What is Marketing Automation & How It Works?

Are you spending too much time on tedious marketing tasks such as scheduling sales calls, sending invoices, sending email drip campaigns, follow-up messages, and posting on social media?

Manual processing of such tasks can take up a lot of effort and resources and you may get slower results. Marketing automation enables you to handle marketing activities and campaigns across various channels without manually performing every communication.

A marketing automation plan can handle every aspect of customer relationship management and automate all repetitive tasks to help you do stronger marketing.

In this article, we will understand how marketing automation works, what it can do for your business, and the best marketing automation practices.

Key Takeaways

• Marketing automation enables you to handle marketing activities and campaigns across various channels without having to manually execute every communication.
• Marketing automation collects information such as pages visited on your website, products purchased or added to the shopping cart, interactions with your social media profiles, and more from both new and current customers.
• Marketing automation allows for operational efficiency for lead generation and nurturing, scoring, segmentation, calculating campaign ROI, upselling, and generating customer experiences across many channels.
• It helps businesses streamline their workflow, personalize customer journeys, improve customer conversion and retention rates, and drive more revenue.
• It is essential to have set marketing goals and find an appropriate marketing automation platform to get the best results.

Understanding Marketing Automation

Marketing automation enables businesses to centrally plan, coordinate, and oversee their customer interactions and manage marketing campaigns and procedures across many platforms automatically.

Digital marketing has gained a sudden popularity in recent years due to its cost-effectiveness and wider reachability.

According to Market.us, the Global Digital Marketing Market is expected to develop significantly, with sales reaching USD 1,310.3 billion by 2033, representing a strong 13.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2024 to 2033.

However, the whole process involves a lot of planning and scheduling to keep customers and potential customers engaged with campaigns and messages.

With marketing automation, you can send automatic messages to your customers via social media, SMS, email, and messenger marketing instead of manually scheduling and sending messages.

These messages are sent using an automated platform by a set of guidelines you establish known as workflows. Workflows can be created from scratch or they can be native templates included with your marketing program.

Other than sending messages, A/B testing, lead scoring, social media posting, emailing, and ad retargeting are some of the processes that can be automated for marketing.

You can also integrate CRM and other platforms with marketing automation software to bring sales and marketing together.

This automation helps you save time and resources that can be used for other important operational tasks.

How does marketing automation work?

Marketing automation works by gathering information from new and existing customers.

This data may include the pages they viewed on your website, the products they bought or put in their basket, whether or not they read an email, their interactions with your social media profiles, and more.

Marketing automation software uses this data to create customer profiles and divide your audience into groups. This can help your marketing team to generate tailored content and messages for every customer.

There are many marketing solutions available that allow you to create automated workflows and you can choose the best tools for you depending on your business requirements.

In order to ensure that you’re consistently producing high-quality content, marketing automation solutions can also evaluate how your target audience understands your messages and make any adjustments.

These tools send triggered material to clients, ensuring that your marketing team is always in contact with them.

Why is marketing automation important?

Every business has a to-do list of manual, repetitive tasks: writing emails, reporting, following up, and reminding others. These jobs aren’t difficult, but they take your attention away from more important tasks that can have a greater influence on your company.

Marketing automation is a practical solution that allows marketers to automate, streamline, track, and optimize a variety of repetitive marketing operations. This allows them to offer personalized experiences expected by customers while also generating quality leads.

Automation of vital operations can spur innovation and expansion in any area of business today. Marketing automation has a revolutionary impact on businesses that need to personalize relevant information and experiences for huge consumer bases.

Marketing automation provides chances for operational efficiency at every stage of the marketing strategy such as lead generation and nurturing, scoring, segmentation, estimating campaign ROI, upselling, and creating customer experiences on multiple channels.

By using technology to automate monotonous operations, you can devote more time and effort to higher-impact activities that require creative and strategic thinking.

Marketing automation examples

Wondering how you can put your marketing automation into action? Here are some of the top use cases to know about.

Welcome emails

Creating a sequence of welcome emails is one of the most popular B2C Marketing Automation flows.

It is important to start communicating with people who have recently signed up for your newsletter as they have shown a desire to hear from you.

This means that at this point, your open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate can be greater. You can use this chance to introduce your various items, provide thorough product information, or offer welcome discounts.

Follow-up on a purchase

You can create a flow in which you automatically send an email to a customer when they leave an item in their cart or when a new model of a product or a similar item that they have purchased becomes available.

For example, if a customer has purchased a camera from you, you can send them an email if you stock up on new accessories that can be used with that camera.

Birthday offers

You can create a marketing automation flow that automatically delivers a birthday greeting to every person on your contact list.

