Marketing automation, the future is now
Automated marketing is the future of digital marketing, enabling brands to deliver a more personalized content to the right audience, at the right time is a winning formula for success of every company.
Marketing automation is a software that runs marketing campaigns and tasks across multiple channels. It replaces humans to do repetitive and manual marketing tasks such as email marketing, google ads or remarketing. While it runs the campaigns, it monitors customer behaviors on multiple channels to gather more information for future actions.
How it works
Marketing automation is based on an if-then logic. Furthermore, if certain conditions exist, then defines them and takes specific action.
For instance, if someone subscribed to the newsletter on your website, then it triggers an action that somebody has subscribed to. Next step is to define who the person is (the newsletter subscriber), and the last step is to take action. This could be sent through a ‘thank you’ email, for instance — “Thank you x (name of the person) for subscribing to our monthly newsletter, we hope you have a good day.”
Having a well defined sales process is a need for running marketing automation, make sure you have established every stage of your sales process so you know later where can you improve to increase conversion rate. Also you need to identify different channels where you drive your leads so you can develop a sales process for each channel. Let marketing automation do your repetitive tasks so you can more focus on the bigger picture.
Lead nurturing
Most of our leads, when they visit our website for the first time are not ready to make a purchase or to download a demo of our software. Using marketing automation, we can nurture our leads by first educating them on content marketing, until we are sure that they are ready, and then offer them a free demo of our software or even a purchase. Approximately 2 weeks later, there is an update and we can then automate a task so that everyone who has the software gets an email regarding the new features.
Lead segmentation
Lead segmentation in automated marketing is the ability to predict the visitors’ next behavior based on their actions and interest of similar people who made it to the next stage.
With the ability to know in which path are they on their customers journey, the software, upon reaching set values, can predict that the person is ready for the next step of his journey, so it gives him/her a new approach.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring in marketing automation is a key to group your customers with the same value; you could set a specific “score” for every action a visitor does, for example, downloading a case study (30 points).
Now we want to make a special offer to all visitors on our site that have more than 100 points. We know that visitors with 100 or more points are already familiar with our products and the brand so they would be more likely to accept the offer instead of someone who just got on our website for the first time, and scored 10 points for visiting 2 pages.
On the other hand, we will have a different approach to the person with 10 points; we could remarket him/her with ads so they would come back to our website and score more “points”. After scoring more than 50 points, we would automatically change the approach.
Saving time
The most valuable thing about automation is that it saves time. It would be hard to manually find and move thousands of contacts from one group to another when we “think” they are ready for the next step in their customer journey.
For instance, we can send an email to all people who watched our last webinar with a survey about how they find it, and then a week later, we can follow up with a 10% discount for future education webinars to everyone who opened the email with the survey.
Customer retention
Using automated marketing with tools like CRM (customer relationship management) and Bi (business intelligence) is really useful for upsell or cross sell from customers who already bought something from us. At that point we know what our customers are feeling about us, are they using our service right and have they the potential to grow bigger.
With all that information we can get into hyper personalized content to deliver a far more personalized customer experience tailored to our customer needs and wishes, which they will more likely respond to us back again.
Conclusion
Marketing automation can help companies who run huge multichannel nurturing campaigns to blend marketing, customer service and sales department in order to deliver the most responsive and seamless personalized customer experience for your brand.
