You must be wondering why there are piles of data that are present on the internet. This pile of data always keeps on increasing. Then how can you potentially as marketers use this data to your advantage? Growth Marketing has become an integral part of marketing today. Learning how to efficiently manage this data to have effective growth marketing has led to a rise in marketing automation.
We have prepared an all-in-one guide for you so that you can expand your business with marketing automation.
Introduction: What is Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to the practice of efficiently and effectively utilizing software to automate marketing tasks. Marketing automation is done primarily due to two reasons:
- To enhance and align the work of the marketing and sales team
- To provide the customer with a seamless experience and convert them from potential leads to regular buyers.
Marketing automation software can learn and comprehend millions of pieces of data information and utilize and analyze it to target potential leads through emails, the web, and social media.
How Can Marketing Automation Help Your Business Grow?
Marketing automation helps you to streamline, focus, automate and keep a check on your workflow. However, a good marketing automation platform is more than that. It should help you gather and convert potential leads into customers.
1. Provide Your Sales Team With Adequate Information
To ensure that your sales leads can follow up on with the right personalized sales messages, it is important to provide your sales team with adequate information. Your team needs to be able to track the lead and provide enough information to the sales team. Only then using their CRM system, the sales team will be able to form personalized messages and have effective conversations with the potential or targeted customers.
2. Retargeting Using Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation is pivotal for converting leads into customers. You need to keep the interaction between the lead and the company consistent. Marketing automation software also caters to this. Triggered emails are sent automatically based on the action of the lead. This prevents the wastage of time of the sales team.
For instance, if a customer is viewing your product and its prices, an email can be sent to the interested customer designed specifically for this purpose.
The effectiveness and performance of triggered emails are three times better than any other type of email.
3. Segment Your Lead Nurturing
In a perfect world, all leads can be converted into customers. However, in reality, this is not the case. Certain leads also need to be nurtured so that they can be passed on to sales. At the onset, at least, if not all, but most customers can be categorized as potential buyers. It depends upon what strategy is being used by the company which will decide whether a particular lead can be converted into a regular customer.
There will be various leads who will not be willing to buy your product instantly. In such cases, you will have to compel them and nurture them.
You must be wondering through what ways can you possibly convince, nurture and compel a person who is not willing to buy a product to buy yours? We have laid down the way you can achieve this. Through dynamic content that is tailored for the specific needs and interests of the potential customers. As mentioned previously, through this you can convert them from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead. Your marketing automation software will provide you with all the data that you require to do the same.
For this purpose, you have tools such as Salesforce, Infusionsoft, or AgileCRM, through which you can segment and nurture your lead accordingly. Owing to the process of lead nurturing, Marketo had a 30% improvement in the quality of the lead.
4. Keep a Check on Your Leads on All Channels
Potential customers exist everywhere. Be it browsing the internet, on social media, etc., Keeping a check on your leads is important for the growth of the business regardless of the channel. It will also help guide your message to potential customers, based on the type of message your lead is engaging with.
It will also help to increase sales since leads engage with the company till the product of the company stays relevant to the customer.
You can use tools such as triggered emails, web personalization, and digital ads to keep your lead engaged with the company. You can even send your customer personalized messages to keep them engaged, while also capturing data about the level of engagement with the message and your content.
5. Record Your Result and Keep a Check on ROI
Following the same procedure to achieve a different result isn’t going to cut it in today’s digital world. Digital marketing agencies need to keep track of the ROI of every strategy and program. They need to see whether they can achieve any tangible result.
A good ROI will generate you five times the amount of revenue compared to what you invested within the program. By keeping track of this, you will be able to deduce which strategy and program will provide you with the most revenue. Once you start generating revenue, you need to invest within these programs and stop those which are not performing.
Engagement platforms with marketing automation not only benefit the marketing team. It also benefits the sales team which will help to expand the business.
What Are The Benefits of Using Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation has become extremely important for businesses. Today, marketing automation is not only used to automate processes but is also being used to restructure marketing campaigns. Digital marketing automation also saves time and energy. This allows the company to generate more revenues.
Let us look at some of the benefits of marketing automation
1. Efficiency
Firstly marketing automation makes your team look much more efficient. It allows you to reduce the cost as well as provides your team with more time to start planning for other important strategic projects.
Secondly, marketing automation prevents you from posting daily on social media manually. Instead, the process is automated. This means that your department will have more time to do other work such as planning for future projects.
