In our guide, we have compiled everything you need to know about Marketing Automation. We explain the concept, why it benefits your company and how you successfully automate communication throughout the customer journey.
This is Marketing Automation
What is Marketing Automation tools and what are they used for? Marketing Automation is a pre-programmed process that allows companies to automate their marketing communications and automatically deliver personalized marketing, at every point of contact with the customer. A b2c and b2b Marketing Automation platform helps you to generate new leads, convert leads and in the long run create strong and loyal customer relationships.
There are many benefits to automating your digital marketing. By replacing manual processes with automated ones, you save time, increase efficiency and take advantage of the opportunities that Marketing Automation opens up.
Valuable customer data
When you integrate your Marketing Automation platform with the other systems and platforms that contains valuable customer data, you can target your marketing to customers based on:
- activity
- purchase history
- behavior on your site
- preferences
Based on that, you can tailor your communication and deliver it to the customer at the right time, through the right channel. In other words, it’s about identifying your customers, capturing interest and then retaining them, while increasing your company’s revenue.
Read more about our Marketing Automation platform and our smart Marketing Automation features.
How does Marketing Automation work?
A customer relationship is built
Once potential customers and visitors have given away customer data, companies can use Marketing Automation to start building a relationship with the customer, using automated welcome communication. When a potential customer becomes a customer, the technology allows companies to automatically nurture the relationship through relevant communication. It also allows you to “win back” customers that the company is about to lose. This makes your interactions with the customer both richer and more profitable, good huh!?
Collects customers digital footprints
Marketing Automation is based on information and works as a collection system that stores customers behavior and activity on the web. Every time a customer, for example, starts subscribing to a newsletter, buys something from a store or clicks on an ad, they give away valuable information in the form of digital footprints. The more a visitor stays on the website, the more information it leaves behind. What Marketing Automation does then, is to collect all the data and store it. Based on that information, the system can then send out automatic trigger emails to customers who have registered their e-mail at some point.
Find out what your customers are looking for
The goal is therefore that visitors in some way should share information about themselves such as name, e-mail, workplace and other relevant information when they visit a website. The more personal and specific information that the tool intercepts and collects about a customer, the more complete profile can be built about the customer. Marketing Automation also helps you to find out what your customers and visitors are looking for in services on your website, how they found it and how you then maintain a good relationship and communication.
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Why is Marketing Automation important?
With the help of Marketing Automation, you can in a both time and cost-effective way, send personal, automated messages to a large number of contacts instead of just one at a time. This means that it enables ONE marketer to perform as well as an entire team. How effective isn’t that? Marketing Automation gives you the opportunity for you as a company to work more productively, increase revenue faster and focus on other parts of the sales process.
Marketing Automation not only helps you save time and resources. It also gives your customers a personalized customer experience with thoughtful, authentic communication that sounds personal and genuine, even though you are sending the same type of message to thousands of customers.
Build trust with the help of customized communication
By targeting relevant content to your customers, you show that you care about them. The more you customize your communication, the more your customers will trust that you continue to deliver high quality products and / or services. There are also other ways to use automation and show loyalty to your customers, for example by sending offers in the form of coupons or other discounts to people who have previously integrated with the brand.
Marketing Automation not only helps you save time and resources. It also gives your customers a personalized customer experience with thoughtful, authentic communication that sounds personal and genuine, even though you are sending the same type of message to thousands of customers.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Better customer experience
Marketing Automation gives you the opportunity to direct personalized communication towards your customers and in that way build loyalty. With the help of targeted and customized messages, the customer will feel noticed and your company will appear engaging and reliable. There is also a good chance that a customer who has got a good impression of a company will also return to it.
Marketing Automation not only helps you save time and resources. It also gives your customers a personalized customer experience with thoughtful, authentic communication that sounds personal and genuine, even though you are sending the same type of message to thousands of customers.
More quality leads
As a company, you can easily get an insight into the entire lead process, which means that we can review the customers behavior all the way from the channel it converts from, until it closes a deal. In this way, you can draw conclusions about which channels work best, which content appeals and interests the customer the most and which campaign to optimize.
Higher ROI
Figures show that Marketing Automation has a very high ROI in e-mail marketing in particular. It opens up to strengthen and simplify many different steps in the sales process that generate both higher and faster ROI than marketing that is not automated. Different companies achieve different levels of ROI from Marketing Automation due to different levels of maturity in their processes, systems and skills. In other words, it’s about how they use the software – and where they are in their assumption.
