Marketing automation is not a new kid on the block. You may have heard of it and even used it but are still not sure what’s it about and what it can do.
Is it necessary for a marketing team so it can run efficiently? The simple answer is yes.
Ask around and you will know that marketers who use marketing automation software performs better than marketers who don’t.
It’s not just a nice-to-have tool that you think you can do without. Marketing automation has already become a standard.
Definition of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a software that automates monotonous marketing work, not just for the sake of efficiency, but to provide a more personalized experience to the customers. It measures, streamlines, and automates marketing tasks and workflows such as:
- 1Email marketing
- 2Lead generation
- 3Landing page creation
- 4Segmentation
- 5Lead nurturing and scoring
- 6Landing page creation
- 7Cross-channel marketing campaigns
- 8Cross-sell and up-sell
- 9Retention
- 10Measuring ROI
- 11Website personalization
While it’s true that you may do all of these manually or without a software, but time will come when it becomes cumbersome as the volume of your transaction grows.
You do not want to ignore a customer query, much more miss out on an order, because your manual system can no longer handle your transactions. You must automate!
Ouch! Is your website costing you sales? Find out with a free audit.**
** Not another disguised sales pitch. No strings attached. Applicable tips.
Strong coffee and nearby seating is highly recommended, but not mandatory.
Signs you need to automate
Here are some signs that tell you it’s time to automate.
- 1It takes you days to reply to basic inquiries like product list, price, availability, etc. Worse, some of these inquiries are left unattended.
- 2You get confused which order to attend to first that you sometimes find yourself prioritizing the one that follows-up the most, instead of the one that came in first.
- 3You can no longer keep track what your customers bought, and you miss the opportunity to upsell or resell.
- 4You have a lot of customer data, and you don’t know what to do with it.
- 5You cannot measure which of your marketing campaigns brought in revenues.
- 6You have a lot of content but have no good method to distribute it.
- 7You spend way too much time on repetitive tasks.
None of these would be a problem if you have marketing automation.
Marketing Automation Myths
Automating your marketing campaigns should be a no-brainer. However, there are some
misinformed opinions going around about it. Some of these are:
- 1Marketing automation replaces the marketing team – It does not replace the marketing team. Marketing automation cannot think and cannot conceptualize marketing campaigns. What it does is take care of the routinary and oft-repeated tasks. When these routinary tasks are taken off their plate, the marketing team can focus more on sensitive and critical tasks that a machine cannot handle.
- 2Marketing automation is just for email – Automated marketing sends messages to customers (potential and current) through email, social media, web, and text. It’s more than just sending emails automatically so you will not forget. It’s about efficiency so you don’t need to write and send the same or similar messages to each customer every day. It’s also about correctly identifying the visitors in your site that really need the message. Email may be a good place to start, but marketing automation opens up more options for marketing campaigns and opportunities for lead acquisition. You can have
conversations with your customers everywhere they interact with your brand. - 3Marketing automation is just for marketing – The marketing team uses the marketing automation software, but they’re not the only ones benefiting from it. The sales department benefits as well because the leads they get are pre-qualified by the system and this means higher likelihood to make a sale.
- 4Marketing automation ends once a sale is closed – It is more than closing the first sale. Marketing automation creates opportunities for upsells, cross-sells, and future engagement that can lead to repeat business.
- 5Marketing automation is only for big businesses – Small businesses find marketing automation a wise investment because the automated processes allow them to focus on higher-level activities. There are a lot of software providers in the market that small businesses will find a service that matches their budget. Build your marketing workflow on a small scale and let the process grow with your business.
Ouch! Is your website costing you sales? Find out with a free audit.**
** Not another disguised sales pitch. No strings attached. Applicable tips.
Strong coffee and nearby seating is highly recommended, but not mandatory.
An efficient marketing program is run by smart marketing teams. One reason they’re smart is they use marketing automation knowing that it can make their campaigns more accurate, empower their sales team with the best leads, and achieve higher ROI.
They know that this tool can help them understand the sales funnel better and determine when leads are ripe for buying. Marketing campaigns become so effective that the marketing programs are now seen as a revenue generator instead of a cost center.
As a result, it will be easier to get support, budget-wise, to execute future marketing campaigns. And what marketer doesn’t like that?