Businesses are fundamentally made up of a series of repeatable processes. The more processes that you can streamline or automate, the more efficient your business will be.
Sending automated follow-up emails, adding leads to your CRM and auto-pinging your sales team, automatically compiling KPI reports… With marketing automation, there are endless ways to save time while actually getting more done!
And importantly, any business that doesn’t implement marketing automation will almost certainly fall behind its competitors (who are almost certainly using marketing automation to be more efficient). Marketing automation increases sales productivity by 14.5% and reduces marketing overhead by 12.2, so you’re at a massive disadvantage if they are using marketing automation and you aren’t.
Keep reading to learn more about the impact marketing automation can have on your business, and tools and strategies you can use to start automating!
The Benefits of marketing automation
Less work
You’d be surprised how much of a days work involves a formulaic, almost cookie-cutter approach. Any repeatable process that follows an if-this-than-that formula is a good candidate to consider automating. Everything that can be automated means less time and work spent executing a repeatable process over and over. Setting up an automation takes far less work than executing and endlessly repeating process forever.
Reduced costs
The cost of human labor is a significant one in most businesses. Possibly even the largest cost. That means every task or repeatable process that can be automated is a reduction of your total operating cost. Or alternatively, you can get more done with the same costs. Either way, you get more bang for your buck in your business.
Additional streams of revenue
Right now there are probably half a dozen different marketing channels that you could be using to bring in more business, but many of these aren’t viable to manage manually. For example, Maybe you can bring in two new customers a month by doing social media outreach. Not enough to really assign a person to invest time working on (Hiring a person to work on this might have a negative ROI). But it’s still worth adding it to your bottom line if you can do it in a way that is basically no cost/automated.
Lead generation and lead nurturing
Marketing automation can help streamline your processes for generating and filtering leads in a variety of ways, including:
- Compiling leads: Marketing automation technology helps collect unqualified leads from multiple sources, like other marketing, customer data, and eCommerce systems.
- Removing duplicates: Lead augmentation can help fill in missing customer information (such as a missing email address), while deduplication is exactly what it sounds like. It helps clean your customer data by removing duplicates or incomplete customer data.
- Lead scoring and qualification: Score leads based on certain criteria, such as customer engagement with marketing efforts or estimated customer value.
- Lead nurturing: Manage the entire lead lifecycle from collection to conversion, and remove inactive leads.
- Multichannel lead management: Implement a single strategy across multiple channels (many software products support email marketing, social media marketing, website, and even webinars and event marketing).
Better marketing and sales alignment
If you want to keep your sales and marketing departments aligned, you can use marketing automation processes to ensure that essential info is passed between departments.
This helps solve a variety of issues, such as:
- Losing track of important leads
- Not checking in with a new customer
- Referencing incorrect or out-of-date info when reaching out to a customer or prospect
- Keeping the pace and pipelines for your sales and marketing in sync
Automated reporting
Marketing automation solutions generally offer a selection of tools to help automate your reporting for sales and marketing. This includes features like preconfigured lead generation KPIs, custom KPI dashboards, tracking various metrics, and compiling and analyzing data and metrics by generating reports. This can provide you with the essential data that you need to make informed decisions about your marketing, while also saving your team all the time it would take to manually create weekly reports. Automated reports are generally dynamic, so they are always up to date. Whereas a manual, weekly report might be out-of-date by almost a week!
Better data for smarter decisions
Trying to map out the analytics of a marketing funnel through manual data collection and calculation is an absolute nightmare, if not fundamentally impossible to do properly. That’s why using marketing automation tools to better collect and interpret your data. From tracking website engagement to optimizing marketing emails for better conversions, and beyond.
Personalized customer journey
What if you could customize your marketing message uniquely for each of your distinct customer segments? What if you could send them custom content geared towards them specifically, or even show them a landing page just for them? Or maybe send out an email marketing campaign that changes based on how the person interacts with the previous email in the campaign?
What marketing tasks should you automate?
