Operating a business is no easy feat. In addition to product planning and development, you also have to juggle a myriad of other responsibilities.
You may feel like you are not making any progress if you are only completing marketing tasks such as sending emails, updating social media, and creating content.
Aside from the previously mentioned duties, you are also responsible for tasks such as accounting and customer service calls.
There’s a lot going on in your head all the time.
Marketing automation can help you automate repetitive tasks and free up your time to focus on more important aspects of your business. It can also help reduce stress levels so you can stay focused on growing your business.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a process of using triggers to automate marketing actions. It is usually focused on customer acquisition and retention, and can include email marketing or social media marketing. Marketing automation generally requires software to be executed.
What are marketing automation platforms?
A marketing automation platform helps you capture, qualify, and nurture sales leads. By funneling these leads to the appropriate person or providing a digital path in your customer journey, you can close a sale.
Social media platforms can help you to execute and track social media campaigns and email drip marketing.
Although Gartner says that the majority of marketing automation platforms are bought by companies that focus on B2B sales, some B2C companies can also benefit from using these platforms – especially those that sell products that require a lot of customer research and consideration, such as cars, higher education, or software.
This is for businesses that want to start using marketing automation tools.
If this type of software is not relevant to your business, it is still important to be aware of these tools. This way, you can consider them for your business as it expands and prospers, even if you do not purchase one of these tools at this time. Continue reading to learn more.
Do you actually need a marketing automation tool?
If you’re wondering whether or not you need a marketing automation tool, it might be helpful to know that these tools are typically used by companies that want to automate their marketing processes. Gartner outlines a few examples of what marketing automation can do in the following section. After reading through these examples, you should be able to decide if a marketing automation tool can help you reach your business goals.
You’ll need to consider your team’s skills and willingness to use and learn the software before making a purchase. Does your team have the ability to collect and analyze data, then make changes to your marketing strategy? If they’re interested in learning, it may be the right time to buy marketing automation software.
If your company sells high value items with a long lead time, yes: you need a marketing automation tool
If your company sells high-value items that are not bought frequently, you should think about using a marketing automation tool. This will help connect your customer acquisition process with your sales process, through content and email marketing.
What if I don’t need a marketing automation tool?
Even if you don’t think you need an automation tool right now, you could still benefit from some aspects of the automation process – such as A/B testing. A/B testing could be a good way to experiment on your site or app. From there, you can work on increasing engagement or clicks, which could set you up for marketing automation in the future.
What marketing tasks should I automate?
A marketing automation system can help with things like marketing tasks, communication, and analytics. You can use it to automate things like sending out emails, doing market research, or tracking customer behavior. In the next section, we’ll look at some examples of marketing automation in action.
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Marketing automation technology helps to collect leads from multiple sources, such as marketing, customer data, and eCommerce systems.
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Lead augmentation can help to provide missing customer information, while deduplication can help to remove duplicate or incomplete customer data.
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Leads can be scored based on customer engagement or estimated customer value. Further qualification can be done by determining if the lead is in the market for your product or service, ready to buy, or just researching.
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Lead nurturing is the process of managing a lead from the time it is collected until it is converted into a customer. Inactive leads are removed from the system.
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Multi-channel lead management means creating a single, cohesive strategy that spans multiple channels. This could include email marketing, social media marketing, website design and even webinars and event marketing. Many software products offer support for multiple channels, so it’s important to choose one that will work best for your needs.
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Some software provides preconfigured KPIs to monitor lead generation, as well as dashboards, metrics, and reports. The software may also have predictive AI capabilities that support other marketing automation processes, such as content marketing recommendations and customer journey design.
Email marketing: Automate your email process by, for example, sending a welcome email to customers as soon as they sign up for a newsletter.
When you build a customer journey in your marketing automation tool, you can specify certain entry points and triggers that will activate that journey. This might include, for example, downloading an app or closing a service ticket. You can then customize the messages that the customer will receive based on those actions, such as sending a survey after a ticket is closed, or asking for a review after a purchase is made.
You can use automation to analyze email text and predict responses in order to respond to customers more quickly and efficiently. This will save you some time and effort as you will not have to do this manually.
In order to make your marketing more efficient, here are 9 things you should automate.
1. Social media marketing automation
Approximately 57% of the population has a social media account and the number is rising.
This means that developing a social media presence has a high return on investment.
But attracting the attention of millions of people is not easy.
Certain things like:
- content creation and curation
- content distribution
- measuring content effectiveness
This task needs to be completed regularly, which is not only time-consuming but also repetitive and boring.
The good news is that these boring and repetitive tasks can be automated.
You can also customize other people’s material to fit your brand’s personality.
Additionally, having reusable blog templates will assist with content creation and outsourcing.
