Complete guide on marketing automation

Marketing automation helps you to identify potential customers, automating the process of nurturing those leads to sales-readiness. 

It automates actions that bring prospects to the point where they can be directly approached by the sales team with the aim of closing a sale and starting an ongoing relationship, and the information it gathers can drive your choice of marketing tactics.

Moreover, marketing automation does this by massively improving the efficiency of your sales funnel, quickly turning a broad base of leads into happy customers using a combination of tactics.

It supplies useful content that develops trust in and respect for your brand, quickly and easily helping leads to understand what it is they’re getting. Further along, when prospects have narrowed down the types of products they’re interested in, you can reach out with targeted messaging, specifically tailored to the groups that could best help to grow your brand. 

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.

You can use marketing automation across all stages of the buyer journey. Here are some examples to give you an idea:

• Attract: Automate your social advertising by targeting social media users who are similar to your existing customers and subscribers.
• Convert: Convert new website visitors into email subscribers through popup forms, quizzes, and flyouts.
• Close: Persuade your subscribers to buy from you with automatic abandoned cart or browse abandonment messages and a well-thought-out welcome series.
• Post-purchase: Keep delighting your customers long after they buy from you with relevant upsell and cross-sell promotions, targeted win-back campaigns, and other valuable post-purchase communications.

Components of marketing automation

Marketing automation has many useful features and capabilities that allow marketers to deliver results that prove ROI, including: 

1. A central marketing database: A place for all your marketing data, such as detailed prospect and customer interactions and behaviors. You can segment and target the right message to each customer. Think of this as a “system of record” for all your marketing information. 

2. An engagement marketing engine: An environment for the creation, management, and automation of marketing processes and conversations across online and offline channels. Think of this as the “orchestra conductor” for your customer interactions. 

3. An analytics engine: A way to test, measure, and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue. Think of this as the place you go to understand what worked, what didn’t, and where you can improve.  

4. A MarTech stack: A collection of all of the effective, collaborative, and scalable marketing applications that you need to help you achieve your goals. Think of this as the main place where you can use tech to stay connected to your buyers and deliver marketing­-sales alignment.

What is marketing automation software?

Marketing automation software automates marketing actions or tasks, streamlines marketing workflows, and measures the outcomes of marketing campaigns. These tools provide a central marketing database for all marketing information and interactions, helping marketers create segmented, personalized, and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects. These platforms provide automation features across multiple aspects of marketing including email, social media, lead generation, direct mail, digital advertising, and more.

A key component of marketing automation tools is the provision of analytics features to determine the success of an entire campaign across segments and channels. These features measure the impact of campaigns on marketing team KPIs and campaign ROI, as well as the impact of campaigns on company revenue.

These products often integrate with CRM software, social media management software, CMS tools, and account-based orchestration platforms. While marketing automation tools do include email marketing features, products in G2’s Marketing Automation category are excluded from the Email Marketing software category, which houses tools that only address automation in the email channel.

• To qualify for inclusion in the Marketing Automation category, a product must:
• Automate two or more of the following: email, social media, SMS, and digital ads
• Provide advanced email marketing capabilities including A/B testing, spam filter testing, scheduling, segmentation, and detailed performance reporting
• Act as a central marketing database for marketing information and interactions
• Allow dynamic segmentation of marketing campaign targets
• Contact targets across multiple channels after specific actions, triggers, or periods of time
• Perform lead management to include lead nurturing and lead scoring
• Generate forms and landing pages to collect prospect information
• Provide analytics and reports that track the entire lifecycle of a campaign, including ties to revenue and/or campaign ROI

What does bad or good marketing automation look like?

Traditional marketing automation often refers to triggering emails based on time delays or actions like email opens and email clicks. But is an email click alone enough data to execute a personalized lead nurturing strategy?

Marketing automation strategies that offer limited data like this to the marketer often result in bad marketing automation. You need context about who leads are and what they’re interested in to give prospects a good experience.

Marketing automation backed by an inbound strategy is centered around the prospect. Inbound marketing automation uses all the information we know about a person to inform the automation strategy, so we deliver the information they need to make a purchase, exactly when they need that information, in the place they’re looking for it.

Good marketing automation takes into account the evolving needs of your leads, and the behaviors and interactions they have with you across all of your marketing channels. Not just email. Using behavioral inputs from multiple channels such as social media, viewing a pricing page, or consuming a particular piece of content gives marketers the context they need to fully understand a lead’s challenges.

The most effective marketing automation also uses those various channels beyond email to communicate. That means the success of your campaign relies less on the email, and fully utilizes the various channels that influence a buyer’s decision.

Benefits of marketing automation

Let’s dive deeper into the other top benefits of marketing automation.

1. Save time and improve efficiency

Once your marketing automations are set up, they require little effort on your part to maintain while making your processes miles more efficient. This frees up the time you’d usually spend on day-to-day marketing tasks, which you can use instead to develop and improve your strategies.

Not only will you see more return on investment (ROI) for your marketing efforts and team, but you’ll also likely achieve your goals much faster than if you didn’t have any automation in place. Just remember to test and fine-tune your workflows to keep them efficient.

