Take Advantage of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a huge topic. It would have to be given the more than 14,000  (yep that number is correct) marketing technology products available. (Not every piece of marketing software is marketing automation software, though.) Deciding which tools are right for your organization amid the sea of options can be overwhelming.

We don’t claim to have a definitive list of marketing automation tools that are best to use. That can be subjective and like a lot of things in marketing, tends to come down to personal preference, affordability, and ease-of-use — not to mention what you actually need the tool to accomplish for you. What we will do here, however, is provide a solid overview of how marketing automation can streamline your processes, help your sales team, and have a positive impact on your customer’s experience.

Let’s jump in!

What Is Marketing Automation, Anyway?

Marketing automation is a tool or process that enables marketers to manage or run an aspect of their marketing plan without being completely hands-on. At its simplest: marketing automation promises to make your life easier. What marketer wouldn’t love that?

One of the earliest examples of automation for marketers is the introduction of computer databases that allowed for less manual maintenance of lists and contacts. Although computer databases have been around since the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 1990s with the emergence of the internet that marketing automation really took off thanks to Eloqua (which is now owned by Oracle). Originally, Eloqua was a platform that let marketers track user activity online — a pioneering development in the early days of digital marketing. (For more on the history of marketing automation check out this post from Act-On.)

These days of course, marketing automation tools can be as simple or as complex as you need them to be. There are tools to help build and send complex email campaigns, software that serves up personalized content to return website visitors, chatbots that help answer simple customer questions, and any number of other tasks.

Using Marketing Automation to Streamline Workflows

Taking the tedious parts of marketing out of your workday isn’t just about giving busy marketers a break. It’s about giving your audiences the messages they need at the right stage of their buyer’s journey to move through the sales funnel.

Knowing how and when a customer or prospect interacts with your company’s website, emails, chatbots, and customer service lines is invaluable information for sales and marketing. Tracking that information manually, however, isn’t really possible without a CRM (customer relationship management) system. Software like HubSpot, Monday, or Salesforce (to name just a few) automatically tracks these customer behaviors for you.

Armed with this information, you can make smarter sales and marketing decisions that cater to your audiences and drive them to take action. What’s more, some of those sales and marketing efforts can themselves be wholly or partially automated based on certain triggers you set up in your system.

Here are a few examples that show how marketing automation can benefit you, your sales team, and your customers.

Audience segmentation: Your CRM can help you group your audiences using different criteria. Depending on what kind of information you’re collecting, that criteria can include demographic characteristics, location, particular interest in one of your verticals, where they are in the sales funnel, and so on. You can then tailor messaging and offers that appeal to the specific needs of the group rather than sending all the people in your database the same message whether or not it applies to them.

Nurturing leads: You can create triggers that deliver certain messages based on user behavior. For sales teams, that means they can have a series of emails already created and ready to deploy automatically when someone enters their information on your site. Marketers may set up “welcome back” messages on chatbots to greet return visitors, and even set up workflows that serve up website content customized for a specific audience segment. B2C marketers may set up text messages that deliver offers and other messages to a user’s phone (assuming the user opts-in, of course).

Tracking audience behavior: “Looks like you left something in your cart!” Sound familiar? That abandoned cart message is a great example of an automated workflow based on audience behavior. But don’t think that’s just a B2C tactic. B2B companies could deploy a similar message to someone who signed up for a webinar but didn't attend, or clicked a “request a demo” CTA but only partially filled the form. Using intent data to deliver relevant marketing messages, content, and digital ads is highly effective.

Lead tracking: Automation tools can help sales teams understand where leads are in their journey through the funnel and document what marketing touches have already been delivered to a prospect. They can help organize contact information, and deliver personalized messages to a large group of people at once rather than spend time writing and sending emails individually.

Customer onboarding: Creating a “welcome” stream of email messages is a great way to get new customers excited about spending money and time with your company. The best part is you can pre-write a series of emails and have them deploy automatically once a prospect converts to a customer. It reassures them that they’ve made a good decision and gives you an opportunity to showcase different offerings they might also be interested in.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Tools

With so many options for both what marketing automation tools to choose and what to do with them, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

We’ve counseled our clients to consider:

• Size of their organization now and where it’s projected to be in a few years
• What they most need marketing automation to do
• Their internal team’s capacity to create and manage the tools
• Whether a new tool will integrate with the existing marketing software they use

Having a good grasp on what they really need a marketing automation tool to do can help narrow down their choices and avoid picking something that’s either not robust enough or far too bloated for their needs. In our experience, taking advantage of free demos or trial periods can be helpful in the decision making process.

Finally, don’t ignore personal preferences. If your entire company is used to using a certain CRM or email delivery system, take the time to evaluate new tools based on whether they’ll really help you rather than getting caught up in the promise of more bells and whistles. And, if you’re not sure exactly how to make these decisions you can always lean on an outside partner like CID to help audit your martech stack and streamline your marketing workflows. (Seriously. We love this stuff!)

Get help making the most of your marketing automation tools. Send a message our way to get the ball rolling.