Great digital marketing requires great digital marketing tools. While mail service companies (ESPs) like Constant Contact and MailChimp used to offer a useful platform, more more marketers are switching to more sophisticated, dynamic, and powerful marketing automation tools to manage their omnichannel marketing strategy and reach far beyond email.
The Benefits of Email Automation
The use of email automation allows you to build workflows and nurture leads to warm up prospects to your sales team, or provide personalized messaging to turn potential buyers to paying customers. Instead of making use of an ESP (email service company) to put together your email marketing campaigns an easier and more efficient approach is to move to a trusted marketing automation platform to deliver with a more complete approach.
Despite the obvious advantages of this omni-directional software, many marketers are either afraid to change their software or aren’t sure how they can present the right business case for their organization’s key people. Today, we’ll assist in easing the first and encourage the latter by exploring the primary advantages of automation in marketing.
Before we do that, however, let’s make sure we’re on identical page regarding what marketing automation software is (and what it’s not).
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the utilization of a omnichannel platform to combine, develop and automate a range of related marketing initiatives. These platforms assist marketers in automatizing repetitive processes to provide (ironically) enhanced individualization, enhance efficiency, increase the performance of key indicators, and generate more leads and higher revenues.
While email marketing processes are the most commonly cited techniques for automation, virtually every digital marketing initiative can be automated in some method, including online social networking, pay-per-click digital advertising SEO audits, among others. This feature allows marketers to devote their time and resources toward moving beyond the traditional batch-and-blast approach to give their different audiences more powerful messages and suggestions across a variety of channels.
When marketers are able to develop unique automation marketing campaigns for each of their targeted groups, they will be able to dramatically improve the individualization within these campaigns, while taking more time to develop more creative marketing approaches. As a result, they can anticipate their target audience to be more engaged and motivated to keep moving through the buying process.
It’s a win for everyone. Consumers receive exceptional customer experiences while businesses increase lead generation, engagement, and generate more revenue.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
In essence, the benefit of marketing automation is helping marketers save resources while also launching more campaigns with more efficiency. But the delight is in the particulars, so let’s examine the time to look into how marketers can take advantage of the benefits of a reliable, effective marketing automation solution.
More efficient and effective marketing Campaigns
In today’s world of marketing the most successful campaigns depend heavily on targeted marketing, that boils down to the old saying of sending messages to the right people or businesses at the right time. Prior to marketing automation, there was an abundance of guesswork, as marketers were forced to adopt a trial-and error approach to their campaigns. This resulted in constant unplanned marketing activities, and no way to know the most effective strategies and what was not.
Through automating their marketing efforts Businesses can now more easily identify their web customers, which allows the conversion of unidentified leads into well-known leads. Once they have a clear understanding of who they’re targeting they can then segment these leads based on their behaviors, demographics, and other characteristics to create customized and automated lead nurturing campaigns. So, marketers will keep their customers in mind while they guide them through the customer journey by providing highly customized messages (more on this below).
The greatest benefit is that, as potential buyers interact with the brand on the internet you are able to track all of their engagements and then pass this information on to your sales team using an integration into your CRM system. This allows for better alignment between marketing and sales collaboration, more streamlined leading scoring as well as hand-offs, as well as a detailed view of the customer’s journey from beginning to finish.
This Marketing Automation Quickstart Guide
Conserve Resources and Be More Creative
In broad terms, marketing automation software lets users reduce time, cost, and headcount. By doing so, marketers can concentrate their efforts on what they value most, which is creating engaging and innovative content and campaigns. When your day isn’t spent on busywork just so you can keep your light on, nimble marketers are able to utilize their imagination to go beyond the traditional approaches and outdated ideas.
Whereas marketers used to have to create new campaigns from starting from scratch, which was not efficient nor efficient They can now use marketing automation to replicate and refine processes designs, templates, branding efforts — you name it actually. As long as your target audiences are secured and you are aware of what you’d like to communicate to your prospects and customers, you can utilize existing resources to create constant marketing campaigns and assets and use personalised messages for each audience segment.
Another advantage of marketing automation is the ability to design simple and repeatable processes and resources, which enables marketing teams to use less time re-building their materials constantly and fewer people to create their campaigns. The result is lower costs for resources, and freeing up funds to focus on initiatives that make an impact, are more popular, have greater impact, and generate an awesome ROI. Automated marketing campaigns are efficient and effective, in fact the people who were surveyed saw an increase of 14.5% improvement in the productivity of sales and an 12.2 percent decrease in marketing expenses.
Enhance Customer Experience
Modern consumers want tailored customer experiences that place them in the driver’s seat. That means less blatant selling tactics, and more subtle thought leadership which aims to educate and convince rather than push. Remember, you would like to make your customers feel good about their investment.
Of course, the objective is to generate a sale but there are other goals that go beyond getting there — and the majority of them are related to creating more enjoyable customer experiences with content and materials that are extremely informative and highly customized. In fact, according to recent research, over 70% of automated marketing users cited more personalized messaging as their primary benefit of the software. If you’re not currently following that trend, you should get your marketing materials personalized.
Marketing automation with CloudV helps you customize your content in two ways:
Since these platforms provide such detailed and precise data, you can leverage consumer insights to customize your content according to what your potential customers are looking for, and how they’re behaving online.
With adaptive tools and techniques built-in directly into the system, you can communicate with the user in a dynamic way through emails, on landing pages, and even on contact forms!
Perhaps the most efficient way to use personalization is by leveraging the most valuable of your assets which is your existing customers. You probably already have plenty of information about them (including their contact information as well as their pain points and the history of their purchases), so why not enter them into cross-sell and/or upsell campaigns? Send them information about new products and products they might be interested in or provide a discounted renewal rate to ensure loyalty of customers. Whatever you choose to do, remember your current customers and provide them with plenty of reasons to stick with your company — particularly since your competition is probably already inundating their inboxes.