Along with a greeting, you can also offer rewards, free shipping, special birthday discounts, or coupons for a free gift.

This can help you make your customers feel valued and convert them into regular customers.

Marketing automation benefits

Marketing automation offers numerous benefits to growing businesses. Here are some of the most significant benefits of marketing automation.

Streamline your workflows

Marketing automation can help you streamline your workflows and optimize your marketing strategy. When you optimize repetitive processes and automated procedures, you can accomplish greater results.

Automating email marketing, lead nurturing, and campaign administration allows marketers to focus on campaign optimization and other goals that increase overall performance.

Personalized customer journeys

Marketing automation helps businesses offer customized advertisements and interactions to certain groups of consumers based on their interests, habits, and preferences.

This degree of customization strengthens bonds with clients, boosts interaction, and improves the overall client experience.

Increased conversion rates

Sales teams and marketing teams can shorten the sales cycle, move audiences through the sales funnel, and increase return on marketing efforts with marketing automation to handle and nurture leads throughout the buyer’s journey.

Improve customer retention rates

With great personalization through marketing automation, businesses can offer an exceptional experience to customers. This, in turn, helps keep customers loyal and increases customer retention.

Drive more revenue

Platforms for marketing automation give businesses access to vital real-time customer data and insights, enabling companies to make wise decisions.

You can track campaign performance, measure engagement metrics, analyze customer behavior, spot trends, enhance marketing campaigns, convert quality leads into paying customers, and ultimately, drive more revenue.

Best practices

Marketing automation strategies are not one-size-fits-all. When creating a marketing automation strategy for your business, it is essential to take your business requirements into consideration.

Here are some best practices to consider while developing your marketing automation strategy.

Focus on quality over quantity

Obtaining hundreds of leads that might not be converted is pointless. It is best to run Facebook advertising, collect website or landing page visitors, and convert organic social media traffic into subscribers for your contact list.

Define goals and objectives

It is essential to understand what you expect from your marketing strategy by having clear and defined goals and objectives.

Determine the marketing needs of your business to define goals and create a marketing strategy that can help you reach those goals.

Build personalized buyers’ journeys across all channels

Personalized experience is what will keep the customers coming back. Use your marketing automation software’s custom user fields to collect information from prospects, and then follow up with tailored, relevant messages.

Prepare a content strategy

Having a content strategy in place can help you get a direction for marketing. This can help you keep track of your process and assess your goals.

Prepare a proper content strategy for your marketing to further streamline the process.

Collaborate with other teams

Collaborating with other teams can help keep your strategy in check. Set up internal notifications for your sales or marketing team when a customer does an important action.

You can include follow-up tasks to inform the teams about the customers they should follow up via a live chat conversation.

Create visual processes

Create a visual representation of how customers will navigate your automation. Use a drag-and-drop builder with reporting tools to swiftly and efficiently align your plan with your company’s primary objectives.

Analyze as you go

Using your marketing automation tool’s reporting, you can identify what is and isn’t working. Analyze the data and make modifications to help optimize your digital marketing initiatives and expand your business.

Best marketing automation platforms

While there are numerous marketing automation platforms available in the market, it is important to choose the one that best serves your business.

Here are some of the top marketing automation platforms that you could consider:

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a comprehensive marketing platform that allows you to manage and communicate with your customer base and potential customers.

It is one of the most popular marketing solutions, with a plethora of capabilities such as email production, marketing automation, lead generation, and reporting.

Start your free trial of Mailchimp today

Klayivo

With an intelligent marketing automation platform driven by all of your customers and built for scale from the ground up, Klaviyo powers smarter digital connections.

It is a user-friendly platform that facilitates the generation, delivery, and optimization of highly customized and sophisticated experiences across social media, mobile apps, paid advertisements, email, SMS, and other channels.

This platform is based on an adaptable, real-time database that centralizes all customer data.

Sign up to Klaviyo for free today!

HubSpot Marketing Automation

HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-inclusive marketing platform that seamlessly combines email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and campaign automation.

It offers great contact management, a wide range of configurable email templates, robust reporting features, and solid social media integration.

It is an incredibly versatile tool that can be used by both small and large enterprises.

Get started with HubSpot for free

How to use marketing automation to grow your business

Marketing automation streamlines your company’s marketing processes, allowing you to focus on more critical responsibilities. It automates all repetitive tasks, which saves you time and resources.

This automation can help you provide individualized experiences to clients, allowing you to establish a loyal customer base while increasing sales and revenue.

However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing automation. With so many marketing automation systems on the market, you should choose the one that best meets your needs and follow best practices to get the most out of it.

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