Marketing automation offers time-saving solutions to streamline your business’s digital marketing tasks into an efficient flow. After using marketing automation software, 77% of businesses reported an increase in conversions.
Digital marketing campaigns can have many dynamic parts, from email marketing to social media posting to customer relationship management and more. These marketing strategies require constant attention, effort, and performance feedback.
Completing each digital marketing task manually can quickly become overwhelming and doesn’t make sense. The sheer repetitive volume of things to do results in lost time and a lack of efficiency. Plus, it opens the door to human error, which can be extremely costly at scale.
Fortunately, marketing automation tools and platforms offer a solution to this dilemma. When mundane digital marketing tasks and outcomes become automated, your business can focus on more important aspects of your digital marketing campaigns.
What is the purpose of marketing automation?
The purpose of marketing automation for your business is to manage otherwise time-consuming digital marketing tasks better. The technology behind automation software enables online marketing and sales campaigns to run smoothly without constant oversight and effort.
Now your business can accomplish more efficiently, at a faster pace, and with a higher success rate. Your business can shift its focus toward more creative endeavors, strategic goals, research and KPI measurement, and more.
The importance of marketing automation extends beyond creating a more efficient everyday workflow. Your customers also gain a more personalized experience. From generating leads to keeping customers engaged throughout their interactions with your business, marketing automation can nurture long-term relationships with your customers.
What is the value of marketing automation?
The value of marketing automation lies in its ability to improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of your business’s marketing campaigns through multiple venues, including emails, blogs, social media, and SMS.
Through the use of marketing automation tools, software, or platforms, your business can perform the following tasks with greater efficiency.
- Generate, nurture, and score leads
- Segment and target specific audience groups
- Use sales tactics to upsell and cross-sell to reach more customers
- Develop and maintain customer relationships through loyalty programs
- Analyze and create reports to make improvements quickly and with more precision
- Build customer profiles and collect customer data
- Personalize and improve customer experience (CX) across online channels
How does marketing automation work?
The process of marketing automation follows several steps to manage tasks and workflows.
- Data is collected about potential customers through various digital marketing interactions, including email clicks, website visits, social media engagement, app usage, and other online engagements.
- The data collected is used to produce relevant and personalized content based on the customer’s profile.
- Various digital marketing outlets, including email, social media, testing on mobile devices, and chat features, deliver individualized campaigns tailored to the customer.
- As the customer interacts with these campaigns, these actions trigger follow-up workflows across marketing channels.
- Also, scheduled marketing tactics help move customers down the sales funnel toward a sale and a long-term, recurring relationship.
- The marketing automation software tracks all results and analyzes how to improve greater marketing ROI.
What are examples of marketing automation?
Marketing automation is often mistakenly referenced as only email marketing. While email marketing is one aspect, marketing automation encompasses many more online outlets and channels.
Marketing automation can and should be used across multiple processes to help your business create and run better online marketing campaigns. The following comprehensive list reveals how marketing automation, including and beyond email marketing, can help streamline your business.
- Email marketing
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Sales force automation
- Social media
- Marketing automation workflows
- Lead management
- Analytics
- Digital advertising and promotion
- Customer loyalty
Email Marketing
Let’s start with the most well-known form of marketing automation. Email marketing automation covers the entire process of acquiring subscribers, from lead generation forms to sales funnel journeys.
You can create a personalized experience for your customers through a series of welcome emails and follow-up emails that send automatically as each new customer navigates your scheduled and predetermined content.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) automates how sales are processed. It manages each individual customer on their sales journey.
Sales Force Automation
This automation focuses on sales processes. It collects data and interprets it to offer helpful analytics.
Social Media
Social media marketing can be a time-consuming full-time job. However, with automation, many aspects of social media marketing, from content publishing to post scheduling, can be optimized.
Also, engagement with posts, comments, sharing, and clicks on ad campaigns can be more easily monitored and developed into insightful analytics.
Marketing Automation Workflows
By automating marketing workflows, you can free your employees from monotonous and mundane marketing processes. This process eliminates human error and makes better use of your employees’ abilities and talents.
