In the age of the internet and building broad reach for promotional campaigns, it's hard to imagine sending advertising emails or building a customer database manually. In many situations, this would be completely pointless. Imagine, for example, a marketer manually sending thousands of emails – one by one, changing the recipient's name. Completely pointless, right? Especially since many activities can be simplified these days. Simply use marketing automation tools. When is it worthwhile? Find out.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is nothing new . The first attempts to automate communication with potential customers were made in the early 1990s. However, it wasn't until the 21st century that technology—especially web analytics and SaaS—reached a significant level of sophistication. With the emergence of services like HubSpot, everything became much simpler.
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Marketing automation in practice
Today, marketing automation allows, for example:
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- Effectively monitor and analyze internet users' activities – in relation to the desired indicators.
- Intelligently segment users due to demographic characteristics, and therefore – precisely select the target audience.
- Personalize offers – matching them to the interests and actions undertaken by the customer (e.g. a user of a banking application who has been browsing loan offers from his bank can soon expect a call from a salesperson who will prepare a specific offer for him).
- Automate email marketing, i.e. sending newsletters and sales messages, "unattended" acquiring leads and building databases.
- Link sales messages across multiple sources (this also applies to remarketing, i.e. the appearance of contextual ads related to websites visited by the customer).
As you can see, the potential of marketing automation is enormous, and not using it would be a great oversight on the part of a modern marketer.
However, the question arises when marketing automation really pays off.
Marketing automation and profitability
The question of the profitability of individual automation activities is difficult to answer unequivocally. It all depends on many factors – from the specific nature of the marketing campaign, to the established goals, to the effectiveness of the tools used. Therefore, it's worth configuring a "package" of marketing automation solutions in consultation with specialists, after analyzing your own needs, your competitors' activities, and market opportunities. One thing is certain: we are heading towards increasingly intense automation . Therefore, it cannot be avoided. However, it must be implemented wisely. You can always test how individual solutions perform in the long term and create the perfect set for yourself.
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What is worth automating?
To identify the most profitable areas to automate, it's worth examining which tasks are most frequently accomplished using marketing automation. Here are the key ones.
- Newsletter
Sending a newsletter is the simplest way to conduct email marketing. By regularly sending your customers links to interesting and relevant (this is VERY important!) articles or offers, you remind them of your existence and increase the chances of conversion. However, you should be aware that on average, three out of four marketing emails will go unread. And if this is the case, there's no point in bothering with preparing each one individually. Marketing automation software will allow you to:
- automatically add each new registered user to the database (e.g., who creates a profile on your portal or sends an email address via the form on the landing page),
- classify the user into a specific target group based on their behavior and demographic profile,
- personalize the messages sent to him,
- ensure that mailings are sent at the appropriate frequency (so that they arrive regularly, but not in an irritating quantity).
Please also remember that promotional emails will be monitored after sending. You will receive feedback on:
- how many emails were opened and how many were deleted,
- how many readers reacted to the CTA included in it, i.e., clicked on a link to an article or a promotional offer,
- how many clicks resulted in conversion and, ultimately, sales.
This will provide you with measurable data that will allow you to streamline and improve your email communications.
2. Lead generation
Lead generation is one of the pillars of modern marketing. This is how you build a database of customers and potential customers, whom you can then guide through the entire marketing funnel . This process is also worth automating – for example, creating a landing page will allow you to do this. A properly optimized website of this type is a key element of inbound marketing, allowing the lead database to (almost) "create" itself.
But that's not all. Remember that marketing automation tools will also allow you to monitor your leads' buying behavior. This, in turn, will help you automatically tailor the messages you send to them based on their current stage of the purchasing journey.
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3. Promotion on social media
Full social media automation? Absolutely not. However, marketing automation tools can support communication through this channel. For example, the system receives information that a user visited a specific online store's website and browsed certain products. This data can trigger the display of appropriate sponsored posts on Facebook—referring specifically to those products or related topics.
These are just a few examples of activities that can be automated. You can, of course, do more. So, explore the possibilities marketing automation software offers and use it according to your needs.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- Marketing automation operation
- The impact of marketing automation on financial results