If you couple social media automation tools with specific dates, you can schedule your content to go live.
2. Customer service and support
The most frequent issue that any business’ customer support staff encounters is that the majority of their consumer inquiries have already been addressed. This is usually because the customer didn’t bother to read the FAQ or other documentation before contacting customer support.
Customer service operations can be negatively impacted by people constantly asking the same questions.
By having a barrier between your customer support and those repetitive queries, you will not only save time, but you will also be able to focus more on delivering meaningful support requests for the best customer experience.
You can use chatbots or live web chat software on your website to help you redirect requests to certain blog posts or forum questions.
Adding live chat support is a beneficial situation for both customers and businesses. Customers spend less time waiting for a response, and businesses save time and resources.
If you want to improve the customer service experience even further, you should use an internal ticketing system to help you handle and organize all customer support requests properly. This can be achieved by using customer support software like Freshworks.
3. Website conversion rate optimization and audit
Keeping track of which lead forms are converting the best will help you get the most out of your lead generation efforts.
There are many factors, like the placement of lead forms and call to action, that can affect conversion rates for your lead forms. Testing all these factors through A/B testing is important.
It can be time-consuming and stressful to test every aspect of these forms manually. It is also not possible to keep complete records of all small modifications.
Conversion optimization tools like Thrive Themes allow you to automate and test every tiny detail of your website, making it easier to turn visitors into conversions.
They can test many different aspects aggressively, such as blog headlines, the placement of lead forms, form headings, and CTAs.
You can create and test multiple variations of a single form at the same time to see which one performs the best.
The automatic winner feature will automatically select the winning variation for you.
Means it’s like “set-it-and-forget-it”.
Furthermore, if you’re reliant on SEO to drive traffic.
In order to improve CRO, metrics such as page speed, Core Web Vitals, SERP rankings, and links (internal and external) must be optimized.
Broken links, redirects, images, etc. can negatively impact your website’s ranking on search engines, so it’s important to keep an eye on these.
Also tracking SERP rankings is vital since it’ll help you analyze:
- when your competitors are climbing up the SERPs.
- What changes have they made in their marketing methods?
- what rankings changed by google algorithm updates, etc.
Thankfully, the above website audit tasks can be delegated and automated to run daily or weekly with SEO tools like Semrush.
This tool is helpful in identifying problems and generates reports that outline how to improve website performance.
4. Push notifications and updates
Push notification marketing is a cost-effective way to reach potential customers, second only to email marketing.
It offers:
- better reach
- high security
- higher engagement
- useful insights
- cheap communication channel
Facebook Messenger is easier to sign up for than email because people only have to click yes or no, instead of filling out a form.
You can also keep your users engaged by sending them notifications about new posts through a targeted drip campaign.
This marketing automation tool ensures that your name is constantly being seen by your target audience, so they don’t forget about you.
GetResponse’s push notification marketing automation can be used in many cases.
Some of them are:
- Cart abandonment notifications – for ecommerce.
- Automated re-engagement notifications – persuading the audience to visit your app.
- Recurring notifications – notification that repeats at certain intervals like blog post update.
- RSS feed campaigns – to drive traffic.
- Introductory notifications – welcome new customers.
- Transactional notifications – immediately after a transaction has been made.
- User-behavior-based automated campaigns – based on time, location, page visits, etc.
5. E-commerce marketing automation
You want your consumers to keep buying from you, not just make a one-time purchase.
This is especially true if you are selling a product or service that needs to be paid for regularly.
Selling to an existing client is 60 to 70% more likely than selling to a new one.
With ecommerce based email marketing automation platforms your marketing automation software can send you automated early billing notifications.
If they subscribe early, you can offer them discounts.
Letting your tenants know in advance that you will be collecting rent early will allow you to get payments before they are due.
If you set up automated triggers, your customers will be notified if a payment fails. This will remind them to pay, so that you can be compensated quickly.
Using GetResponse, you can also automate sending birthday discount emails, providing a more personalized experience for your customers.
You can also set up emails to remind customers that they have not completed their purchase.
The right marketing automation tool can help you take your ecommerce business to the next level by optimizing your sales revenue and creating a better customer experience.
6. Communication between different departments
Operating your business effectively requires teamwork and interconnectedness between various departments within your company. By working together, you can generate revenue and improve your business’ operations.
Integrations, such as new leads being automatically transferred to your sales team with your CRM allows the marketing team to focus on generating leads rather than transferring them to other departments.
{The workflow automation between different departments will also help you track your prospects effectively, and increase productivity.}
Based on what you now know about the capabilities of these platforms, which marketing tasks do you think should be automated?
Setting up the right marketing automation software may seem costly at first, but it will pay off in the end.
