Harnessing The Power Of Marketing Automation

Conversion Fanatics
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

Marketing automation helps streamline repetitive tasks in your business so operations flow more efficiently and revenue grows more quickly. The term may sound cold, impersonal, or robotic even. But in reality, the human touch drives every step of any automated marketing process.

Erik Devaney of HubSpot: “While anyone can push a button and fire off a thousand emails, the marketers who find the most success with marketing automation are those who understand their audience and who tailor messaging and content to meet the needs and expectations of specific audience segments.”

You can use marketing automation to accomplish a variety of tasks and strategies, such as driving traffic to your website and moving that traffic down your sales funnel: from traffic, to lead, to customer. Marketing automation can also assist with customer retention, cross-sells and up-sells, and measuring marketing ROI.

And whether you’re a large company or a small or mid-sized organization, you can benefit from marketing automation. Plus, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in; you can be business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C).

Marketing Automation: Reap The Rewards Without Sacrificing The Human Element

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Marketing automation can be a beautiful thing, but it can also go horribly wrong and you can definitely come across as impersonal and out of touch with your targeted audience if you’re not careful.

Start Small And At The Top, Then Scale

If you’re new to the game, aim to keep automation simple, starting at the top of the funnel and making sure all the kinks have been worked out before working your way down to the later stages.

Jeffrey Russo of HubSpot suggests that you “identify a few important stages in your funnel, and 1–2 personas. Over time, as you see what is and isn’t working, you can experiment with adding additional stages or persona segments.”

Maintain Focus On Your Ideal Customer And Reverse-Engineer

In baseball, you keep your eye on the ball. In marketing, you keep your eye on the customer. Your customers are on the receiving end of your content and marketing strategies. So you need to think of their needs, wants, and perceptions first and then use that information to steer your automation processes and content creation.

If you don’t, you run the risk of sounding out of touch or overly self-promotional.

Matt Quinn of Sauce weighs in:

“Start with your customer personas in mind and work backwards. Make sure that you aren’t automating for automation’s sake. That way, while the messages will be automatically generated, they can be incredibly personal which will have a huge impact on open rates and click-through rates.

When you start with your persona, you’ll be able to identify what makes them who they are (i.e., haven’t made a purchase in three months) and thus will direct the path of what you should actually be automating.”

Choose The Best Type Of Software For Your Company

Whether you want to automate the process of sending emails, segmenting contacts, posting on social media, or tracking the life-cycle of the customers in your funnel, there’s a software for it. You just have to figure out which action(s) you want to automate. Then, you can make a more informed decision about which software you should choose.

According to Mike Templeman of Foxtail Marketing, the top picks for automation software are…

“If you’re an enterprise company, then my suggestion to you is you go with Marketo. And if you’re a small to mid-market company, my suggestion is you rely on HubSpot, but you wouldn’t be too terribly disappointed if you went with Act-On,” he says.

Other top players worth checking out include Oracle’s Eloqua, Adobe Campaign, IBM Unica, and CallidudCloud.

What do you think about these automation tips? Which of your business’s operations, if any, do you automate? What value does marketing automation bring to your company? Head over to ConversionFanatics.com and share your insights!

Conversion Fanatics

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Customer centric conversion optimization company. Helping companies increase advertising effectiveness, split test faster and improve results.

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