Extremely simply, marketing automation refers to a system that handles routine marketing work in a pre-defined way. When repetitive tasks are handled with the help of automation, sales and marketing goals can be achieved more efficiently than before and the person has more time for the most important thing, i.e. strategic planning.
Marketing automation – ‘All in the warm-tireless
At its lightest, marketing automation can mean, for example, that a thank you message from a newsletter subscription is automated. Or that subscribe to the website Guide to ring the customer’s email is automatically immediately after the order form filling.
Inbound marketing attracts customers to the buying path through various channels such as emails, search engines and social media. The attraction is based on digital content that the customer finds so interesting and useful that he comes to the company on his own initiative.
Once the customer is on the buying path, information about his stores begins to accumulate in the marketing automation system. With the help of automation tools, the user is segmented according to his interests and directed to the corresponding user path. This path provides him with personalized and timely content that deepens the customer’s knowledge, maintains interest, and gradually moves toward the purchase decision and human contact.
As the customer’s interest and knowledge grow, he or she becomes warm from the cold contact and the clustering of the store becomes easier. By the time of the sales situation, the sellers have also accumulated a lot of useful information about the customer’s stores, needs and interests, starting from which pages the contact has visited, what ads he has clicked and what e-books he has downloaded. With the help of the accumulated information, it is possible to personalize customer communications very accurately and thus significantly improve the customer’s shopping experience.
Marketing automation can also be used to take care of existing customers in case salespeople don’t remember or have time to do so. For example, the buyer of a car can be reminded of upcoming maintenance or the buyer of the car can also be offered to purchase an additional service. This reinforces the customer’s commitment to the company.
Marketing and sales go hand in hand
In addition to increasing customer orientation, the absolute trump card of marketing automation is that it brings companies’ marketing and sales departments together more strongly than before. If in the past sales have accused marketing of leads that are too cold and marketing sales that the fate of leads has not been reported, you can say goodbye to inconsistencies with marketing automation. Marketing automation provides better leads for sales and more measurability for marketing.
However, the use of two-sided bins is required to achieve dissolution and pulling together. In some cases, it is also necessary to abandon familiar approaches and create entirely new and common processes. It can be painful at times, but it will ultimately reward you when the goals of both departments are achieved more effectively than before.
Does marketing automation replace man?
While marketing automation is a system, it is about much more than just a technology solution. The system itself doesn’t make you bliss, and the job doesn’t stop at pressing the start automation button. There is a need for human contact also in the future.
In order to get the most out of marketing automation, its processes must be constantly adjusted and developed. There is also a need to consider new ways to attract traffic to websites, monitor the accumulating data and on that basis to make corrections. In the early days of system deployment, the need for human resources may even increase, as only careful groundwork allows automation processes to work as desired and there is enough content tailored to different user paths.
Together with man, marketing automation can work wonders, so in the future, at least, the amount of automation in marketing will certainly not decrease. The importance of the customer experience as an accelerator of the purchasing decision is growing all the time, so the winners will be the companies that are best able to tailor their marketing to the customer’s current needs.
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