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Big or small enterprise, does it matter anymore? Every company is fighting for its space in the consumer’s life and more often than not, they have to devise new strategies to engage with them frequently. The buyer journey is no longer a straightforward phenomenon. The struggle for marketers to constantly do more with less is real. On the brighter side, advanced technologies have helped businesses change the game at a much faster pace, reducing the need for humans to do redundant tasks.
The benefits of accessing technology are many including targeted communication, increase leads, drive conversions and ultimately generate more revenue. Marketers now have a smarter way to support their efforts – it’s called Marketing Automation. Even now in a marketer’s toolkit, there are lots of choices. How can you know what is best for your business?
The increasing number of consumer platforms and channels means customers are easier to reach than ever before and, as such, marketers are eager to implement cross-platform, omnichannel campaigns.
What is Marketing Automation?
Let’s take a step back and understand what led to marketing automation being used especially by smaller-sized companies. Whether it is drafting business/promotional emails that walk the buyer through a personal journey, keeping up with social media posts, regular data-entry to conduct research & analysis or an endless list of other time-consuming tasks, automation features are great productivity tools. It’s a nightmare when you don’t have a marketing team to do this for you. As a business owner who should be concentrating on more strategic tasks for your company’s growth, however, what we end up working in our business instead of on our business. What’s the other alternative – forget about it! Don’t do marketing at all (which is a far bigger threat given today’s competitive marketplace). There is no marketing magic wand, but there are software tools or SaaS (software as a service) tools that will create positive momentum to closing sales.
By definition, Marketing Automation is a robust crosspoint of software and strategy. It allows you to nurture prospects with highly personalized, impactful content that helps convert prospects into customers. Strategic planning combined with the efficiency of automation can usually bring more success for both sales opportunities and business overall.
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Timeframe – 2004 to present, PC: Google Trends
How does Marketing Automation Work?
Simply put, automation means more chances to interact with consumers for higher conversion rates and increased revenue. But how exactly can marketing automation platforms help you do more with less?
You can decide to use any of the available automation software to reduce or even eliminate repetitive tasks including:
- Manual email campaign creation
- Coordination of SMS messaging
- Dissemination of social media posts
- Website visitor tracking
- Online advertisement placement
- Data management and analysis
A well-designed campaign can only be successful with a perfectly planned marketing automation activities. And like most technology, marketing automation is constantly evolving and I foresee exponential growth in its usage across industries.
Access your business needs and then invest in the right marketing automation platform
Your company needs to align marketing and sales with a platform that helps these traditionally siloed departments work together. With marketing automation software, these departments can seamlessly deliver a personalized experience to every prospect, no matter where they are in the funnel of marketing strategy.
If it sounds too good to be true, the good news is that it isn’t. A marketing automation platform can transform a marketing department and help it become a streamlined mechanism. The trick is finding the best platform for your needs.
Sometimes marketers buy into a full-suite solution with much enthusiasm, never using the majority of the program’s functionality. We recommend doing an in-depth analysis of your goals and focus on the features you need. You’ll need email automation at the very least. On a limited budget, you may not be able to afford social media or search advertising right away, but having that available for future use will be an important next step. You’ll want marketing analytics to know what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll also need content management that optimizes a personalized experience for your audience.
Email Marketing Automation — one big piece of the marketing pie.
According to a 2018 study by the Radici group, There were more than 3.8 billion email users. That means over half of the planet uses email right now. Radicati expects that number to reach 4.2 billion by the end of 2022.
Most of your customers use email and are part of the 91% of email users who check their inbox at least daily.
This is why Email Marketing Automation becomes an essential ingredient of every solid marketing strategy. It’s the practice of creating a customer journey of relevant emails that are timely and designed to introduce meaningful concepts and validate a shared experience, building trust which is an important step in eventually closing a sale.
In this blog, I will explain you with an example of email marketing tool I have been using for a couple of years – Constant Contact (Without any biases, I find it a fantastic tool for all my clients). When you sign up for Constant Contact, the action of signing up for its services triggers a welcome email. This email introduces you to the tool, asks you to verify your email address, further directing on how to set up your account and get started with building your brand.
With email marketing automation, you can deliver the same personalized experience to your first subscriber as well as your XXXXth one. It saves time because you only have to plan the series once. Each new subscriber will get a logical, perfectly timed series that speaks to their specific wants and needs.
While some brands may hesitate to use automated marketing emails for fear their messaging will become more robotic and less personalized and in turn will lose its effectiveness. In reality, it’s just the opposite. Email automation tool can help you gather more information about your subscribers and actually make your messaging more personalized and thus more effective – as long as you’re using that data the right way, of course.
What have we understood so far?
Marketing Automation can contribute to the success of your company by automating those daily however essential tasks that take up a fairly large amount of a company’s business hours.
A word of advice – While it accelerates your customer outreach program, operating it in silo loses its effectiveness and strains what otherwise could have been productive, long-term customer relationships. We must learn to strike a perfect balance along the way!
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