number of individuals.
This is where marketing automation can be a lifesaver.
A smart marketing automation system can make personalized messages for each and every customer you have. This way, you won’t have to worry as much about reaching out and checking up on every person you’ve ever sold something to.
Customers nowadays expect the brands they spend money on to pay attention to their needs, so having an automated system that can recognize the buying patterns and preferences of different buyers can be a massive asset.
Getting Qualified Leads
Having high-quality leads in sales is half the job done.
If you want to fill a sales funnel, let’s say using a lead can be of massive importance.
Using marketing automation, you can easily figure out where the lead is stationed, what his preferences are, and what the best way of approaching him would be.
Also, tools that belong to the marketing automation category can be of great use for creating high-quality landing pages and create SEO content that is highly-personalized and dynamic, which will keep your customers engaged.
Most of the companies in the field of online marketing routinely use marketing automation as a part of their sales arsenal.
If you want to get leads that have a real chance of becoming paying customers, using marketing automation can be a great overall option.
More Efficient Lead Engagement
Making sure that you get leads from your marketing campaign is only the first step.
Once a lead lands on your page, making them stick around for long enough to complete a purchase is the other, typically more difficult, part of the job.
The content on the landing pages needs to be engaging and informative. That said, a page that’s too detailed can bore or even fend off a potential customer.
Marketing automation helps you orchestrate a tailored experience for every user, dramatically increasing the chances of making a customer stay and make a purchase.
Marketing Automation Tools & Features
As we said above, marketing automation is a bundle of high-tech software tools based on complex, smart algorithms.
Typically, multiple marketing automation tools are used at once to maximize the joint effect they can have on your online business.
In the passages below, we’ll talk more about the most important automation tools and features, and how they make your life easier, as a marketer.
Personalized Email Marketing
Email communication is one of the major ways in which brands talk to their customers.
Whether it’s contacting customer support, learning about new product lines or updates, or receiving news, customers get the bulk of their info about their brand via email.
For this reason, it is essential to keep email communication close and personal, as well as professional.
An increasing number of customers claim that they prefer a personalized approach to email communication over raw and emotionless updates.
Having software in your hands that you can rely on when it comes to making personalized messages on a regular basis can be a major asset for your business.
It’s not only about the quality of messages, either.
One of the biggest hurdles for marketers when it comes to email communication with customers is the sheer volume of messages.
No matter how big and efficient your customer support team is, at some point, you and all your representatives simply won’t be able to handle the immense workload.
Marketing automation, in this respect, has the potential to take a major workload off your shoulders.
Having AI construct messages for you is the best way to keep in touch with your customers without having to pay an arm and a leg in human resources.
Conclusion
All in all, marketing automation is a rather novel concept for attracting and retaining customers online.
That said, this technology is getting more and more polished and refined every day. Any marketer that’s either online-based or has a considerable online presence can benefit massively from jumping on the marketing automation bandwagon, so to speak.
Facilitated engagement with customers, more leads, simplified troubleshooting, as well as greater lead retention are only some of the many benefits.
Jon Crain has written hundreds of website design and marketing article blog posts.
He is the sole owner of Pittsburgh SEO Services LLC which is a small business in Pittsburgh PA that specializes in affordable wordpress websites and digital marketing campaigns. Jon Crain has a marketing degree specializing in digital marketing and holds multiple internet marketing certifications. Jon Crain has over 25 years of experience along with managing hundreds of website projects and marketing campaigns. He also has won a variety of awards over the years from Tribune Review, Post Gazette and other publications.