Marketing automation

“Marketing Automation replaces separate systems for email, web visitor tracking, lead scoring, nurture campaigns, campaign management and reporting with one solution that streamlines marketing processes and shares data with sales.” – David Raab, Raab Guide


You are a business owner with a clear vision about where you wish to reach. But, why is it that in spite of your efforts, many of the competition seem to be getting better results? This may happen for a variety of reasons. One of these may be that many businesses ignore the power of automation altogether. The ‘Rolodex’ model of executing business processes is passé. In modern times, businesses need to save time by avoiding repetitive, mundane tasks.
Unlike before, marketers are now realizing the immense advantages of automating key processes. Automation of various activities such as Sales & Marketing empowers a business. With more time at their disposal, it now allows them to best express their latent creativity. Moreover, the Support teams can now deliver improved customer experience. This helps them to customize their engagement with the most valuable customers.
But, it is unfortunate that many of us (yes, even in 2018) are averse to adopting this phenomenal technology.
Here are a few interesting facts about marketing automation that you should know.
Good to know facts about Marketing Automation:
#1. It is as easy as taking a walk in the park: Marketing Automation is not mysterious, as many are prone to assume. All you need to do is to add a small JavaScript code to your website and that, in turn, does everything else. It tracks visitors based on cookies. There is no need for complicated implementations. But, the configuration and the time frame may take some need-based adjustments. It then starts tracking visitor behavior on your website and stores the information. This data will help you take the right business decisions. Additionally, you can also customize your engagement for each user.
#2. Segmenting is easy too: 
The ‘segmentation’ feature in your marketing automation platform is a powerful tool? It can help you create targeted lists of prospective leads.
#3. Nurture Customers: 
Datashows that only about 20% of website visitors actually turn into customers. Thus, it becomes important to have a strategy that nurtures potential customers to transform them into permanent ones. Your strategy will be determined by what model of business yours is: B2B or B2C. Intense lifecycle management is the need for B2B companies, while upselling is a strong requirement for B2C ones. Even so, both the models need to measure ROI and use that information to enhance business and relationships.
#4. Shorten your sales cycle: 
How often have you wondered when and whether a lead will qualify? With marketing automation, the sales cycle becomes shorter and seamless. This allows your marketing team to identify hot prospects at the right moment of intent. The ‘lead scoring’ feature in your CRM helps you to give a score to each lead, based on her online activities. These scores tell you where the customer is, in the sales cycle.
“Did you know that 95% of Best-in-Class companies rate the ability to score leads for sales prioritization as a four or five on a one-to-five value scale. (Aberdeen)”
#5. Upsell better: 
Now we all know that even a single satisfied customer can be a boon. He becomes an indirect brand ambassador for your business. With marketing automation, this becomes a cinch. Keep track of your customers’ on-site activities and identify their needs to act at the right time. This ensures a level of trust and loyalty, and this, in turn, makes her a repeat customer and also easier to upsell to. Winners all!
#6. Streamline Email Marketing: 
Email marketing is one of the most effective B2B marketing methods in the world. It is too important to overlook. Over the past few years, the way people respond to email marketing has changed drastically. It is, therefore, important to have a sound email marketing strategy in place. Delivering the right content at the right time makes a huge difference to customers as well as to your business. Your marketing automation software goes a long way in creating a robust strategy. Your software will have features that create, personalize and track engagement.
#7. Customize offers:
Giving a persona to an otherwise invisible website visitor can be a tough task. But his digital footprint on your website can give you highly actionable insights into what his preferences are. This, in turn, can help you to create and deliver targeted content that is likely to engage him. Your marketing automation software makes it possible to track each activity of the user’s. What pages he has visited. What links he has clicked on. What kind of industry he belongs to. All this and more is possible based on the cookies and his IP address. As a marketer, all this data helps you to respond to the user in real time, with relevant content.
#7. A/B Test: 
This is a known method that most marketers rely upon. Since there is no single proven formula for success, marketers take a variable based approach to determine what works best for them. The objective of this is to ensure that the customer is engaged well. Marketing automation software allows you to conduct A/B testing; that is to test multiple variations of content for online forms, emails, landing pages, etc. for the right blend. The various factors to be considered are timing, frequency, content, and call-to-action. Multiple versions, their permutations, and combinations may be tried out before the nail hits the head. This is an effective approach.
#8. Improve website traffic:
One of the major objectives for a marketer is to increase website traffic. Your marketing automation software will help you to create dynamic website content for each visitor. This will give them a good experience and eventually improve your web traffic. With a good software solution like ours, you can lend a unique touch to your content. It is well known that today’s customers expect and even demands a personalized experience. With marketing automation, it is possible.
#9. Educate your subscribers: 
Your  marketing automation platform gives you the freedom to share relevant marketing and educational content with your subscribers. You can not only create content based on your lead segments, you can send your leads that content that they would find relevant at the precise moment. For example, it would be great for a new lead to understand how your industry works and the value it creates. However, it may not be a great idea to promote your business aggressively. Instead, you should share crisply written educational content that they are happy to read and then share. Create great content consistently and keep it simple. This is likely to attract more readers. Try to rope in industry influencers in your content strategy. That will boost your marketing effort.
#10. Align Sales and Marketing: 
Many people feel that the CRM is only a marketing tool. It is a potent sales tool as well. It seamlessly aligns both the Sales and the Marketing teams. Earlier, guesswork drove a large number of marketing decisions. Lead qualification status was subjected to assumption and not metrics-driven. Now, your Sales team can follow each lead from the start. This creates the perfect orchestration required to deliver well!
Some recent mind-boggling stats about Marketing Automation:

• 67% of Marketing Leaders currently use a Marketing Automation Platform. – Salesforce “State of Marketing” (2017)
• Over the next two years, an additional 21% of Marketing Leaders plan to use a Marketing Automation Platform. – Salesforce “State of Marketing” (2017)
• 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels. – Marketo & Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success” (2015)
• There are nearly 11 times more B2B organizations using marketing automation now than in 2011. – SiriusDecisions “B-to-B Marketing Automation Study” (2014)
• Nearly two-thirds (63%) of the “Very successful” use their marketing automation systems extensively, while more than a third (37%) achieved best-in-class status with limited use. – Three Deep & Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends for Success” (2016)
• Marketing attribution plays a huge role in measuring marketing performance, particularly to down-funnel metrics such as revenue. 75% of respondents said that they had an attribution model in place, 38.8% of respondents reported using single touch attribution models, while 25.4% are using multi-touch models. – Heinz, Reachforce and research partners “The State of Pipeline Marketing Report” (2016)[Source]

Marketing automation is now even bigger and better, and there’s still a lot more to come. With marketing automation, the sky is the limit, and a well thought out strategy is bound to take you there. So hop on to the bus before you miss it and with our product, we have your back!