Marketing Automation solutions improve influence and engagement with customers and prospects. They reduce mundane and repetitive tasks. The marketing department can thus concentrate on the marketing strategy. Automation has a direct impact on sales quality by delivering engaging messages consisting of offers. The data that is fed must be continually verified and normalized. Current Marketing solutions allow data to be managed under optimal conditions.
What is Marketing Automation?
The basic formula of all marketing is:
Lead definition + Contact details + Campaign = Marketing
Automating these steps using technology and software makes it a Marketing Automation . Thus, software or a commercial application makes it possible to automatically process certain or more stages of marketing. This is called Marketing Automation.
There are many long and complicated definitions of automation software. In short, they are used to automate the marketing process based on prospects' interests and interactions. They help improve the customer experience with increased efficiency and higher conversion rates.
The fundamental goal of marketing is to produce more revenue for your organization. To achieve this, you need to increase traffic to your site. You need to convert this traffic into leads and turn them into end customers. Marketing automation influences the conversion and closing phases of this process.
What are the advantages of Marketing Automation?
The advantages of Marketing Automation are as follows:
- It speeds up the whole campaign enormously
- Marketing intelligence helps you target only leads with a high probability of converting
- Your employees benefit from significant support in finding and helping the prospect most interested in your services. So, he goes the last mile to make sure one more deal gets done.
- Detailed analytics and statistics help you improve with every campaign
How does it work?
Today, hundreds and thousands of marketers rely on email campaigns to drive more traffic and achieve better results. They send email after email to their entire prospect list. They hope that the message will appeal to some of them and that the customer will eventually purchase a product or service. But does this really help businesses?
Repeatedly sending the same message to all prospects and customers can annoy them and cause them to “unsubscribe”. Ultimately this deprives you of any opportunity to do business with them in the future. This is where a marketing automation system would be a wise investment. This system allows you to maintain your leads throughout the purchasing process. It also allows you to deliver personalized and highly targeted messages that truly meet the customer's specific needs.
READ ALSO: The fundamentals of marketing automation
Characteristics of Marketing Automation tools
Lead nurturing and drip marketing are the most attractive features of effective Marketing Automation software. There are many software programs available on the market. However, not all of them offer all the features on the same platform. Before choosing your vendor for automation, you should check if it offers all the essential features.
Marketing Automation tools work like an intelligent electronic controller. Prospects are nurtured and engaged until they are converted into qualified leads. Then they are motivated to go further down the pipeline. This prevents sales staff from being overwhelmed with leads that never turn into real customers. The product improves ROI for sales and marketing departments. Thus, beginners are not forced to go through the labor-intensive phases of the industry.
As leads are engaged and nurtured, their interactions are always measured and evaluated. And if they remain inactive, engagement and maintenance continues automatically. However, when the lead becomes active, the software automatically notifies the relevant sales department. Most interactions and information are automatically entered into the customer relationship management system. Thus, all the details of the prospect's interactions with the sales department are displayed. Having an active lead, and all the details on what makes this successful, is a great advantage for any sales rep.
Best practices to follow
Many SMEs are interested in using Marketing Automation tools. However, they face some obstacles. To avoid any issues in your marketing automation system, you need to follow best practices. The following pages have been designed with “what works best” in the market in mind.
Integration with CRM and sales process
It is very important to closely align sales and marketing operations for successful Marketing Automation. The marketing team needs to understand the sales cycle and how prospects move through that cycle. In order to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, you need to track leads throughout the sales pipeline. Additionally, it is important to know that by sharing data, marketing automation platforms and CRMs are able to integrate and communicate with each other.
Trend towards hyper-personalization
The trend towards hyper-personalization is the most ideal approach for the market. It helps provide people with what they are looking for and prevents spamming. Thinking about the people who showed some interest in your offers, who reacted positively, who clicked on your links and who bounced helps in personalizing the message and offers.
Avoiding autopilot mode
Marketing Automation is a good way to save your time and resources by programming certain functions. However, it is very important to avoid autopilot mode. Automation can quickly become a sales prevention tool when “contact us” forms are not routed correctly.
Always use a multitasking platform
There are many Marketing Automation platforms on the market. Some offer pure sales or email marketing, while others are limited to sales prospecting only. On the other hand, multitasking platforms have proven useful for managing your sales, emails, and digital marketing campaigns from a single dashboard. This saves time, increases efficiency and increases ROI.
Like the fingers of a hand, Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) operate individually, but depend on each other to perform the same basic tasks. Marketing automation is about starting customer relationships off on the best foot, while CRM is about managing and improving those relationships. Without both fingers, the hand still functions, just not as well.
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