Lead Management
To increase your business’s efficiency with sales campaigns, rely on lead management automation software for generating, measuring, and developing marketing leads.
Analytics
As your business uses automation tools, software, and platforms, customer data and market patterns get continuously collected. These analytics can help your company develop more strategic marketing plans.
For example, A/B testing through automated processes allows your business to determine what’s working and what needs improvement.
Digital Advertising and Promotion Creating ads and bidding across digital channels can be a cumbersome task. Automation refines this process for quicker, better results.
Customer Loyalty
Loyalty programs help nurture long-term customers. By automating components of your loyalty program, your business can more easily maintain your existing customer base and expand your loyalty membership leads.
10 Benefits of Using Marketing Automation for Your Business
Tedious tasks can slow down marketers’ ability to focus on more important matters. With marketing automation, the advantages become apparent almost immediately. Most digital marketers, a whopping 91%, attribute their increased success rates to using automation software, tools, and platforms.
Marketing automation can offer multiple benefits for your business and your customers.
- Increased efficiency and employee productivity
- Fewer resources wasted on ineffective campaigns
- Improved productivity and organization
- A streamlined workflow
- Better conversation rates
- Greater lead nurturing and lead scoring
- Greater accuracy with reporting, data management, and analytics
- Customers receive a personalized marketing strategy
- Better customer service resulting in higher customer retention and satisfaction
- Able to align marketing campaigns and sales generations
What are the top Marketing Automation Tools?
With marketing automation in demand, several platforms offer excellent services. We’ve narrowed it down to six top marketing automation tools worth using for your business.
- HubSpot
- Drip
- Sendinblue
- ActiveCampaign
- Omnisend
- EngageBay
HubSpot
HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software provides easy-to-use, highly functional visual workflows that are tailored to your business’s needs from simple to sophisticated.
In addition, Hubspot offers outstanding email automation and multiple integrations to help you easily create your campaigns across channels, including email, ads, SMS, chat, web, and more.
Hubspot specializes in its customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This area of expertise adds to its ability to provide effective and efficient marketing automation solutions.
Drip
Drip focuses on e-commerce marketing automation. It allows flexibility to build marketing campaigns across email, SMS, and onsite forms and pop-ups.
Drip provides comprehensive email automation with pre-built templates that can be customized for your brand. Drip excels in collecting, organizing, and segmenting customer data for greater personalization and analytics.
For these reasons and more, Oviond has partnered with Drip.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue offers automation software on its digital marketing platform. Their user-friendly tools appeal to both novice and experienced marketers.
Sendinblue is a digital marketing platform that features well-liked automation software suited for both beginner and advanced marketers.
With SendinBlue, you can automate email marketing, SMS, and chat. It focuses on CRM, transactional emails, and segmentation. Plus, you can create landing pages, sign-up forms, and Facebook ads.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign provides marketers with integrated email marketing, marketing automation, and small business CRM. It offers superior automation solutions that perform well in functionality and flexibility.
Businesses and marketers with a higher level of technical abilities will benefit from ActiveCampaign better than beginners will little automation experience.
ActiveCampaign provides multiple automation tools for every aspect of your marketing campaign to reach new customers, nurture your existing audience, convert sales, and grow long-term customer relationships.
Omnisend
Omnisend is a marketing automation platform intended for eCommerce companies. Their automation workflows offer pre-built, customizable templates designed for easy use by online merchants.
Creating emails, landing pages, pop-ups, forms, and more is quick and easy. Plus, Omnisend provides automation within the same workflow throughout several channels, including
email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, segmentation, push notifications, and more features.
EngageBay
Designed ideally for small to medium-sized businesses, the EngageBay marketing automation platform features software for email marketing, social media management, and website chat.
EngageBay makes marketing automation easy with user-friendly building pages to help you create landing pages, email sequences, and other marketing strategies like SMS, push notifications, canned responses, and more.
Discover More Marketing Tools and Solutions
Now that you understand how marketing automation can help your business, discover more marketing strategies, tools, and solutions. Learn how to level up your digital marketing monitoring and reporting game with our insightful, well-researched advice and how-to posts on our Digital Marketing Monitoring & Reporting Blog.
