What is Marketing Automation and Why Your Company needs it?

These are all time-consuming processes, and ones that can be made easier with the right automation software. Considering automated Local SEO means you only create campaigns or personalized content once, and let the software do the rest of the work for you, it’s a no-brainer for any online business. Of course, you always have the option to go back and revise your strategies as you learn from the data , but the initial effort you make has the potential to benefit you for years to come. Determine Which Triggers Are ImportantYou’ll need to specify which customer information and activities continue to be recorded into the system and how the sales and marketing teams are updated.
Optimize the marketing and sales funnel by attributing qualified leads and sales to specific marketing campaigns. Segment data to craft personalized campaigns for your products and services. Deliver highly relevant content to prospects at the right time and guide them through the buying cycle. Now that your lead stages are in place and you understand your audience, you must determine a lead qualification threshold. This is also known as lead scoring, which is the process of assigning a score to your audience based on multiple attributes. This will push leads automatically through your marketing automation system and help you prioritize your leads and respond to them accordingly.
Our regular readers will know that we recommend marketing automation to SMBs doing B2B and B2C selling online. That means you need to develop a strong content library and connect with each stage of the lead generation and nurturing process. Remarketing ads can easily become annoying, and end up doing you more harm than good. Because top marketers know that successful strategy is based on what’s been proven to work.
Here, automation helps convert their interest into purchase decisions. This could be through a well-timed email to send hard-to-refuse discounts and limited offers, abandoned cart reminders with or without a bonus, or even offering freebies. Check out this guide to marketing automation for marketing agencies.
On top of that, you need some kind of dashboard to best see how your automation strategies are working with your content, campaigns, and especially your audience. However, that customization usually comes with either a learning curve on your part or some added expense in the form of a consultant or a product engineer to help you get everything configured. For instance, if you sent an email to someone a week ago, but they just opened it this second, then you’ll see their name pop up at the top of your dashboard. From this tab, you can send a follow-up email or adjust the contact’s standing within the specific workflow.
You can use marketing automation tools to send you a reminder when a customer reaches certain sales milestones, for example. This enables you to reach out to customers and more easily personalize their experiences. Not only does Airbnb use marketing automation software and strategies to optimize its content and communications, but it also offers automated services to its hosts. As a host, it’s possible to improve the way you run and promote your property with smart functionality including automated guest communications as well as pricing management tools.
An email is then sent to them, thanking them for downloading the brochure. The content is personalized based on the information you have regarding the user. Don’t look at Eloqua unless you’re really going after enterprise-level software and you have the budget for it.
Without a customer-centric culture, supported by management, marketing automation often results in sheer auomation with little added value. This is not the case and depends on the ways marketing divisions use marketing automation. Most professional solutions offer advanced insight and analytics features, enabling a better customer view. With so much branded content to manage, quirky publication BuzzFeed uses automation to schedule social media communications while driving maximum efficiency across marketing channels.
This all-in-one platform lets companies drive traffic to their website, manage day-to-day content, score leads, create landing pages, organize marketing automation strategies, and more. Jessica Stewart is the resident marketing analyst at FinancesOnline and a pioneering member of our research team. Marketing automation software DailyStory is designed for small businesses, providing them with the ability to identify and engage top customers.
3 MIT graduates founded Unica in 1992 and built a web analytics marketing software that simplified understanding data. Towards the late 1990s, Hotmail offered free email services to anyone with an internet connection. And somewhere in between all this, we saw the birth of Search Engines and the rapid evolution of the Internet. Your team doesn’t have to focus on mundane tasks that are already scheduled to be executed by a marketing automation platform. They can direct all their attention to coming up with more creative marketing ideas which, in turn, boosts your team’s efficiency and delivers better output.