- Respond immediately to an email contact request
- Assign inbound leads to a sales representative
- Stay engaged with prospects who aren’t ready to buy—yet
- Welcome bundle for new clients
- Remind a customer about an abandoned shopping cart
- Stay on top of failed billing charges
- Send appointment reminders
- Gauge client satisfaction, ask for reviews, ask for testimonials
- Send a birthday message to clients
- Email followups (you can send followups automatically rather than manually drafting and sending emails to customers)
- Send customized messages to prospects to guide them through your customer journey (asking for a review, sending a followup, sending a survey after answering a support ticket, etc.).
The best marketing automation tools
Hubspot
HubSpot is your all-in-one stop for all of your marketing software needs.
Active Campaign
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation (CXA) platform that helps businesses meaningfully engage customers. Access pre-built automations that combine transactional email and email marketing, marketing automation, ecommerce marketing, and CRM for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an email marketing platform. Powered by data, built for ecommerce and web businesses.
Mailchimp
Share your ideas with Mailchimp email newsletters—then use its landing page and form builders to grow your lists and take marketing further with drip and transactional emails.
Sendinblue
All-in-one marketing platform for engaging with your contacts. Cover your entire marketing funnel with our all-in-one solution for marketing automation, email marketing, SMS marketing, chat, Facebook Ads, CRM and for sending transactional messages via email and SMS.
Bloomreach
The #1 Commerce Experience Cloud, Bloomreach offers a suite of products that drive true personalization and digital commerce growth, including: Discovery, offering AI-driven search and merchandising; Content, offering a headless CMS; and Engagement, offering a leading CDP and marketing automation solutions.
Omnisend
Omnisend is a marketing automation platform built for growing ecommerce businesses that have graduated their basic email marketing tools.
Onesignal
An omnichannel messaging platform supports email, push notifications, in-app messaging, and SMS. Powered by superior architecture, OneSignal is designed to easily help you improve your customer journey for a mobile world.
Iterable
Iterable is the customer communication platform that helps brands deliver joyful experiences with harmonized, individualized, and dynamic communications at scale. With Iterable, marketers can create, optimize, and measure every interaction taking place throughout the customer journey.
ManyChat
Using ManyChat, you can have one single platform to automate and manage all your conversations on FB Messenger, Instagram DM, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, Email. Whether you are looking to generate more leads, automating your campaigns, or improving customer satisfaction by increasing your SLA times, ManyChat has all the tools to solve your business’s marketing needs.
Moosend
Moosend is a powerful email marketing automation software with world-class features, state-of-the-art automation flows, and lead generation tools that help you grow your business from day one whilst maintaining an award-winning all-in-one user interface.
EngageBay
EngageBay helps companies to acquire, engage, nurture web visitors and convert them to happy customers and grow their business 5x and more.
Zapier
Zapier helps businesses easily automate work in 4,000+ web apps without writing any code. With Zapier, you can automate anything, fast, and eliminate all the repetitive tasks that slow your team down at work. Unlock the power of automation by easily connecting the tools you rely on in minutes, and building custom workflows that fit the way you work.
GetResponse
With an all-in-one suite of online marketing tools, GetResponse is the perfect solution to help you grow your business.
Drip
Drip is the email marketing automation platform for growing ecommerce brands who want to take their email marketing to the next level. Unleash the power of your ecommerce customer data and deliver perfectly personalized email marketing strategies that will grow your revenue.
Intercom
Intercom is a Customer Communications Platform that powers in-context exchanges and offers an unparalleled user experience, engaging customers across their lifecycle.
Keap
Keap is all-in-one marketing and sales automation software for small businesses. It effortlessly combines CRM, email marketing and e-commerce.
Kartra
Kartra is an all-in-one solution to manage your online business: checkout, automated email campaigns, site builder, membership portals, etc.
Ontraport
An all-in-one business and marketing platform designed for information marketers, experts, and coaches.
With the increasing number and complexity of marketing channels, marketing automation is the perfect solution for efficiently engaging all your most valuable leads. This article should help get you started.