In general, results show that:
- Companies that use Marketing Automation get better control of the sales funnel, have more productive sales-people and experience better revenues.
- Companies that use Marketing Automation are more likely to report faster growth, than users who don’t automate their marketing.
- The majority of companies see ROI in less than a year.
Resource efficient
In both a time and cost-effective way, you can streamline and facilitate your digital marketing and communication. Marketing Automation makes it possible to send targeted messages to a larger number of contacts, instead of just one at a time. In this way, the manual work is reduced and instead space is created to optimize the digital strategy.
If you are a small business, it can be extremely costly to hire full-time marketers. In these cases, Marketing Automation is a perfect tool for achieving marketing goals without having to put too much resources into it. With smart Marketing Automation for your e commerce store, you can both save time and money.
Detailed picture of the customers behavior
Marketing Automation gives you the opportunity to get a much more complete and detailed picture of potential customers behavior than what manual methods can provide. By tracking customers interactions with the communication and marketing you target them, your team can gain a better understanding of which steps and tactics worked best during the customer journey. The learning of those insights can then be applied to future activities.
Marketing Automation throughout the customer journey
With the help of valuable customer data and powerful technology, you can deliver customized Marketing Automation throughout the whole customer journey with your brand.
Think of the customer journey as a roadmap that describes how a customer becomes aware of your brand, their interaction with your brand and how the customer acts accordingly. Instead of just looking at part of a process or an individual event, the customer journey documents the entire experience of being a customer and visualizes the process the customer goes through to become:
- aware of (company / product / service)
- consider and evaluate
- and decide to buy a new product or service.
Each customer is unique
Some customers may seem similar in their behavior but no customers are identical, each customer is unique! With that said, so should their customer journey with your brand be. With effective email marketing through our CRM and Marketing Automation tool, you can build series, also called marketing flows with relevant emails. These emails are automated and also adapted to the different phases that the customer is in during the customer journey.
1. Interact and attract the customer from the start
The first step in the customer journey is to arouse potential customer interest. Here, the goal is to try to convince the potential customer to get involved with your business. The Internet is big and so is the competition, but that doesn’t mean that you need to try to attract everyone who is online. The primary goal is that you want to expand the number of people who belong to your target audience and get them to visit your site.
To attract them, it can be good to build a strategy where the focus is on capturing leads through, for example, a free trial offer, downloads and email marketing that can turn these visitors into customers. The idea is to get the consumer necessarily interested in sharing information, especially their email address. It’s by gathering important information about the potential customer that you will be able to build on and create a relationship, which is a crucial moment in the customer journey.
2. Engage and convince with the help of welcome emails
If a visitor to your website expresses interest in what you offer and, for example, signs up to subscribe to the newsletter, then it’s time to arouse the customer’s curiosity by sending an automatic welcome message, so-called on-board email. Introduce yourself, express your joy that that particular person has found you – and give them a reason to stay. Therefore, you can also put a welcome offer in the email to increase the chances of buying and at the same time convert customers to the website.
3. From consideration to purchase - Capture abandoned shopping carts
Sometimes it happens that a customer is about to buy something but does not complete the purchase, for example that they put something in the shopping cart but without checking out. Then it’s important to encourage the customer to buy, by reminding them what they are missing out on. By setting up automatic reminders that trigger cart abandonment, the customer receives an email informing them that they have an abandoned shopping cart. To increase the closing frequency, you can put an automated discount offer in the email but also recommend similar items that they might like by using their purchase history and behavior on your website.
4. Encourage repeat purchases with product recommendations
When you have come this far in the customer journey, it means that a customer has made a purchase – hooray! You have now converted a potential customer into a customer and it’s now said that the traditional sales funnel ends here. But here, life cycle marketing takes it to new heights and continues as a cycle. When the customer has made a purchase, send a “thank you” message. Feel free to include an automated and well-designed transactional email, as a confirmation that everything went right and that the customer’s order is well taken care of. If you put a little extra gunpowder on the design or perhaps include product recommendations in the email based on the purchase that was just made, which is another excellent Marketing Automation example, you can increase your sales even further!
5. Maintain dialogue with relevant communication
Once you have converted a visitor to become a customer and at best, a loyal customer, the most important job starts, Digital Marketing Automation nutrition – to make it want to stay. The key to success in sales is just that, to retain your customers and for that a good strategy is needed.
