It’s easy to feel out of your element when you first come across the concept of marketing automation.
There are thousands of marketing automation platforms available in the market – all of which have different dashboards, specialize in various marketing channels, and use their own terminology.
For those who are just entering the scene, all of it can be intimidating to say the least.
In this guide, I’ll try to show you that marketing automation isn’t some far-out space technology that’s reserved only for large companies with even larger budgets
What is Marketing Automation?
Some key marketing automation capabilities for you to consider:
Automatically building marketing lists using landing pages that offer content assets to profile subscribers.
Automatically welcoming prospects with relevant email messages – these are messages personalized to the attributes of the individual.
Automatically reviewing interactions with emails and on-site content, then segmenting intent to purchase based on lead scoring and automatically serving ads or offers based on this information.
Automatically following up on prospects with nurturing messages to boost intent to purchase.
Automatically qualifying leads against preconfigured metrics and passing to sales without human interaction (this capability is only really relevant to B2B).
Automatically sending ongoing personalized messages delivering promotions and content based off the person’s attributes, in order to encourage customer loyalty.
Based on the study results, we can see that the top three advantages are that marketing automation helps you 1) save time, 2) generate more leads, and 3) increase your revenue.
But how does marketing automation help you achieve these goals exactly?
Let’s put together the capabilities we’ve mentioned a moment ago along with the study results and consider three different scenarios.
1. Marketing automation helps you serve your audience better
Automated campaigns that deliver the right kind of content to the individual prospects based on various cues, e.g. the pages they’ve visited, files they’ve downloaded, or courses they’ve signed up for.
See, with marketing automation, no matter how big your audience is, you’re able to keep a personal approach throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
More relevant communication leads to more engaged customers. That, in turn, usually leads to higher returns.
3. Automations improve your ability to scale your business
You’re providing top quality services for your clients, but every time you sign up a new client your workday becomes longer.
If you’d like to scale your business, there are only two ways out:
- either hire someone and delegate some of the tasks to them,
- or start charging your clients extra.
Neither of these solutions are perfect.
The situation can change, however, if you transfer more tasks to your marketing automation platform.
These could be seemingly simple but lengthy processes such as nurturing your prospects who’ve shown interest in your work.
Or these could be more complex activities, like setting up marketing funnels using landing pages, Facebook ads, and email campaigns for your clients.
When you use marketing automation, every new client you sign won’t add as much to your workload, because a lot of the processes are carried out automatically.
This leaves you the time to acquire more customers, develop your business further and at a higher pace.
These are just three reasons why marketing automation is worth your consideration.
How does marketing automation work?
While marketing automation software can be very robust, most of these tools follow a simple logic – If X happens, then do Y.
For example:
If someone fills out a form to access an ebook on one of my landing pages (X), then the system should send them a welcome email with the access link (Y).
This is a very simplistic example, but it’s good to start with one of those before we double-down on more complex scenarios.
Common features
Marketing automation platforms offer a variety of different features.
Here are some of the most common ones:
- Email marketing
- Forms and landing pages
- Lead nurturing
- Lead generation
- Campaign management
- CRM integration
- Social media marketing
- Lead scoring and tagging
- Ecommerce
- Visitor tracking
- Analytics and optimization
While these are most common, it’s worth noting, however, that different platforms may specialize in different marketing channels.
Because of that, some marketing automation software may offer robust capabilities in certain aspects of digital marketing, while only scratching the surface in others.
When is a good time to start using marketing automation?
I hope I’ve managed to show you that marketing automation can generate high returns even if you don’t have a large team or budget.
Think about how much time you could save by automating various parts of your business, like welcoming new subscribers, nurturing prospects, or retargeting those who abandon their shopping carts.
Even if you haven’t developed a robust omnichannel marketing strategy in place yet, you could begin automating your marketing campaigns.
As a matter of fact, the sooner you start building marketing automation workflows, the better.
Best marketing Automation Software
GetResponse is a marketing automation platform. It enables you to create a valuable marketing list of prospects, partners, and clients, so you can develop relationships with them and build a responsive and profitable customer base.
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