How Effective Is Marketing Automation?

The best definition of automation in marketing is simply using software to automate and simplify marketing tasks. Automation can help save time on tasks such as sending email marketing campaigns, lead generation and sending invoices. These are just some of the many reasons why marketers and sales teams adopt automation. It helps to nurture leads, as well as customer relationships, which over time will improve the customer experience. 

Automation is an effective marketing process for several reasons. Our working day consists of repetitive tasks that include creating reports, drafting emails, setting reminders, and customer management. With marketing automation, you can set up manual processes that allow you to run automated campaigns that can continue to run in the background while you can focus on other bigger projects and campaigns. 

How does marketing automation work? 

Marketing automation is all about automating time-consuming tasks. You can define each task and then choose the appropriate marketing automation tools to help you complete and manage tasks effectively. Automation will save you valuable time overall and it can help you to focus on working more efficiently and towards your business goals. 

Marketing automation should be part of your marketing strategy, plain and simple. It allows you to use a platform to market your products consistently and efficiently. Performing these repetitive tasks through automation allows you to be more productive in other ways and gives you the opportunity to work with your customers directly. This allows you to collect valuable feedback and data that can be used to nurture customer relationships, shape future products and campaigns, and meet and exceed your business goals. 

What are the benefits of marketing automation? 

Marketing automation is extremely effective if you adopt it correctly. Using the correct tools and managing them effectively will not only save you time and money, but it will help you track and understand a customer's marketing journey. There are many benefits of using marketing automation, for example:   

1. Build and nurture relationships: New customers often must learn more about your business before making a purchase, which is why marketing automation, like personalised email, is important to building and nurturing that customer relationship. Email marketing automation is such an effective tool to use as you can help your audience learn more about your products and services through regular sends and increase conversion rates. 

2. Increase scale and scope of campaigns: Marketing automation helps to increase the scale and scope of your marketing campaigns. Automation is a much more effective and efficient method than creating email campaigns manually.  

3. Increase customer lifetime value: A key way to increase revenue is to get existing customers to spend more throughout their lifetime with your brand. Existing customers can be segmented or tagged and targeted with specific campaigns. Exclusive offers and first access to new products and information are just some tactics that can be used to strengthen your relationship with customers post-purchase.  

4. Track the customer journey: The more customer data you can gather, the better. Marketing automation allows you to track the customer journey and provides valuable information such as how long it takes for a customer to make a purchase, what pieces of content they are engaging with and what assets are leading to the highest conversion rates. 

5. Predict and shape customer behaviour: As mentioned before, the more data you collect from your customers the better. Marketing automation makes use of machine learning to improve product recommendations over time. You can use this automation to predict and shape what your customers do next, which in turn helps drive conversions and increase revenue.    

Which tools should you use for marketing automation? 

To know what automation tools to use, it is important to consider your business goals and marketing strategy. Automation tools are like individual workflows you can set up to perform contrasting functions that will help you to accomplish your goals. 

At every step of the customer journey and across all your customer engagement channels, there are certain workflows you can automate, like email marketing campaigns. You can start with these tools below: 

• Marketing email automation: You can choose to automate a single email like a welcome or abandoned cart series to take repetitive tasks off your plate. You can also choose to automate campaigns and include certain triggers and criteria that your customer must meet in order to receive further campaigns and content. 

• Customer Journey: Mailchimp’s customer journey builder helps you create unique, automated workflows for your contacts. This tool helps you think more about an end-to-end experience. With the customer journey builder, you're doing just that - building a journey for your customers with logic, strategy, and an end goal behind it. 

• Scheduling: From emails to social posts to postcards, you can stay ahead of your marketing by scheduling the date and time you want to send content to customers. If you trade worldwide, scheduling is a fantastic way to target specific customers in a specific country, at a time that is likely to generate high engagement. 

• Retargeting: Retargeting emails and advertisements make it easy to remind people of your products and services. Reminding customers about the products they have viewed and providing them with a clear path back to your website is vital. Think of retargeting as a gentle reminder that gets customers thinking about you and your products. 

• Optimisation & Recommendations: With product recommendations, dynamic content, a/b testing and send time optimisation, you have all the tools you need to build and maintain fruitful relationships with your customer base, increasing revenue and customer lifetime value. 

Marketing automation should be adopted strategically to meet your business and marketing goals. Use tools at your disposal to learn from your customers, structure your campaigns, and deliver the results you need to succeed. To find out more information on marketing automation, read our blog post What is Marketing Automation and why should you use it?   

If you would like help with your email campaigns or automation, get in touch with SilverDisc.