Remember that e-newsletter you spent hours writing and designing? Or that ad you and your team worked on overtime? Well chances are, they’ve been left unread or skipped by your customers, or worse, moved to trash.
Now you’re back to the drawing board, trying to figure out what went wrong. Did you send or run it at the wrong time? Was it because of the copy or the colors you used? The product you featured?
It’s hard to answer these questions if you don’t know your customers. What makes them click? What do they want to see?
But how do you get to know your customers? Of course, it’s close to impossible to skim through their personal information or to talk to hundreds from your database.
This is where marketing automation plays a part.
Marketing automation removes repetitive marketing tasks from your hands and does the job for you. It is a technology or software used to streamline and automate marketing processes like email marketing, ad campaigns, and social media posting, all while providing your customers with a more personalized experience.
Let’s dive into the important facets of marketing automation.
Integrated Data and Analytics
If there’s one language that can be spoken by all business professionals and executives, it’s numbers. How much clicks did we get from those ads? How much leads can we attribute to Facebook, Instagram, and Google?
Data is an important aspect of marketing as it determines whether your copy, content, and design resonates with your audience, whether your campaigns should continue or which campaigns and channels are worth investing in. It also enables you to create and send personalized and relevant content to your prospective customers.
Through marketing automation, customer, product, and sales data from all channels are integrated into one analytics software. This helps you understand your customers’ needs, and thus enables you to deliver the right content at the right time.
Lead Generation
Capture
From the moment your website, ad, or form captures a lead, the marketing automation software pulls and integrates the data into your lead database.
Nurture and Convert
The lead nurturing feature of marketing automation helps you get an in depth look at your leads’ behavior, as well as segment and communicate with them according to their recent behavior and activities.
Marketing automation also implements lead scoring, which is a method used to rank prospects by their potential to convert into a sale. Through this, you will know what type of content to deliver, and frequency of communication, depending on each prospect’s lead score.
Drip Campaign
One of the ways to talk your way through conversion is by running a drip campaign. A drip campaign is a feature of marketing automation which facilitates the automatic delivery of personalized and targeted content to prospective customers on a set timing based on their online activities. It is a series of pre-written emails that are sent out when triggered by a specified action or event. These triggers may include:
• Member registration
• Abandoned shopping carts
• Order placement
• Event signup
• Newsletter subscription
• Prospect’s birthday
Social Media Automation
Gone are the days when social media managers had to open multiple tabs or applications to schedule posts on all social media platforms, or the days when they had to extract data from each of those platforms and compile them manually to create a single report.
With marketing automation, publishing multi-channel content and replying to messages can be done in a single interface, and social media analytics reports can be generated from one place. Furthermore, it conducts a more thorough search of all platforms for positive and negative sentiments about your brand by scouring all posts and conversations that mention you and your products and services.
The Bottom Line
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands which remember them and make relevant offers. With thousands of prospects at your door, there’s only so much that can be learned about their needs, aspirations, and behaviors without marketing automation.
Investing in a marketing automation software may seem expensive at first, but its use can lead to saving on operational costs and improving ROI in the long run. Contact us now and we will give you recommendations on the best marketing automation software to use for your business
