The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation

The innovation known as marketing automation promises big things: more leads, conversions, and sales, all with less work. 80% of the world’s top-performing companies using marketing automation technology for the past three or more years have seen a notable boost in revenue as well as consumer engagement.

For marketing professionals, marketing automation offers an exciting opportunity for greater efficiency, cost reduction, and an enhanced customer experience (CX). Embarking on an automation journey for your business may seem intimidating, but with the right advice, it’s easier than you think. Get it right and it will offer great rewards, too.
Here, we’ll explain everything a marketing team needs to know about automation in marketing and how you can use it to your brand-boosting advantage.

What is marketing automation?

So, what exactly is marketing automation? Marketing automation is a term used to generally describe the use of a platform whose main purpose is to automate activities across your inbound marketing channels. Generally, these can include repetitive, albeit essential, tasks such as sending emails, social media and managing contact information.
When used correctly, marketing automation allows you to efficiently and effectively generate leads and nurture prospects at every stage of the customer journey, allowing you to drive more revenue and maximize ROI – all without having to sacrifice the quality of your work.

Why use marketing automation?

Working with the right marketing automation platform and approach, you will see a healthy return on marketing investment (ROMI).
Here we look at the business-boosting benefits of using marketing automation tools and making them a key part of your ongoing promotional strategy.

1. Cross-departmental collaboration
The right marketing automation platform and strategy will inspire better communication between your sales and marketing department.
Increasingly, the role of sales and marketing is seeing a colossal level of crossover, such as within social selling. Marketing automation tools offer sales enablement features that empower marketing teams to enhance their lead-nurturing efforts with targeted campaigns, content, and communications.

2. Save time and lower costs
Another key benefit of marketing automation is its ability to save time and lower operational costs. Not only can these intuitive tools automate certain repetitive tasks, giving marketers time to invest in more creative or profit-boosting activities, but some platforms also serve up valuable pockets of data.

Automated processes will take care of customer communications, lead nurturing, content scheduling, social media management, market research, analytics; practically any task that doesn’t require active human involvement. Implementing automation can, therefore, lead to increased productivity and better efficiency for your business.

3. Improved budget allocation
Expanding on the last point: when team members have the time to focus on their core tasks, it makes them more productive. In turn, projects are delivered faster, without the need for investment in extra staff.
Automation removes the drain of repetitive tasks, allowing you to get the most out of specialists. With this saving, your business can reallocate the budget directly back into campaigns to see more returns.

4. Monitor and target audiences
A solid marketing automation platform will give you the power to monitor and target your audience with pinpoint precision. Armed with autonomous technology, such tools can track real-time data or monitor engagement and behaviors with minimal human input. In doing so, it’s possible to create more targeted, personalized communications across channels at times when specific audience segments are likely to engage the most. The result? A consistently healthy ROI and increased customer loyalty.

5. Be consistent with branding
Without consistent branding across channels, you will become less recognizable to prospective customers. Strong branding is one of the cornerstones of marketing success and by using marketing automation to your advantage, you will remain consistent across the board.
Marketing automation tools are effective at retaining a specific style with visuals, content, and communications across all key marketing channels which, in turn, will help you boost your brand reputation in a saturated digital space.

Marketing automation tools & platforms

Now that we’re up to speed with the benefits, we’re going to look at a variety of marketing automation platforms.

These pieces of marketing automation software are designed to drive insight and efficiency, leading to progressively better promotional outcomes in the process.

Get Response
Get Response is a marketing automation platform that was originally focused on email marketing. But now, this savvy piece of marketing automation software has a far more agile and integrated automation setup. With Get Response, you can organize workflows with an intuitive drag-and-drop menu that’s based on a trio of parameters: conditions, actions, and filters.

Customer.io
Customer.io offers everything you need to customize, target, and test your messaging based on how consumers interact with your business.
It’s an especially triggered messaging system that connects emails based on customer behavior and specific target audiences. Customer.io integrates smoothly with a range of mobile interfaces, serves up real-time data, and boasts a high level of interactivity with audiences.

MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular and affordable marketing automation options out there, and it’s consistently one of the best-rated, particularly by small businesses.
As MailChimp has perfected its email strategy down to the finer details, this is really its core strength. So if you have a colossal list and not many additional automation processes are needed and work on a tight budget, this tool could be for you.

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