In general, consumers are more likely to shop at a retailer who knows their purchase history and who, based on it, delivers relevant content to the customer. It’s a very good way to maintain the dialogue with a customer at the same time as you build trust which hopefully leads to you being able to keep the customer.
Based on data that shows what is appreciated by the target group to which the customer belongs, personalized emails can be created consisting of targeted special offers. It keeps the customer’s interest alive and the chance that it makes a repurchase is high. Marketing automation can therefore help you with this type of targeted communication.
At most e-retailers, you can monitor an item that is out of stock. If you have pre-programmed a back in stock function, then an automatic back in stock email will be sent to the customer when the product is back in stock. This means that the customer then has a chance to buy the product that they have previously shown interest in and you get a chance to increase the conversion rate and increase sales. Win, win!
6. From repeated purchases to a brand ambassador
Once the customer has made repeated purchases, it goes from being a customer to becoming a loyal customer – so now is the time to make this customer a brand ambassador. In this step, it’s excellent to encourage the customer to spread the word to their loved ones through a refer-a-friend offer. You can also ask the customer for feedback on completed purchases by asking them to either rate the products or fill in a form. In this way, you show a genuine commitment to the customer’s experience with your brand.
With customers who have not interacted with you for a while, you can send win back emails. Just because a customer has not purchased or shown interest in your business for a while, doesn’t mean that the customer is lost. It’s just a matter of giving the customer a reason to come back by reminding them of the amazing things they saw or bought on your particular website.
If, on the other hand, you have directed communication at a specific customer for a longer period of time to try to win it back but without progress, then it’s important to find out the reason behind the customer’s interruption. Then you can send a questionnaire email with an attached link that leads to a quick survey. In this way, you can get valuable feedback from your customers and at the same time show that you are committed to understanding the customer’s behavior.
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Keys in Marketing Automation
Start by setting goals
It can be a good idea to start by setting goals for what you want to achieve with your marketing. Then you can implement Market Automation in your marketing strategy as a tool to achieve the goals. In this way, you can streamline your strategies and at the same time measure your progress.
Identify repetitive tasks
Before you choose to start working with Marketing Automation, it’s good to identify the most repetitive marketing activities that your company has. When that is done, you can start adapt automatisation to your marketing strategy.
Examples of typical tasks that many marketing departments do manually, but that can be automated:
- Creating campaigns
- Newsletter
- Training / seminar invitations
- Updating contacts in CRM / Sales support
- Segment target groups
- Reply / confirmation email
- Customer lists for sellers
- Import and export of contacts between different systems and channels
Segment your audience
Marketing Automation is most effective when it is as targeted as possible. How you target your customers is determined by your customer base, your customers history and engagement. If you don’t get to know your recipients, there’s a risk that the message you sent out through your Marketing Automation system, will be sent incorrectly. This mistake can create irritation towards the company and customers, which in turn becomes negative for the brand. So, for successful automation, segmentation is A and O, so take your time.
Stay human!
Although Marketing Automation is important and effective when creating large campaigns, it’s even more important that the people involved in it are met by a personalized and genuine communication. This is especially important as human contact is still needed to have a strong and loyal relationship with the customer. Consumers can directly see the difference between personal messages versus messages that are obviously sent to an entire recipient base. So keep in mind that with the help of the points above, especially segmentation and analysis of customer behaviors, you can reach your customer in a human way without being perceived as a robot.
Marketing Automation explanation - summary
We usually say that basically Marketing Automation is about all companies pursuit of the three-stage rocket, namely that:
- Increase people’s awareness of the brand
- Reach out to potential customers
- Sell more
Marketing Automation helps you in short to strengthen customer relationships, generate leads and increase revenue with the help of pre-programmed and targeted communication based on the customer’s digital footprint. If you look at Marketing Automation as a way of working and not an individual service, you understand the endless possibilities that Marketing Automation offers.
We hope that we have now straightened out the concept of Marketing Automation and made the benefits clear to you. Explore our Marketing Automation platform for free for 30 days.
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The meaning of Marketing Automation is to save time by automating repetitive, manual tasks.
Here's some Marketing Automation examples:
- Welcome email series
- Reminder emails
- Opt in emails
- VIP emails
- Birthday ot anniversary
- Re-engagement
- Feedback & survey emails
Sales and Marketing departments in different industries, use Marketing Automation to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities. Both to increase revenue and maximize efficiency but also for lead nurturing and lead generation.
Every company who need to stay in communication with their customers on a regular basis can benefit greatly from using a Marketing Automation software and also see major improvements in productivity by automating these processes.
