Benefits Marketing Automation Can bring to You

What is the purpose of marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the use of a multichannel software platform to consolidate, create, and automate routine marketing activities. These platforms help marketers execute repetitive marketing tasks automatically.

Marketing automation helps generate leads, nurture those leads into customers, and measure overall ROI on marketing campaigns. Marketing automation saves time and cost for the organization.

What are the different types of marketing automation?

There are different types of marketing automation to handle routine marketing and content initiatives. A study by the Content Marketing Institute found that nearly 85% of all automation was for social media management, while marketing automation was used by more than 50% of respondents.

The main types of automation software used today are for the following marketing initiatives:

Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2019

Why is marketing automation important?

Marketing automation was initially designed to simplify email marketing. The massive growth of digital marketing channels, processes, and initiatives led to a greater need for companies to do more than send out emails. Today, companies need to align their marketing campaigns across social media, paid digital advertising, and SEO, among many others. Marketing automation helps allocate time and resources towards better messaging and marketing ideas instead of concentrating on one or two initiatives at a time. Thus, marketing automation has become one of the most crucial marketing requirements for any organization.

How can marketing automation help customer retention?

Customer retention is critical in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. It costs 4-5 times more to get a new customer than to retain an existing one. Existing customers are 60-70% more likely to buy from you, and just 20% of your customers can give you up to 60% of sales in a given period. Companies, therefore, have to be on top of their game to ensure that customers do not leave.

Businesses can use marketing automation for customer retention by targeting the right customers at the right time at the right place with customized messages. This can be achieved through digital media channels such as emails, websites, social media, and SMS or text messages.

Marketing automation brings in anonymous visitors to the company’s digital marketing content, converts leads into new customers and helps retain existing customers in a much more organized manner. Marketing automation can help an organization retain customers in several ways:

1. Create a seamless and better customer experience.
2. Design customized loyalty programs.
3. Create special offers.
4. Take quick action on customer feedback.
5. Maintain updated customer data without manual entries.
6. Track purchase behavior and engagement.
7. Identify key customers and reward them.

Benefits of marketing automation for organizations

A powerful, practical, and well-designed marketing automation platform gives many benefits to an organization:

1. Save time
   1. With marketing automation, what took days now takes hours and what took hours now takes minutes.
2. Scalability
   1. An organization can grow rapidly as its business picks up.
   2. Marketing automation tools have inbuilt scalability features that allow them to cope with increased demands of lead generation and conversion, database management, marketing campaign management, and overall marketing growth.
3. Better marketing and sales coordination
   1. Marketing automation helps lengthen the marketing pipeline and improves deal closure by sales.
4. Smarter spending
   1. Marketing automation helps organizations allocate more funds and resources towards strategic marketing initiatives rather than “unprofitable” routine activities.
   2. Marketing automation helps companies generate a positive ROI at multiple levels.
5. Performance tracking and reporting
   1. Marketing relies on data for everything.
   2. Marketing automation allows granular marketing campaign tracking at any point in the campaign’s lifetime.
   3. Some automation packages use machine learning and artificial intelligence to forecast future campaign performance based on historical data.
6. Better creativity
   1. Marketing automation facilitates better creativity by allowing marketers to focus on developing compelling content and interesting campaigns.
7. Better customer targeting
   1. Marketing automation helps businesses identify website visitors and convert leads into customers who can be segmented by demographics, buying or browsing behavior, and many other characteristics.
8. Campaign management across multiple channels
   1. One platform allows tracking and management of multiple marketing campaigns across different channels.
   2. This gives companies a holistic view of all campaigns and helps better allocate marketing funds.
9. Lower staff costs
   1. Marketing automation is designed to “automatically” trigger lead nurturing and marketing campaigns based on certain criteria.
   2. This reduces the need for a large marketing department.
10. Increased revenue
    1. Marketing automation allows the organization to follow up with customers regularly, listen to their feedback, upsell and cross-sell.
    2. This increases or improves the customer’s lifetime value.
11. More A/B testing possibilities
    1. Marketing automation helps companies run A/B tests on all campaigns and at different marketing cycle stages.
    2. This facilitates incremental improvements in the campaigns, which leads to significant funnel efficiencies over time.