Finally, apart from saving time and cost of operation, it also makes the work for the team easier. Your team can do all of the work within one software. This includes creating a blog, an email campaign, and posts on social media, etc., In the end, marketing automation makes your team much more efficient.
2. Marketing and Sales Alignment
Marketing automation platforms also allow you to combine your sales and marketing automation efforts. It will make the task of going from marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead much easier.
Subsequently, marketing automation also leads to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. Additionally, it will also help you to find more leads and bring a boost to your sales. Marketing automation also provides digital marketing agencies space to work on their strategy to increase conversion rates. At the same time, your team can work to grow productivity.
3. Increase Conversion Rate
Having an increase in conversion rate makes your team much more active and impactful. This will also allow you to administer over your leads more effectively.
Marketing automation platforms also provide you with the ability to manage and track your leads. You can even use marketing automation software to retarget your customers who have visited your website by boosting your CRO.
Therefore, marketing automation gives your team time to revisit and analyze your marketing strategy. This allows digital marketing agencies to look at ways of converting visitors into potential customers.
4. Accurate Reporting
Drawing and recording your analytics is an extremely tiring and difficult task. But if you use marketing automation software, you can produce automated reports.
Therefore marketing automation software can give you an extremely accurate overall review of your project. You can see the complications in a much easier way. This will help you see where you are going wrong.
5. Personalized Marketing Strategy
Your team will only have to spend time creating data entry instead of manually entering it. It will also help the team to create more personalized content with its segmentation capabilities and reporting.
Through marketing automation, you can focus on your targeted audience on social media, with search ads, and through email campaigns. This can happen since marketing automation software converts your visitors into potential leads. Once you can gather your leads, you can divide them based on their characteristics or behaviour.
For instance, email marketing automation runs a campaign inviting people to a sales conference. Within this process, your potential leads receive personalized messages and you can further track their engagement. In another case, you might be an online retailer. A potential customer who has been looking for winter boots viewed your website. A web page for winter boots will be presented first. Having personalized web content helps build a better, personal and loyal relationship. This will create potential leads and will guarantee the best experience a customer can have with a company which will lead to an increase in sales.
6. Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is another important aspect for marketing and sales teams. Marketing automation software can develop lead scoring for your team. It will further indicate and notify the sales team once a lead surpasses from market qualified lead to sales qualified lead.
This is a testament that marketing automation helps bring together the marketing team and sales team which is extremely beneficial for the business. Subsequently, it also automates the entire process, this helps to save time and makes it easier. Your sales team can now immediately approach potential customers.
7. Data Management
Marketing automation software keeps tabs on your performance, manages your data, and keeps a track of your leads. Further, you can even keep an overview of the overall engagement with the customer.
This allows you to manage your data most effectively. It also keeps your data updated automatically.
8. Scalable Process
While building a marketing system, you need to keep the scale in mind. You need to inquire which process will help grow your company and increase the scale of operation. If a particular process does not seem to be scalable, then your business wouldn’t expand.
Marketing automation allows the processes to become scalable. If the process is not automated and is to be carried out manually, it becomes dependent on the person. The more it is dependent on one person, the harder it will be to scale when the team grows
Types of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation has various forms. We will begin to unpack them individually to help you use them effectively in your marketing journey.
1. Email Marketing Automation
The most common form is email marketing which ranges from post-purchase emails to re-engagement emails and much more. Email marketing automation is a tailored process to reap the best marketing outcomes. For instance, time-based emails are sent on occasions such as one’s birthday (for example, Starbucks offers free birthday drinks) or holidays (the popular Black Friday offers).
Additionally, email automation campaigns are one of the top three tactics deployed by marketers to improve performance and user engagement. Its automatic nature offers a time-saving advantage to generate increased revenue with minimal manual effort.
Action-based mail takes a further step. Automated emails are triggered by actions taken by a website visitor or customer, then receiving an array of emails related to that action. Action-based emails are more involved, for instance when a customer does not complete a purchase, receives a subsequent confirmation email for that action, and exits the site with items still present in the cart – in a matter of some time will receive a follow-up email about the items left in the cart. Such an action-based email is called an “abandoned cart” email and is often used by many online stores as a marketing strategy to make customers return to the site to complete their purchases.
2. Digital Marketing Automation
Although email marketing is a common type of marketing strategy, it’s not the only one. Let’s discuss other forms of digital marketing that are both external and internal.
Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media marketing can be a time-intensive tool and if not done well on a day-to-day basis can lead to little to no benefits. Thankfully marketing automation can help solve this issue. With tools like HubSpot and Hootsuite you can schedule content, set social media monitoring filters, and even automate specially designed response processes. However, this should never be used as a substitute for manual, genuine, human interaction with followers and customers which is an integral factor in building trust and loyalty with customers.
Advertising Automation
Manually tweaking an advertising platform—changing the copy, graphics, and timing based on each customer’s actions or behaviour—would be a strenuous process. Luckily ‘retargeting’—and advertising automation strategy— can save you from this burden. Retargeting automatically shifts and smartens its response strategy based on consumer behaviour. When a customer visits your website, your retargeting automation will respond to it by displaying relevant ads on the sites they choose to browse next.
Mobile Marketing Automation
SMS marketing is becoming quite popular and effective, with big companies adding mobile marketing to their marketing automation plans. Text messages can be similarly sent to emails, automatically at particular time cues or actions. An SMS has a surprisingly faster and higher response rate in comparison to opening emails and is thus an effective strategy you should consider.
CRM with Marketing Automation
CRM— a marketer’s best helper often goes hand in hand with marketing automation. A simple update received on your database can initiate a whole number of internal tasks, including lead scoring and sending alerts to your sales team for new prospects. CRM can also be used to trigger email workflows based on either user data or user behaviour.
Marketing Automation Strategies
When you subscribe to a marketing automation tool, you are generally excited to use the tool. However, if you do not know how to use the tool, you will not profit from it. The best way of making your marketing automation campaign successful is by thinking of every marketing automation tool as an integral part of your marketing plan.
Marketing automation helps you expand and generate revenue because you can now uncover various benefits such as nurturing leads, attracting potential customers, increasing productivity, etc.,
Let us look at a few of the marketing automation strategies that can help you to improve your business:
1. Marketing Automation Can Help improve Communication Within The Team
Communication between the team members is one of the key basis of a successful marketing team. This needs to start before the team engages with the potential customer. It happens internally within the team. While setting up a business a lot of people are involved in the process.
They work towards delivering a successful strategy to sell the product and engage with the customer. Members include writers, designers, social media handlers, and many more. For the strategy to work, all the members of the team need to be on the same page and up to date.
But this is not so easy to achieve. Some tools have been designed specifically to ensure smooth internal communication between all the team members. Tailored Mail or Zapier is designed for apps that can be used to improve communication between the team members. You can set up Google Drive to share all client-related details and other important documents. This will help increase transparency within the team and improve communication.
2. Using Dynamic Content to Interact With Your Customers
To get the best outcome from any automated marketing tool, you need to have dynamic and interactive content. Any such content would compel the customer to look at your product and become potential leads for the business. This is important since presenting the wrong content before the customer could lead to the loss of a potential customer.
You must be wondering what dynamic content must be like? HubSpot defined dynamic content as:
“Also referred to as “dynamic” or “adaptive” content, smart content is a term for the aspects of a website, ad, or email body that change based on the interests or past behaviour of the viewer. It creates an experience that’s customized specifically for the visitor or reader at that moment.”
You can understand customers’ past behaviour by improving content marketing and by building trust with your customers. This will help improve brand loyalty.
According to the report published by DemandGen, 47% of the buyers view at least 3-5 different pieces of content before engaging with a sales agent. You need to create content that is not detailed but rather interactive, adaptive, and dynamic.
To have the best chance of success for automated marketing, you need to combine and align the content according to the past behaviour of the customer and where their interest lies primarily.
By gathering more data about customers’ behaviour, it becomes a lot easier for the marketing team to convince them and compel them to engage with your content.
For instance, by collecting and analyzing data from marketing automated software, Cincom, an enterprise solution company, enforced a behaviour-based content campaign. This helped the company to increase its click-to-open rate by 1,941%. The company also started to produce 18 new sales leads every week on average.
However, the written content is not enough. While inquiring about the product, blog posts and articles are a good way of engaging with the customer. But when the customer is considering buying a product, they require visual content such as video, slide presentations, etc.
3. Building a Drip Campaign
For marketing automation, having a drip campaign is marketing at its best. This is because drip campaigns are entirely about customers. It is automated and it takes customers’ behaviour into account while taking an action. This allows it to fulfil the needs of the customer.
For instance, if a potential customer visits your page, it will send them a welcome message which is completely automated. If the customer decides to view your products sales page, then it will send them promotional offers and various other incentives
It also prevents you from making the mistake of sending the same email to all your existing customers and potential customers. Rather than blasting the same email, which is extremely ineffective, you should categorize messages according to the behaviour of your potential customers.
