Learn More About Marketing Automation Software
What is Marketing Automation Software?
Marketing automation software allows companies to optimize their marketing strategy by automating marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media posts, and lead generation.
The automation of these tasks is made possible by creating an automation workflow. A workflow serves as the path that triggers one marketing task after another. An example of this would be when a new customer creates an account on your website, which triggers a welcome email to be sent out to them. Once that welcome email is triggered, product announcement emails are sent, then sale announcement emails, and so on. Each step in the workflow is prompted automatically by a previous step, so no one has to do each step manually. The workflow can then be shaped around any marketing task, whether that is social media management, lead acquisition, or A/B testing.
With this in mind, marketing automation software is not a one-off function that can be automated for years on end. Workflows must be manually updated so the marketing material remains relevant and engaging for customers. While the actual function of email marketing can be automated, the content of the email must be updated with current offerings, company updates, or other relevant information.
Key Benefits of Marketing Automation Software
- Measure campaigns to optimize, justify, and prioritize initiatives
- Reduce time spent administering marketing programs and completing tasks
- Improve close rates with timely and relevant engagement
- Boost brand and messaging consistency across campaigns and channels via templates and standards
- Shorten sales cycles with quicker response times
- Customize marketing to each customer’s needs
- Create scheduled and automated activities for around-the-clock engagement without manual effort
Why Use Marketing Automation Software?
Marketing automation tools allow you to spend more time focusing on creative solutions while increasing your close rate and improving the quality of your leads. This software helps develop your business and lets you focus on more pressing aspects of day-to-day functions. For starters, you will be able to reduce your staffing costs by a considerable amount; lead nurturing and marketing campaigns can be run automatically instead of manually, enabling your business to potentially send thousands of personalized emails a day without lifting a finger. This type of automation also helps your sales activity dramatically by improving your lead management and prioritization, which usually results in a better ROI. In addition, marketing automation tools hold your marketing and sales teams accountable for their performance with concrete data points, giving you the ability to adjust and improve your business strategies.
Key Business Problems Solved with Marketing Automation Software
- Create more targeted, well-informed content
- Provide overall message direction based on customer data
- Customize messaging across a customer base
- Personalize messaging without manual entry
- Reduce staffing and labor costs
Who Uses Marketing Automation Software?
Small businesses and large enterprises alike can benefit from marketing automation software. If you are a small business, you can directly benefit from marketing automation tools without having to increase your headcount, which can be especially important for companies with a small workforce and limited hiring capital. While the initial setup requires an investment of time to customize your platform, the overall result will be a significant decrease in tedious marketing tasks and a more effective sales cycle. From a small-business perspective, it’s exceedingly important to be effective and intentional with the finite amount of resources at your disposal. Marketing automation tools will allow your staff to make the most out of the hours allotted to them, freeing up time for creative solutions instead of repetitive tasks. These tools can optimize your staff’s time, allowing for a more effective business strategy.
Marketing teams — Marketing automation tools allow marketing teams to automate tedious tasks, organize workflows, and collect more customer data. By automating marketing tasks like email marketing, lead generation, and digital advertising, marketing teams save plenty of time and are able to focus more time on analyzing their data. Spending more time with this data results in a more effective marketing strategy.
Sales teams — Marketing automation software allows sales teams to leverage marketing data to identify qualified leads, analyze customer sentiment, and establish better communication with customers. When sales teams understand what leads have expressed a major interest in the product, they can reach out to customers based on actual data and turn cold calls into warm calls. With marketing automation data, sales teams can also be notified when the best time is to reach out to their leads. If leads are on a pricing page, this can trigger an alert to a sales rep to reach out to that lead and talk them through the product offering.
Content managers — Content managers can use marketing automation software to automate the content publishing process. This allows content marketing teams to schedule posts for the most effective times during the day, which can drive more visibility for their content.
Kinds of Marketing Automation Software
Marketing automation software is an umbrella term for any software that allows companies to automate or streamline their marketing efforts to improve operational efficiency and increase revenue. With this in mind, many tools that businesses use on a day-to-day basis contain marketing automation functionalities, including CRM and email marketing tools. However, while many tools provide marketing automation, these products may vary in their focus and breadth of features. Below are some of the different focuses you may find in a marketing automation solution:
Inbound marketing automation — Inbound marketing automation is designed for marketing teams that focus more on content management. This usually translates to teams that write blogs or post social media content to attract new customers. Within inbound marketing, some examples of tasks that can be automated include marketing analytics, reputation management, social media monitoring, and sales lead generation. The automation of these aspects frees up time for marketers to analyze the customer data and make informed decisions on how to improve marketing strategies.
Lead management and nurturing automation — With lead management and nurturing automation, sales teams can automate the process of acquiring and qualifying leads based on which are most likely to convert. This is particularly useful for sales teams, as users capable of setting parameters for what constitutes a qualified lead. This may be when prospective customers visit your product page three times, or it may be when they only come once. You get to decide when the automation tool triggers a sales notification that will alert sales reps to reach out to qualified leads and close a sale. With this tool, sales reps can save plenty of time by focusing on only the most qualified leads.
