A Quick Guide to Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a great way to free your team from repetitive tasks so they can focus on more strategic, creative and, frankly, human work. But what exactly is marketing automation? How does it work and what are some of the pitfalls to avoid?

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the process of simplifying and automating routine marketing functions with software. It enables marketing teams to prioritize, execute and streamline tasks to improve efficiency. It frees marketers’ time and allows them to focus their efforts on more value-added tasks.

In addition to streamlining workflows, marketing automation can enable or improve marketing practices like segmentation, lead generation, lead nurturing and scoring, customer retention and ROI tracking.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

Let’s take a deeper dive into how marketing automation can help your marketing team and some of the benefits it provides.

Personalized communications

Marketing automation, with the help of data-driven insights, enables you to deliver personalized content to prospects and customers. These communications address real needs at the right time and are tailored to recipients’ preferences. The relevance of the content helps you build stronger relationships, increase conversion rates and improve customer retention. In fact, personalization in email marketing can improve open rates by 26% and can result in transaction rates that are six times higher than non-personalized emails.

Efficient lead management

Marketing automation can fast-track conversions. It helps you more efficiently manage leads by prioritizing tasks that are likely to push customers through the sales funnel more quickly. It expedites responses to queries and can send follow-up emails to prospects who have browsed your website or abandoned their carts.

Seamless omnichannel experiences

Marketing automation enables you to collect data and create a unified view of your customers. It helps you offer seamless, personalized experiences across any and all channels that your customers use.

Conversational marketing + instant engagement

Marketing automation enables instant engagement with the help of AI chatbots that can engage with buyers on your websites and move them through the funnel. It also helps identify website visitors and personalize their experiences based on their profiles, behavior and how they’ve previously engaged with you.

Report automation

Marketing automation makes data visualization and analysis quick and easy. It can automate report generation with the help of tools like Google Analytics, Tableau and Power BI.

How Does Marketing Automation Support Customer Journeys?

Marketing automation can streamline and augment your efforts during every stage of the customer journey.

Awareness

During the awareness stage, when your marketing efforts are focused on lead generation, marketing automation platforms can capture and organize data from website traffic, social interactions, email, pay-per-click (PPC) results and more. Marketing automation also enables you to segment your contact lists so you can tailor content to different groups based on their attributes and interests. You can then send a series of automated emails to create awareness about your brand.

Consideration

The goal of this stage is to show your prospects that your products or services are an ideal alternative to competitors. Marketing automation allows you to create workflows for tasks like sending follow-up emails or requesting calls. These automated workflows are activated the moment a customer performs a specific action or behavior, such as opening an email or clicking a link.

Decision/purchase

The decision or purchase stage is when you can convert a lead into a paying customer. Marketing automation enables you to encourage leads to take follow-up actions, like signing up for a trial offer or setting up a call for a product demonstration.

Retention

Even after converting your prospects to customers, you can continue to use marketing automation to retain them through cross-selling/up-selling and other promotional activities.

The customer journey is non-linear, and the stages are fragmented across multiple channels and devices. But marketing automation is able to make the journey holistic and seamless – delivering the right type of engagement at the right time through the right channels to ensure your brand stays top-of-mind at every stage.

What Are Marketing Automation’s Capabilities?

Marketing automation platforms can help generate leads, align sales and marketing, automate customer onboarding and retention and create a better understanding of consumers’ behaviors.

Data integration and lead capturing

Marketing automation solutions integrate with business applications like customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms to extract customer data. They can also pull customer data from websites, mobile apps and online stores.

Marketing automation systems also power forms that capture information from your prospects and build your sales leads database. Some platforms also allow you to present different forms or CTAs to prospects and progressively profile them to improve data quality over time and interactions.

Lead management

Automation platforms can automate lead scoring and profiling to classify them based on their potential. They also allow you to segment leads into different groups based on predefined criteria. This helps you focus your marketing efforts on more promising leads and boost your ROI.

Multi-channel messaging

Marketing automation lets you launch campaigns and send messages through a variety of channels, including email, social media advertisements, SMS and more.

Customer journey nurturing

Marketing automation can also enable nurture campaigns. This means messages – most often email but also social media and SMS – are triggered based on predefined user actions or status changes. This creates added engagement, moving consumers along the sales funnel.

Automated workflows

The key benefit of marketing automation platforms is that they increase productivity and efficiency. They enable you to easily create and manage automated workflows, optimizing many of your marketing and sales processes.

Real-time alerts

Maketing automation platforms can send automatic real-time alerts to your marketing and the sales teams. If a workflow requires action to be taken by a team member, they’ll be notified in real time.

What Are Pitfalls to Avoid with Digital Marketing Automation?

Getting the most value from your marketing automation efforts means avoiding some common pitfalls.

Poor data quality

According to Gartner, poor data quality costs businesses nearly $10 million per year on average. Inaccurate or incomplete data can hurt your email open rates, create operational inefficiency and reduce your marketing ROI. To keep your automated marketing on target and avoid being blacklisted, check customer data and scrub email lists regularly.

Lack of engaging content

Marketing automation makes it quick and easy to generate engagement with content – but only if your content is valuable and engaging. You need compelling content that will engage your target audience and encourage them to take follow-up action.

Excessive promotion

Too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing. According to a recent marketing fatigue survey, two-thirds of consumers want to receive fewer marketing messages and more than 60% have unsubscribed from three or more brands because they received too many messages. Marketing automation platforms make it so simple to send emails that it’s easy to get carried away and send too many messages too often. This can cause subscriber fatigue and lead to spam complaints and unsubscribes. Moderate the pacing of your campaigns and make sure you’re sending the most relevant content or offers at a pace that aligns with your customers’ journeys.

Lack of in-house expertise

It takes expertise to make the most of your marketing automation efforts. This includes the ability to critically evaluate your needs, pick the right tools, prioritize tasks for automation and troubleshoot any issues that arise. The lack of a proper setup can lead to ongoing execution challenges and results that are below expectations.

These challenges are common. Almost half of marketing professionals say they’re held back by a lack of internal expertise with marketing automation; over 40% say they don’t have the personnel to fully engage with their automation tools; and 31% admit to lacking a strategy.

Automate Your Marketing with Material

There are a lot of choices and a lot of factors to weigh when choosing marketing automation software. And, once you make that choice, getting the most out of it requires you to develop a strategy and bring a fair amount of expertise to bear on your marketing challenges and goals.

At Material, we offer end-to-end marketing automation services. We can help you quickly build out intelligent marketing automation, including personalized email campaigns and optimized customer journeys – allowing you to engage with every customer, through any channel, on any device.

We’re an Acquia Preferred Partner and have 50+ certifications with Salesforce. This means we have the ability to evaluate, integrate, optimize and support seamless, cloud-based marketing automation through the industry’s best-in-class providers. Material’s technical acumen, combined with our consultative approach and expertise in behavioral science, makes us a perfect partner for creating powerful, effective and automated customer experiences.

Whether you’re just starting your automation journey or looking to get more out of your program, we can help. Reach out today and let’s start the conversation.