Marketing automation utilizes software that enables businesses to automate tasks and workflows for marketing and sales processes. It is more than just sending emails, it is a fantastic tool to help simplify some time-consuming tasks in digital marketing. Typically, these tasks are handled by a live person but don’t need to be. With marketing automation, you can be more efficient with your and your sales team’s time. Moreover, it can help you understand your users and generate the best digital marketing strategies to engage potential clients.

Not sure how to prioritize those leads you received from your website?

Marketing automation allows you to score your leads. A task that can seem daunting to set up, is easy when using one of these platforms. While it does require some time upfront, it pays off with the ability to quickly identify high-quality leads. To set this up, you open the lead ranking section and assign points based on the most important actions your customer would make. The higher the score, the more likely those leads are ready to purchase. This saves time for your sales team, by allowing them to follow up with high scoring leads and enables the marketing automation to take over nurturing the other leads.

Did you know that marketing automation can be triggered by certain actions a user takes on your site?

If you’ve developed well-thought-out customer personas and created detailed workflows, you can generate opportunities to nurture high-scoring leads or those not quite ready to make a purchase, by sending emails that are targeted by the actions a searcher performs on your site. Workflows allow for certain triggers to occur based upon a user’s engagement with a website or email. With workflow automation, you can enable the sending of cart abandonment emails to re-engage an incomplete transaction. It has been found that 45% of those who receive an email will open it. Additionally, 10.7% of them will eventually return and complete the purchase.

Want to know if people are reading your newsletter or white pages?

Another valuable aspect of marketing automation software is that it offers options not only to see if someone opened your materials but how they interacted with them. This tracking can provide you with a tremendous amount of insight into what your leads or customers are interested in. You can utilize this information to generate new campaigns or to add more relevant content about specific subjects. It can also give you better insight into where a lead is in the sales funnel. It’s important to note that low scoring leads are still potential customers and not to be ignored. This is a great opportunity to establish a drip campaign to nurture leads until they are ready to make a purchase.

Common misconceptions about marketing automation.

It’s impersonal, not engaging to customers and it’s spam.

The reality is that the campaigns you create within the program are well-thought-out and highly personalized if you do it right. These emails should be dispensing information and providing engaging content, but not sales pitches. This helps to build your reputation and nurture a positive relationship with your leads. Giving some control to your leads and customers regarding how often they receive emails can create even greater positive feelings about your company. Additionally, with the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) act in the European Union, it is imperative to obtain explicit permissions for collecting data and emailing your leads and customers.

Marketing automation is one and done.

While marketing automation can allow you to spend less time on certain tasks, you still need to monitor it regularly. If you are going to be successful, you need to look at the analytics and ensure that your campaigns are working. If it’s not, tweaking the message can make a more significant impact. Also, if the leads attempt to contact you, you will need to be responsive to their inquiries. Otherwise, you will miss those opportunities and potentially eliminate the chance for engagement in the future.

Most companies aren’t using marketing automation.

In reality, more than 50% of companies are already using marketing automation. Within B2B, marketing automation has seen a rapid increase in adoption. That means it’s probable that your competitor is already utilizing marketing automation, and if not, it is a great way to set yourself apart from the competition. And, while you may think this is something for only large corporations, there are many options designed for small to mid-sized businesses.