Embracing marketing technology is undeniably essential for the modern marketer. Especially in today’s digital era, where automation is the lifeblood of every business environment. Marketing automation will continue to be an essential building block of productivity for any business across industries.
According to Grand View Research, the global marketing automation software market is expected to reach $ 7.63 billion by 2025. Automation is clearly the future of marketing. It can turn a lean marketing team into a momentum-driven force to be reckoned with. Given the hypercompetitive environment businesses operate in today, marketing automation can be the driving force for a startup to compete with larger enterprises.
Marketing Automation is much more than sending email newsletters or bulk SMS. Companies that use marketing automation often observe more web traffic, more business transactions, and prompts greater customer retention and loyalty.
Marketing automation when combined with intelligent user behavior-driven platforms helps engage prospects and customers through relevant content that converts prospects into customers and customers into loyal customers.
And, this is precisely what Smartech’s AI-powered growth marketing platform helps accomplish, building hyper-personalised 1:1 connections with an endless number of customers, at scale.
Key reasons why marketing automation is important:
1. Save time on recurring tasks and focus on marketing strategy
Ehsan Jahandarpour, a startup coach and a growth hacker and Brian Downward of BD Ventures, published a captivating infographic that highlights how marketing automation if used right can save time (and money). They collectively identified that automating most repetitive marketing tasks such as emails, social media posts, and some website actions can give you more free time to focus on marketing strategy and other critical tasks.
Few key takeaways from their infographic include:
- 78% of marketers say automation increases revenue and 75% of brands using automation see an ROI in under 12 months
- Save more than 6 hours a week by automating your social media posts
- A 250% increase in your reply rates by automating your outreach and follow up emails
- Using an automation tool can save 80% of your time on content scheduling and workforce management
We all know how much time can be saved by automating our daily recurring tasks from our busy work schedule. With marketing automation tools, what took months, now takes days, hours, and minutes subsequently. As the technology continues to advance at such pace, lesser time is needed for recurring and redundant tasks making more time for marketers – like you – to channel it into strategic planning and problem-solving.
2. Leverage your CRM to maximize ROI
CRM systems are a great tool when just contact is your focus and a marketing automation tool is marketing focused. But, when both tools are combined greater value is generated.
One straight out benefit is that you’ll have all the sales and marketing related activities all at one place. Research by SessionCam has already shown that 89% of users have integrated their CRM with their marketing automation platforms in order to provide improved data management and ease of process.
Customer relationship is a key aspect of retention. By automating your cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups you are more likely to notice an increase in your customer lifetime value. When you combine this with enhanced lead management and prioritisation, your sales activity will produce a much higher ROI than disjointed past efforts that allow data to exist in silos.
Also Read: Is Your Marketing Automation Platform Just a Glorified Campaign Launcher?
3. Gain a bird’s eye view of your customer behavior and data
Marketing automation is the holy grail of marking analytics. It enables you to collect data from various sources of marketing channels and gives you a bird’s-eye view to analyse your customers. Emails help you gather analytics that are easy to track such as open rates, track responses, and optimise subject lines in an attempt to maximize conversions.
Push notifications are another way to collect data based on detailed mobile a/b tests you run in order to optimise your CTAs and resultant conversions.
Smartech offers your customer’ demographic, geographic, technographic, and behavioural data-points across all channels on one unified platform.
Content marketing is crucial for all kinds of business. Most businesses create innocuous content and retract from developing more content when they don’t see their efforts yield sales.
In fact, businesses need to invest in marketing automation tools that can optimise their content for conversions. Investing in marketing automation software that amplifies engagement with your cadence schedules, feedback forms, testimonial requests etc. The amount of data you gather needs to be filtered in order to understand and foresee monetisation opportunities.
4. More Predictability and Consistency
Consistency is the key to successful customer engagement. Sending the relevant marketing message at the right time through the right channel helps in retaining the customer for a longer period. But how can you ensure this process to manually occur? By creating micro strategies at the right stage in buyer journey and automating it will guarantee you in delivering the message at the right time every single time.
When consistency in messaging is established, predicting the result becomes a lot easier and reflects on to your recurring revenue. Marketing automation creates processes and leverages intelligent systems that help you in predicting the number of leads required to equal a customer. How much advertising dollars do you have to spend in order to create a customer or close a deal?
5. Enhance the efficiency and productivity of your marketing efforts
No matter how small or large your organisation is, marketing automation will drive efficiency and productivity on the forefront. Today’s modern marketers – like you – are constantly under pressure to deliver more – to improve sales, optimise marketing campaign spends, and productivity with minimal resources.
Marketing automation helps increase leads, improve conversions, and ultimately generate better ROI. While all these are necessary, revenues are achieved better if the productivity is beyond 100% and this is achievable by automation.
Automation has become an integral part of every marketers’ strategy and is thus, an indispensable part.
6. Deliver personalised experiences at scale
Approximately a third of the marketers surveyed cite personalisation to be the most important aspect in marketing in the coming years. In a recent study by eMarketer, 48% of the US retail marketers reported that personalisation on their websites or apps increased revenues in excess of 10%.
Marketing automation allows you to craft specific messages to match the specific needs of each customer. You can create content that resonates to the lead’s behavior during the lead nurturing process and automate it to be delivered in accordance with the response to the specific lead behavior.
Creating a content strategy that includes personalisation is no longer an option for brands, but is more a tactical necessity. It is essential to have tactical personalisation from the very beginning of adapting a marketing automation tool and plan your process to drive healthy growth and revenue moving forward.
The more differentiated the delivery of customer experiences, driven by personalised multi-channel and cross-device communication, the more intuitive your customer journey orchestration efforts need to be.
7. Improve your sales funnel
When was the last time your sales funnel dried up or was dormant because the prospects weren’t moving down the funnel?
A robust marketing automation solution enables you to identify and nurture the leads using highly personalised, relevant, and timely content on the basis of their behaviour through any means of communication.
By enhancing the lead nurturing process converting the leads to sales qualified leads and then to customers becomes a lot easier. Businesses can see a 10% or greater increase in revenue with automated lead nurturing.
Source: JMB Partnership
The goal of marketing automation is to help you manage customer relationships better by automating manual and redundant actions such as email sends, social media posts, feedback forms, landing page designs, and contact lifecycle stage changes etc.
By capturing data that you get from customers across multiple channels, leveraging actionable analytics, and the power of machine learning algorithms, you can ensure you adhere to the 4R model. This implies that you succeed in reaching the right customer with the right message on the right channel, at just the right time.
To learn more about how you can harness the power of an intelligent marketing automation platform to fuel higher conversions across both web and app platforms, schedule a demo, today!