2. Improve customer relationships and their experiences

Automation also makes it quicker and easier to personalize your marketing efforts according to your customers’ behaviors, actions, interests, needs, and wants. 

By enabling you to send highly segmented, personalized communications exactly when your customers are most receptive to them, marketing automation removes friction from the customer journey, making it easier for your customers to buy, buy, and buy again.

Marketing automation systems can help you to analyze your communications beyond email clicks and opens, you’ll also gain a better understanding of your customers and subscribers.  

Finally, automatic post-purchase communications mean you can generate more reviews and customer feedback to support your acquisition strategies.

3. Make more money

Automating your marketing means you can streamline the conversion and closure stages of the customer journey. You’ll be able to reduce your abandoned cart rates while automating promotions, upsells, cross-sells, offers, discounts, and sales to grow your revenue efficiently.

Not to mention, marketing automation software can also help you to boost your revenue even further by sending data-backed product recommendations to your subscribers to tempt them into clicking “buy.”

4. Grow your business faster

What does increased efficiency, better customer relationships, and more sales mean? You’ll grow your business significantly faster with marketing automation than without it.

Recent studies show that a massive 80 percent of marketing automation software users saw an increase in the number of leads, while 77 percent also had an increase in conversions.

Why is marketing automation valuable?

Lead generation is an extremely important step in any business’s growth. By automating many steps in the process from marketing to sales, your team has more time to focus on overall strategy and nurturing the leads that show real promise. That means more prospects, and more customers.

Marketing automation is also able to give you a richer, more detailed picture of the behaviour of potential customers. Using behavioural tracking methods such as following a user’s path through your website, marketing automation software can help your marketing team to understand a prospect’s interests and where they are in the purchasing lifecycle. They can then customise any follow-up based around those action points.

For instance, let’s say a particular customer is reading about a broad category of products. This might indicate that they are at the beginning of the purchasing process, researching and comparing while preparing a shortlist. If they later download white papers on a specific product, that could indicate a narrower focus and a readiness to be contacted by a salesperson.

Bringing together information from touchpoints including website visits and downloads, social media activity and direct marketing enables automatic scoring, qualifying and prioritising of leads. This in turn can then drive wider marketing campaigns, including:

• trigger-based marketing messages
• infrequent “drip-feed” emails to maintain interest
• personalised emails
• Facebook or Twitter messages

Common problems that automation can solve

Many marketers today are overworked, dealing with issues like being unable to track engagement and chasing unqualified leads, just to name a few. Automation can assist by helping you scale your programs, delivering more personalized and targeted communications, aligning with sales, and measuring effectiveness. Below are some common problems that marketing automation can help solve.

• Problem: I need to do more with less. In a fast-paced digital environment, marketers feel pressure to do more with less: They need to generate more leads, grow revenue, and close deals faster. Once one program is finished, another follows immediately. Marketing automation frees up marketers’ busy schedules with automated tasks, so they can focus on more strategic work and let the software do the rest to manage leads. 
• Problem: I don’t have a way to track or optimize user engagement. Tracking user engagement is essential, and marketing automation allows you to capture, track, manage, and score leads coming in the funnel environment for the creation, management, and automation of marketing processes and conversations across online and offline channels. With this in place, you’ll be able to better optimize your programs and better demonstrate the ROI of your efforts. Utilize retargeting and recirculation to optimize engagement and connect with the buyer. Marketing automation provides an easier way to provide the right content to the right person on the right platform, where they are open to engaging with you. MarketingSherpa says 68% of B2B companies will use landing pages to nurture new sales leads for future conversion.  
• Problem: My leads aren’t converting, or I have a leaky sales funnel. 61% of B2B marketers say that generating high-quality leads is their biggest challenge, according to the  B2B Technology Marketing Community. Dealing with leads that aren’t converting or a leaky sales funnel is frustrating, but can be fixed. Marketing automation allows you to nurture prospects with relevant and useful information across multiple channels until they are ready to buy. Done well, nurturing can result in 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead.
• Problem: My leads aren’t qualified. Marketers can’t focus on just top-of-funnel lead generation and awareness-building strategies—they also need to make sure these leads are a good fit for the company. There’s no point in increasing lead generation if the leads have no possibility of converting to sales. Marketing automation helps you better understand your prospects and buyers. You will be able to personalize each individual buyer’s journey from the first touch to the sale and beyond, with marketing data and analytics, lead nurturing, and lead scoring capabilities.
• Problem: I’m experiencing marketing inefficiencies and tech gaps. If you are experiencing marketing inefficiencies, marketing automation can help. By automating certain manual workflows, your staff is free to focus on more strategic work that will help to improve overall processes, innovate marketing campaigns, and boost the bottom line. The automation of marketing communications like email and mobile makes sending targeted messaging quick and simple. With buyer personas, you can ensure you deliver personalized messaging at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Conclusion

If you’re spending too much time manually sending emails, creating social media posts, and analyzing your marketing campaigns, then it’s probably time you considered marketing automation software.

You’ll be able to make your processes more efficient while getting time back to focus on achieving your goals and developing new marketing strategies, which can only be a good thing for long-term business growth.

Marketing automation can integrate with potentially hundreds of other applications. On top of CRM, one of the most common integrations is with webinar applications to drive engagement.