The basic goal of every business is to make money. One of the best ways to increase profits is to increase efficiency and automation plays a big role in this.
Marketing automation can save your team a lot of time and remove the need to do repetitive or mundane tasks. In turn, this lets your team explore their creativity and become more engaged with their campaigns.
But marketing automation only serves these benefits when implemented in the right way that benefits your business. Otherwise, it can be a hindrance and involve learning new technologies that don't really save you any time.
So which areas of marketing should you be automating? Well, it will depend on your business but here are four areas of marketing that most businesses will see great results from if they implement automation.
An essential marketing automation process that every business should be implementing is sending all captured customer information to your CRM.
According to Dun and Bradstreet, the majority of marketers would say that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall performance of their marketing. However, 54% of marketers say they still aren’t using it extensively.
You have to get the foundations right. Capturing your customer data directly to your CRM may seem beginner-ish. However, without it, you will find that the quality of data you have to fuel other marketing automation is not up to scratch and diminishes their effectiveness.
When your leads are properly segmented within your CRM you can send them relevant marketing campaigns.
You can create a marketing automation process that auto segments your leads based on behaviors and demographics so you can send them personalised marketing.
For example, if you are a travel agent, and a new customer signs up, you can auto-segment this customer based on their previous purchase history. You can then send this person an email containing details of flight routes they may be interested in or let them know of available offers on flights that are leaving from their local airport.
A lead score is a number that you assign to every lead you have that correlates to specific behaviours and engagements they have taken with your campaigns. Each interaction has a score and leads with higher scores have more potential to convert which shows you that nurturing this lead is more likely to lead to a conversion than a lead with a lesser score.
You can create a marketing automation process that automatically adds to the score of a lead when they take certain actions. For example, you might assign five points for signing up for your newsletter. And then another 10 points when they download a pdf guide from your resources page. Every time an action is taken the score automatically updates and you know what interaction your lead has had with your brand.
Detailed analytics and reporting are essential for effective lead nurturing. If you don't measure the impacts of your campaign, how do you know if they are effective in nurturing leads or not?
Analytics and reporting often involve sifting through huge amounts of data – much of which is not useful to you. Marketing automation tools can help you quickly interpret your data. By creating automated reports and marketing dashboards you save your team huge amounts of time in understanding and making use of the marketing data that you collect.
One helpful area for automating reporting is campaign testing. If you need to test variants of each marking effort (A/B testing) having automated reports that are visually enriched helps you to quickly understand the intricacies of why one variation is performing better than another.
Marketers are constantly feeling the pressure to up their game. But there never seem to be enough hours in the day. Marketing automation helps you save huge amounts of time and give you and your team more time to focus on more impactful areas of marketing and innovate with new ideas.
Fortunately, there are numerous tools available to make marketing automation simple. The key is finding the areas of your marketing that are the most time consuming but would be simple to automate. These are normally repetitive tasks.
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