Table of contents:
- What is marketing automation?
- Why is marketing automation important?
- How does marketing automation help marketers?
- How to implement marketing automation in your organization?
- Top marketing automation software platforms
- Conclusion
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a process of using software to automate marketing tasks to drive sales, generate leads, and effectively target customers with automated marketing messages across channels. It enables you to work with greater efficiency, increase conversions, reduce costs, and improve customer experience.
Why Is Marketing Automation Important?
Marketing automation can streamline your marketing efforts, make them more efficient, and helps your team to drive better leads and achieve greater ROI.
- Marketing automation on average drives up to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
- 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software, and 77% had an increase in conversions.
- 91% of marketing automation users agree it is “very important” to the overall success of their online marketing activities.
How Does Marketing Automation Help Marketers?
The following are some of the most important advantages of marketing automation for businesses.
- Personalization
Today customers expect personalization and one of the most important advantages of marketing automation is that it can scale personalized communications. Marketing automation provided a new frontier for marketers making it possible and easy for them to reach out to an unlimited amount of contacts, which was impossible to do manually.
- Makes Marketing And Sales Alignment Easier
Marketing automation helps in better inter-team communication allowing marketing and sales teams to work better together. Marketing automation software uses data and behavior analysis to attribute revenue to leads and sources automatically removing any scope of confusion between marketing and sales teams.
- It Saves Time And Money
Marketing automation allows you to automate various tasks that would have taken hours to do manually. It allows you to move everything to the cloud which saves time and money on your IT resources. It allows you to:
- Automate processes to give time to the things that require your expertise or attention such as strategy and client interaction.
- Automate any task in which active human involvement is not required so that you can focus on increasing the productivity and efficiency of your business.
- Automate emails as it doesn’t need any extra input from you and it ensures that the crucial communication takes place on time. Email automation helps in effective communication, nurturing leads, or developing a potential client relationship.
- Helps you Make Data Driven Decisions
Automation gathers and analyzes information about leads, customers, sales, campaign success, and more. It allows marketers to analyze the efficiency of marketing campaigns and improve metrics for better ROI.
The data from marketing automation analytics helps you in every stage of your marketing process. Automated A/B testing can also prove helpful in optimizing content in real-time for better impact.
How To Implement Marketing Automation In Your Organization
Identify the right tasks and create processes to automate manual tasks. The following are the major steps to complete the process:
- Identify The Right Tasks & Create a Process:
Find out the most repetitive marketing tasks of your team and you will understand where automation will be most beneficial. Also, choose those marketing tasks that are time-consuming and compatible with automation. The administrative burden on your staff will be significantly reduced by just automating response emails. - Select The Appropriate Automation Software:
There are many automation software available and you need to research well before you finalize the one best suited to your needs. There may be some software that is designed particularly for your industry, and some even offer a free trial allowing you to test the software before settling for it. - Train Your Team:
Make your staff understand the way automation is going to fit into their working day and the way their role is refocused. Train them and then let them test out the new systems properly and share any issues they might be facing while dealing with it. - Evaluate Automation Effectiveness:
The implementation of automation is just a start. You need to evaluate what is and isn’t working for you. The impact automation has on key metrics needs to be understood so that the right adjustments can be made at the right time.
Top Marketing Automation Software Platforms
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC):
SFMC (formerly known as ExactTarget) is one of the leading enterprise marketing automation platforms.
Companies can use Salesforce Marketing Cloud to personalize customer experiences through all channels with its suite of tools. It has a range of functionalities that can be used by companies to do everything from email marketing to global omnichannel campaigns.
2. HubSpot:
HubSpot offers fundamental automation features as well as the best inbound marketing campaign offerings and innovative features including:
- Landing pages and forms
- Dynamic content,
- SEO,
- Social Media
- Automation,
- Automated Email Responses,
- Thorough Personalization of Emails
3. Marketo:
Marketo, an Adobe Company, provides marketing automation software for marketing services with a focus on account-based marketing services. It has simple basic features and advanced features that make it ideal for medium and enterprise businesses with bigger and difficult datasets include:
- Account Insights And Account Profiling
- Digital Ads
- Mobile Marketing
- Revenue Attribution
- Marketing Analytics
- Dashboard
- Predictive Content
4. Pardot:
Pardot is a cloud automation solution that is usually used by enterprise clients having technical assets and time to know the platform. It helps companies to monitor and calculate the effectiveness of their communications, comprehend user behavior, and personalize content through campaigns based on any amount of specific standards.
5. Keap:
Keap (formerly known as Infusionsoft) is an all-in-one CRM, sales, and marketing automation platform having advanced features such as capturing and tagging new leads, allocating responsibilities, and sending emails that drive new leads. This marketing automation tool is best suited for small businesses and freelancers.
6. Klaviyo:
Klaviyo is an email marketing platform for ecommerce businesses. It helps ecommerce brands drive more sales with relevant and automated email marketing. This ecommerce marketing automation platform allows you to test and optimize automated emails.
7. Mailchimp:
Mailchimp is an email marketing giant providing marketing automation for small and medium-sized marketing teams. Mailchimp’s marketing automation suite offers innovative features including:
- Generating HTML email templates
- Landing pages
- Google remarketing ads,
- Facebook as well as Instagram ads
- A/B and multivariate testing
- Standard and comparative reports
8. ActiveCampaigns:
ActiveCampaigns leads in the small business marketing automation area and can be effortlessly integrated with several platforms. It has all the fundamental features of a perfect marketing automation platform, with few innovative functionalities including contacts and leads scoring, site and event tracking, dynamic content, SMS marketing, predictive sending, and a mobile application.
Conclusion:
Marketing automation software is a tool that allows you to share your passion for the product with your audience, as well as to listen to their feedback, to react in real-time to their actions.
A lot of the marketing automation softwares manage spam and can do email lists or contact list management automatically saving you a lot of time and money. It also improves efficiency for your sales staff so that they do have to do things manually as the repetitive tasks can be automated using marketing automation.
Any company with good planning, defined goals, specialized training, and optimized content can gain a lot from automation. This is the time to bring automation to your brand as the AI market is considered to be worth $16 billion by 2022.
Marketing professionals using automation properly can reap benefits including better efficiency, cost savings, enhanced productivity, better insightful analytic data, and improved customer support.
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