How do customers benefit from marketing automation?

People today are always on the go and consume content through various devices. Their attention spans are minimal, but at the same time, they are also exposed to vast amounts of marketing information. This makes it challenging to choose a particular brand or be “loyal” to it.

Customers can benefit from marketing automation in many ways:

1. Access to more relevant information
   1. Marketing automation improves content personalization.
   2. Every customer can receive unique and relevant information at the right time and at the right place to help them make better decisions on their brand interests and purchases.
2. Avail of more unique experiences
   1. Marketing automation provides granular data about a customer –  browsing behavior, purchase habits, and many other data points.
   2. Companies can use this granular data to build customer personas with their own specific set of preferences.
   3. This, in turn, allows organizations to maximize individualized experiences, which raises a customer’s “feel-good factor” while engaging with the brand.
3. Better, positive journey to the final purchase decision
   1. Marketing automation provides content and material that helps customers make a more informed purchase decision.
   2. The ease of making decisions goes a long way in locking those customers into a stable relationship with the brand.
4. Dynamic, relevant content across multiple channels
   1. Customers today are not restricted to just one media channel.
   2. Using multiple channels risks fragmenting the information that a customer needs to make a favorable decision.
   3. Marketing automation helps marketers send out information across multiple channels.
   4. Customers can thus access consistent information on their favorite brands on all the channels they use.

Disadvantages of marketing automation

While it is clear that marketing automation has many significant advantages for any organization, some downsides or disadvantages should be kept in mind while deciding to automate marketing processes.

1. Lack of awareness
   1. Many organizations are willing and keen to implement marketing automation systems.
   2. However, not all organizations are aware of the full benefits of marketing automation.
   3. Hence, some companies either implement an imperfect automation platform or decide not to do it at all.
2. Improper implementation
   1. Marketing implementation platforms are not “one size or type fits all.”
   2. Organizations sometimes implement marketing automation systems with features that are not required for that business or conversely do not have features required for the business.
3. Redundancy
   1. Marketing automation software platforms do not always keep pace with developments in consumer behavior, marketing strategies, or even new product development.
   2. The initial efficiency shown by these platforms can reduce over time as the organization grows in size and complexity.
4. High costs
   1. Although several open-source or free marketing automation platforms are available in the market, these have limited functionalities and features.
   2. Companies need to upgrade to paid software versions to get the full benefit.
   3. These paid versions can be expensive and may not be affordable for small organizations.
   4. Even for large organizations, the cost of constant upgrades, improvements, and software replacement can be prohibitive in the long run.

Marketing automation v/s Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

Marketing circles are increasingly talking about Customer Data Platforms and whether they can replace Marketing Automation Platforms.

Customer data platforms are solutions that give marketers control over customer data collection, segmentation, and management through integrations without professional IT support.

A Customer Data Platform is a marketer-managed platform giving a “single view of the customer” rather than fragmented descriptions at scattered points on the customer journey.

A Customer Data Platform is more of a unified customer database and, in that sense, is a storehouse of customer information collected from various sources. It provides transparency and granular views of each customer.

Developments in the technology powering Customer Data Platforms have given them many functionalities currently offered by Marketing Automation Platforms. Organizations are exploring the utility of Customer Data Platforms, and over time they could pose a threat to marketing automation platforms, especially as “demand marketing” gets more traction.

Conclusion

Marketing automation has become a necessity for organizations today. It makes marketing easier for the organization and frees up the marketing team to focus on other areas of the marketing effort that will boost the company’s marketing ROI and sales efforts.

Marketing Automation software can be useful only if businesses use it smartly and effectively. A marketing automation solution helps the marketing teams track and refine the customer’s journey through the marketing pipeline as a unified communication platform.

Perhaps the most important contribution of marketing automation is that it helps the company build and strengthen client relationships by streamlining business operations.