Know what is marketing automation, what a good marketing automation means, and how you can use it to grow your business.

How marketing automation works?

Marketing automation uses software to automate marketing activities. Marketing teams can automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, SMS marketing, social media posting, and even online Reputation management campaigns – not just for the sake of efficiency and accuracy, but also for providing a more personalized user-experience for their customers.

The technology behind marketing automation makes these tasks faster, easier and accurate to do.

What all can marketing automation do for your business?

When we look at the most common challenges faced by businesses, we know that generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout their journey remain on the. Along with these challenges, businesses also face the explosion of data being generated, but struggle to put it to an efficient use.

Marketing automation software helps businesses overcome these challenges by putting data to work by streamlining marketing workflows.

Many businesses think of marketing automation as a middle-of-the-funnel tool, only good for nurturing leads with automated email sequences. This approach can result in a disjointed experience for prospects and customers as they move from marketing, to sales, and to customer service. It is because email marketing is only one of the many other tools used in marketing automation.

In this approach prospects are forced through a sales funnel with arbitrary touch-points and irrelevant content. Instead of responding to individual customer needs, businesses serve up the same generic content to each and everyone repeatedly.

However, marketing automation strategies should be used across the customer lifecycle so that it creates a fertile ground for healthy, long-term relationships with your customers with flow of content relevant-to-customer basis. When it is done well, marketing automation delivers three major benefits to your business:

1. Personalized user-experience

Each of your prospects’ actions is an added data point for your marketing strategy. It tells you what customers are looking for right at the moment. This information is certainly very helpful, but manually tracking such behavior is impossible. However, with marketing automation, businesses can use these inputs across variety channels to deeply understand their customers’ present needs and deliver the right content at the right time.

Automating your marketing actions around such triggers, is called workflows. These help drive qualified prospects to helpful content, resulting in warm leads that can then be nurtured thoughtfully into hot leads and then into customers.

The beauty of marketing automation is that you can use it for the post sales customer journey as well. With the customer at the center of the flywheel, businesses can continue to engage customers with highly personalized workflows that lead to loyal, repeat customers for cross-sales, up-sales and referral-sales. 

2. Streamlined processes

Marketing automation takes your whole business together with streamlined processes that keep your customers at the center of it all. It can build processes that work across different functional teams so you can reduce customer effort at every stage of their journey. It breaks through silos and works together to provide a unified customer experience right from the very first touch-point, all the way to customer purchase and beyond.

With effective marketing automation, businesses get rid of complicated hand-off procedures, because everything is automatically saved in your central marketing-hub, and internal workflows can help you prioritize tasks as needed.

3. Integrated data and analytics

Your Marketing automation hub stores all of your prospects’ actions as an added data point for your marketing strategy. The marketing automation software, provides an integrated data with analytics that the businesses are able to use to deeply understand their customers’ needs and deliver the right content at the right time. These analytics help businesses remain alert to the customer-pulse and this drive qualified prospects to helpful content, resulting in warm leads that can then be nurtured thoughtfully into customers.

How to get the most of marketing automation

We can say that, marketing automation is a combination of software, strategy, and customer-centricity driven with integrated data and analytics. It allows businesses to nurture prospects with highly personalized, relevant and useful content that helps convert prospects to delighted customers, and further, customers to loyal advocates.

To get the very best out of marketing automation, businesses must weave automation throughout their business to unite teams with processes that save time. Together with the human touch, marketing automation can create a wonderful flywheel that keeps your business growing at a desired pace.

Businesses can start by focusing on the customer journey, rather than on the needs of their own businesses. Identify all potential touch-points that could benefit from marketing automation and build processes that ease the customers from touch-point to touch-point.

• Must organize contacts using a CRM integrated with your marketing automation software, so that every action the customer takes is tracked as another data point.
• Must use these data points to connect customers to the next step of their journey – whether that’s educational content, a salesperson, or a customer success window. The benefit of marketing automation is to be able to use this white-glove approach with very large number of customers at the same time.

A great marketing automation strategy synchronises your teams by prioritizing tasks and making hand-offs a breeze. Contact records can be owned by the marketing team until the lead is hot and ready to be contacted by sales, at which point automation assigns and notifies the sales rep/team. The journey continues when the customer purchases, customer success team is notified, and can see all the past conversations and actions taken by the customer on their way to the sale. The process is not only seamless and efficient, but it also builds a long-term relationship between the customer and the business.

How can businesses make marketing automation work?

Marketing automation is really powerful. To make it work, businesses must understand all its components and nuances. This page has compiled some of our top resources that will help you understand those nuances so you can make marketing automation work for your business.

How does marketing automation affect your customers?

By now you must have understood that marketing automation isn’t just about what it can do for your business. It also pays off for your customers as well by solving common pain points that have arisen in the digital-era. Today your customers are flooded with information, which makes it tough to find the answers they search and need. When they do manage to contact your company, they most likely have a disjointed experience as they move from team to team, across channels, and between different platforms. By connecting teams, gathering data in a usable format, and prioritizing behind-the-scenes tasks, marketing automation reduces this friction.

1. Surface more relevant content

Marketing automation enables you to be specific about what each customer sees. From advertising to email marketing, you can use your buyer personas along with behavioral targeting to only send the information to each prospect or customer what exactly they need. Customers are short of time – automation helps cut to the chase by using the data you’re already collecting to highlight the most pertinent content at the right time in the right form.

2. Provide better answers, faster

With marketing automation businesses can prioritize tasks and manage leads, so incoming questions get answered quickly. Also, with behavioral data stored in your CRM, customer-facing teams are empowered to provide more relevant help without the need to dig for information first. You can quickly understand your customers’ history and automate responses based on previous purchases, in-product actions, or its lifetime value.

3. Offer seamless, omni-channel experiences

We all hate repeating ourselves. And that’s why marketing automation is so great for customers as well. Data is collected, stored, and used in your marketing software so you can offer your customers a personalized experience like pre-filled forms, targeted emails that meet their needs, and customer service that feels as familiar as the store down the street. With marketing automation, customers get the same experience no matter what channel they are contacting you on.

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