Pricing automation — E-commerce websites and online retailers can use pricing automation tools to close more sales. If a customer has come to your website and has been browsing a certain product multiple times, then it is very likely that they are considering buying that product. With pricing automation, retailers can automatically drop or raise prices based on interest or repeated product page visits. This allows retail sites to close more deals by offering customers a price point that they are willing to settle on.
B2B (business to business) vs. B2C (business to consumer) — Both B2B and B2C companies can experience value from using marketing automation software to send more personalized, timely, and relevant messages to consumers. B2B and B2C businesses do, however, have differing needs that must be met from this type of software. First, B2B companies have considerably longer buying cycles, and the decision process involves more steps. Additionally, B2B buying decisions are not typically made by just one individual; there are often numerous decision-makers that conduct extensive research before making a purchase. Meanwhile, B2C consumers typically make decisions on an individual basis and generally make buying decisions faster than B2B consumers. These differences impact a business’ marketing strategy, the channels in which they reach their consumers, and the types of content that get automated. Consequently, B2B and B2C companies consider marketing automation software features differently.
B2B companies leverage marketing automation software to assist in nurturing their leads throughout the sales cycle and look for features like integration into their CRM, lead scoring, and high-quality data (i.e., no duplicate contact records). B2C companies focus on the customer journey and making data-driven, predictive recommendations for products or services, typically requiring features such as retargeting, retention marketing, and personalized cart and browse abandonment messages. Since B2C companies typically experience a shorter sales cycle, personalization of their websites and messaging is of utmost importance; the marketing automation software they choose to implement typically needs to integrate with e-commerce sites. In contrast, while nurturing their leads, B2B companies use marketing automation software to send educational and event-based emails to increase brand awareness. Finally, the channels in which B2B and B2C companies reach their consumers differ. Both B2B and B2C businesses rely on email marketing, but B2C businesses often use other channels as well. That being said, they often look for marketing automation software than can support automation with other channels, including SMS, push notifications, and social media messaging.
Marketing Automation Software Features
Email marketing — One of the main functions of marketing automation software is the automation of email marketing. For example, once a customer signs up for your company’s newsletter, marketing automation takes over and can start sending out email marketing campaigns based on events, online activities, and lead scores. Email marketing functions also automate the personalization and branding of marketing emails. This way, each email that gets sent out is a personally addressed letter to whomever signed up for your newsletter.
A final important function of email marketing automation is managing email deliverability.This ensures inbox delivery and includes opt-in management, bounce handling, unsubscribe processing, suppression lists, email preview, spam checking, link validation, and delivery monitoring. This way, businesses can focus on analytics and profit rather than manually attending to every customer need.
Social media marketing — Marketing automation software allows businesses to automate the process of managing a social media campaign, which can increase customer engagement and visibility for your brand or product. With automation tools, you can schedule automated posts such as polls, sweepstakes, and referral programs. Then, marketing automation software can evaluate the customer sentiment of your posts by measuring likes, comments, replies, and retweets. Not only does this help raise brand awareness, but it also allows users to see how their brand is being perceived.
Lead management — Using marketing automation software to manage leads is one of the most effective ways to attract new customers. With lead scoring and grading features, marketing automation software can automatically qualify and score leads based on demographics, as well as prospect online behaviors like recency and frequency. Additionally, businesses can automate drip marketing campaigns that send relevant messages over time, based on prospect behaviors and predefined campaign steps. Automated behavior tracking then tracks which emails a prospect opens and clicks, what web pages they visit, and what keywords they use. All of these lead management tools allow businesses to collect and analyze prospect data without having to do the leg work of manually assessing each customer lead.
Advertising automation — Marketing automation tools can lead customers down the sales funnel by automating when leads see certain advertisements. If customers are revisiting a product page multiple times, this triggers your marketing automation software to present the customer with product advertisements based on where they are in the sales funnel. If they are strongly considering buying the product, then this might trigger a sales advertisement, or if they have been looking at competing products then this might also trigger an advertisement from your website. This helps to keep your product visible so customers always consider purchasing your product, even when they are considering another product as well.
Workflow management — Workflow management automates a process that typically requires intervention by several different users due to its series of steps. Administrators can write rules to determine who, and when, a user needs to complete a step. This also includes notification of users when they need to take action, which creates one fluid workflow that is meant to lead customers through the sales funnel, all the way from awareness to purchase.
Mobile marketing — To supplement both email and social media marketing, marketing automation tools also have the capability of automating mobile marketing. Users can communicate with customers by sending out push notifications, wearable device notifications, or Apple Wallet and Google Pay notifications. This way, even when apps or websites aren’t open, you can still send mobile notifications so customers are alerted with sale alerts, product announcements, new features, etc.
Many marketing automation software tools will also offer the following features:
Potential Issues with Marketing Automation Software
Over-automating — One of the common pitfalls of using marketing automation software is over-automation, when companies fall under the misconception that marketing automation software is a fix-it-all solution that you can “set and forget." Marketing automation, like many other innovative technologies, works better with human expertise and management. This means consistently monitoring workflow automation in order to reflect new offerings from your business.