Personalized messages which are delivered through Drip campaigns have about 80% higher open rates and 3X click-through rates than a message that is sent to everyone. 79% of potential leads are not converted into buyers because they aren’t through drips. Subsequently, companies that can fully utilize drip campaigns can increase sales by 80% and lower the cost by 33%.
Drip campaigns are effective because they can nurture potential leads and improve relationships with the customer without direct human involvement. Brand loyalty can also be built over a period using these leads.
KANA Software increased its average CTR by 3X, compared to the other forms of email. Visitors who viewed their website from drip campaigns viewed their website for 3:02 minutes on an average as compared to 1:56 minutes through other emails.
4. Converting Abandoned Carts to My Orders
There can be many potential reasons for abandoning your shopping cart. One of the few reasons for abandoning shopping carts is unexpected shipping costs, or even customers simply adding items to the cart to compare all the prices.
You need to fight this problem of abandoned carts by providing customers with positive incentives such as discount coupon codes. Marketing automation software can help you with this process. You can reach out to potential customers and remind them that they have a few unordered items left in the cart. Subsequently, you can even bring back potentially lost customers and generate a substantial revenue stream.
A Brand Growth Experts client revealed that when he implemented the abandoned cart email service, his company was highly profitable. His automation system sent potential customers an automated email that they have things left within the cart. Within the same email, he also sent them a discount, so that customers become compelled to complete their transaction.
In 2017, the month in which he established this automation, his flow brought in $5990. By the end of the next month, revenue that was generated from the abandoned cart email was tippled. It had risen to $14,923.
In 2018, the abandoned cart email generated him $24,417. He was able to bring a 64% increase through automation.
This Brand Growth Expert client was able to generate ample additional revenue through only two automation. Your company’s marketing activity has the potential to attract more leads, and bring in more potential customers, this automation also has the potential to improve and generate more additional revenue for you as well.
5. Using Email Sequences As a Follow Up on Prospects Who Fill Out a Lead Form
Automated marketing can help follow up on a potential customer or lead who has filled your form, increasing customer engagement. With an automated marketing tool, one can prepare a list of welcoming and attractive emails to reinforce engagement through scheduled emails sent.
Email sequences are a series of emails that are sent to potential customers to help generate revenue and convert such new customers into frequent buyers. More than one sequence can be designed and applied to different leads through every single change in customer behaviour. For every $1 spent on an email sequence, businesses have been shown to generate up to a $38 return on investment.
This is why it is so important to design an effective email sequence that will turn your leads into lifelong customers.
6. Leverage Marketing Automation in List Segmentation
Leads or potential buyers can generate a lot of useful information for companies. With this abundant data, you can group your leads into different segments making it easier to plan useful marketing strategies for each group. Making such segmentation lists manually is a laborious task that is easily prone to human errors.
With the help of marketing automation, however, you can segment your leads list from your settings. Customers can be segmented based on various criteria such as demographic information, geographical location, past purchase behaviour, customer engagement level, etc. Segmentation can be as creative and purposefully tailored to meet your needs and requirements depending on the metrics you are focusing on.
Email marketing tools like AgileCRM or Active Campaign help achieve segmentation lists very easily, including planning content to be sent to each segmented group. If you can develop an effective email marketing automation and QIS packaging you can increase your ROI and sales conversion rate by a staggering percentage.
List segmentation helped companies like PaperStyle.com – a stationery specialist website – increase its email opening rate by 244% and a 330% increase in revenue per mailing sequence.
7. The importance of Studying Top Performers in Your Market
Every industry has its top performers who seem to lead an area of the market. There are many reasons for them to come out on the top – the most important being the ability to exploit and use new technologies to their advantage. High performers in the online marketing world are making the best use of marketing automation.
For you to implement the most effective marketing automation strategies it’s vital to study the actions and systems of high performers.
What is their approach to marketing automation? How often and what are the scheduled times according to which they send out emails to potential customers? What type of content do they send to successfully engage lead prospects? These are the questions you must have a look at while doing your research.
Another option available is to pay these performers to teach you how to obtain the best results from marketing automation as you may be unable to fully grasp the tips and tricks to successful marketing automation through merely studying them alone.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we have established that marketing automation unpacks various benefits that help to expand the company. However, you need to remember that marketing automation only helps you maximize your efforts and not do marketing for you. It can help you to find new leads, convert, save time and increase sales. But you need to be aware of how to use it properly and effectively. Marketing automation will improve performance with minimal efforts and streamline your work focus.
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