What Is Marketing Automation And How Does It Work?

Marketing is important to your business. However, as customers grow, so does the unpredictable marketing landscape. This means that you are spending more and more time trying to keep up with the latest marketing tips and trends. It is wasting your precious time which you can use for other tasks.

In this article, you are not only educated with marketing automation but also suggest you the best tool so that you can set up your email and CRM automation right away.

What is Marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the process of using software and technology to build and implement applications to automate repetitive tasks, such as (yes) email marketing, advertising campaigns, tracking, and more.

For example, brands can create an automated lead generation funnel that collects an email address, sends a recorded demo, then invites the prospect to schedule a live demo.

Marketing automation is not a good strategy that you can ignore - the industry is expected to exceed $25 billion by 2023.

If you want to compete, you have to use marketing automation.

Good News? Using marketing automation can save you time, money and improve your marketing efficiency. Here are some ways to add it to your strategy.

How does Marketing automation work?

At a high level, marketing automation campaigns send targeted content based on behavior and data received with the goal of closing more sales.

Here’s an example:

You send an email inviting new leads to participate in webinars about your product or service.

Leads are directed to fill out a form to participate in the webinar. Everyone who RSVPs to Yes is automatically funneled into a new email list (this happens in your marketing automation tool).

Everyone on that list automatically starts receiving an email nurturing campaign. It begins by sending a thank you email to everyone who has attended the webinar. Then, a few days later, they receive a link to download a case study on a similar topic.

Finally, when leads download that case study, they’re automatically sent to your sales team so they can follow up with them (as these leads are highly qualified and make the buying process even shorter).

Marketing Automation Features

Marketing automation isn’t limited to companies with big budgets or a never-ending list of customers. This can have a powerful impact on companies of all sizes, especially small businesses that are already limited by time and resources.

Marketing automation comes with many features. Some of the key features of a marketing automation platform include:

1. Builds Relationships: New customers rarely purchase from a business when they first learn about it, which is why marketing automation, such as personalized email, is key to building and fostering that relationship. By helping your audience learn more about your products and mission through regular, thoughtful messages, you’ll be able to encourage and increase conversion rates.

2. Automates social media: With tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, you can automate the posting of all your posts once you’ve created captions, copies, images, links, and hashtags. Automated posting saves time, helps your brand maintain consistency, and also helps you take a more analytical and deliberate approach rather than moment-to-moment inspiration.

3. Helps you follow up on potential sales: Follow-up emails sent to customers browsing your website, leaving your cart, or even writing in with a customer service question can help close a potential transaction Huh. Other marketing automation features, such as follow-up reminders, can put your sales team on top of the most qualified leads.

4. Tracks the customer journey: The more you know about your customer, the better. With marketing automation, you’ll be able to track the customer journey and see how long it takes a customer to make a transaction, what information they need to complete that purchase, and which Marketing assets are leading to the highest conversions.

5. Automates reports: Automating your reports can save you countless hours of time creating data visualizations and basic analysis. The tools you’ll need are fairly accessible - Google Analytics, Tableau, and Power BI. You can easily automate report generation with custom visualizations, and there’s practically no coding. You must have a data source that will be connected to these platforms to generate reports.

6. Simplifies communication with a chatbot: In the simplest terms, a chatbot is a programmed responder with an interactive tool with pre-fed responses, links, and questions that automatically prompts your customers when they first visit your website. can assist. Even in the B2B space, chatbots can add a significant amount of value by lowering your bounce rates, capturing customer data, and freeing up resources.

The video above shows example of marketing automation for small businesses.

General Marketing Automation Integration

Marketing automation can be integrated with potentially hundreds of other applications. On top of CRM, one of the most common integrations is, according to Chung, with webinar applications to increase engagement.

Many webinar solutions offer an installed package that connects to a marketing automation platform and make it accessible to engagement data because someone who lives throughout the webinar will have higher engagement than a registered person Not done.

According to Lechner-Baker, integrating marketing automation with chat platforms is also very common. API connectors can lead to a number of other integrations for marketing automation, which have been covered by LearningCurv and Leadfeeder.

Email marketing automation

Email marketing is the major asset in marketing automation. Emails are a means of communicating with leads and providing endless flexibility in what you say and when you deliver it.

Email marketing automation is the act of using software to automate and simplify the sending of your emails, minimizing the time and effort required to execute a successful delivery. From drip campaigns to welcome campaigns to customer experience surveys and more, email marketing automation uses innovation to help smartly schedule sends to specific customers.

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Sales Automation

Marketing and sales automation can be used throughout the customer journey, from creating awareness to building a dedicated user base. This is especially powerful in the conversion phase, helping you increase revenue.

Here are three ways in which marketing automation can help grow your sales:

Generate Leads: Landing pages are an important tool in your marketing automation process. When combined with gated content and auto-responder emails, they create an automated flywheel that grabs new leads and starts nurturing them immediately.

Optimize campaigns: Email and landing pages can help you generate new leads, determine how qualified those leads are, and better nurture leads to conversions using data like website behavior We do.

Take advantage of triggers: Triggers are a unique form of email marketing automation that hits customers’ inboxes prime time, such as right after they exit the cart or end a free trial. When paired with offers and upsells, they act as an effective nudge to shop.

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Conclusion

Marketing automation can be a real game-changer for online businesses. It helps you score, rank, and nurture throughout the sales cycle while boosting conversions by targeting customers with the highest purchasing power. But more than that, it helps you live the life of your dreams. It takes all those pesky tasks off your plate and gets you into the big leagues.

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