According to Statista, marketing automation has been one of the most effective online marketing channels in 2020, contributing to about 17.4% of digital marketing efforts worldwide.
It is also predicted that the 3.6 billion US dollars industry will grow at a CAGR of 17.67% between 2021 and 2027.
2023 is going to see more traction in the marketing automation sector, with major businesses adopting automated marketing processes in a bid to stay ahead of the competition.
Automated softwares can take care of repetitive tasks, allowing you to easily track leads and nurture them through the conversion funnel, making it an indispensable part of your marketing activity.
So what is marketing automation and why do you need to include it in your current marketing strategy? Let’s dive in.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a technology that tracks users’ behavioral patterns. It uses data to streamline and measure marketing workflow, at the same time automating individualized marketing experience to increase revenue.
Marketing automation software can increase business productivity by 20%, increase marketing ROI by 45% and decrease overhead costs by 12.2%.
A typical marketing automation software will help you streamline and automate most of these workflows mentioned below:
- Email marketing and drip marketing campaigns
- Cross-channel marketing campaigns
- Lead generation and personalized customer experience
- Lead scoring and nurturing
- Targeted cross-selling and up-selling workflows
- Customer retention
- Measuring marketing ROI
Importance of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation streamlines your marketing process and paves the way for better sales and marketing accountability. A clearly defined marketing process with metrics to measure campaign effectiveness will allow you to scale up your marketing initiatives.
With marketing automation tools, you can easily use behavioral tracking methods to follow a customer’s journey through the sales lifecycle. This helps you reach potential customers more personalized manner and allows you to cross-sell or up-sell your products more efficiently.
Most importantly, marketing automation tools save time by automating manual and repetitive tasks, thereby freeing up your team for more critical tasks.
Used proactively, marketing automation can reduce your staffing costs and turn your marketing cost center into a revenue center.
Marketing Automation Trends
The ever-expanding world of technology makes it imperative for businesses to stay updated on the latest trends so they can gain competitive advantage. Customer buying patterns, economic and social trends are constantly evolving, and your marketing strategy should reflect that.
Here are some top trends for marketing automation in 2023.
Omnichannel marketing
These days businesses employ multiple channels to reach their customers. From social media and commercial ads to connecting through chatbots, emails, and phone calls, each of these channels can help you identify and engage with your customers and convert them to leads.
For a seamless omnichannel marketing experience, you need to leverage marketing automation tools. An omnichannel marketing strategy’s critical feature is gathering all data touchpoints and aggregating that information to gain useful insights. Marketing automation tools help you do that and much more.
Funnel-optimized content
When it comes to content, customers are increasingly demanding more curated and personalized experiences from brands. While 85% of businesses have seen an increase in content demand, 43% of businesses agree that most customers expect personalized content.
Content creation is time-consuming, whether you are creating email campaigns or landing pages. Using content automation, you can reduce the time needed for iterative activities and reach customers more personalized manner.
Data-driven decision-making
The data-driven business culture is here to stay and is expected to gain significant traction in 2023. Without critical data metrics, it is almost impossible to evaluate the success of your campaigns, qualify your leads, or analyze the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Whether you want to sync your data with your sales team, run an a/b test on current campaigns, or make an informed decision on your CTA buttons, marketing automation aligns the process with your marketing goals.
Lead capture
Lead generation and nurturing are one of the most essential goals of any marketing or sales funnel. Considering that today 67% of buyers usually end up shopping digitally, most of your marketing efforts will be directed to online channels.
Sourcing customer data through different channels and qualifying those leads, nurturing those leads with personalized content, cross-selling, up-selling, and getting repeat customers can be fast-tracked with an efficient marketing automation process.
AI and machine learning
According to a recent study by Statista, 32% of businesses utilize AI and marketing automation in paid promotions and personalized emails.
Using AI and machine learning, you can quickly gain access to user behavior patterns and use the data to improve customer engagement and campaign performance and repeat your sales and revenue channels.
Chatbots
Chatbots have quickly become one of the top tools for customer service. According to recent studies, Chatbots help 55% of businesses generate high-quality leads.
Conversational AI is a great customer engagement tool. It can initiate conversations with potential customers and generate interest and collect customer data that can be further dripped down the marketing funnel to generate qualifying leads.
Automated social media marketing
In 2021, social media was one of the most automated marketing channels for business owners. In fact, 47% of SMBs use marketing automation tools to leverage their social media marketing.
Automating simple and repetitive social media tasks like account management, audience response, and automated publishing can significantly reduce workload and streamline your SMM efforts.
Why Should Businesses Invest in Marketing Automation
A robust marketing automation tool will help your business garner a cross-channel customer journey across the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign. The data generated from such a source will give you useful insights into optimizing your sales funnel and can also increase your sales pipeline contribution by about 10%.
Let’s have a quick look at some other reasons to adopt marketing automation in your business:
Enhanced customer engagement:
Marketing automation tools allow you to personalize customer engagement by matching relevant content with past user behavior patterns. Reminders for abandoned carts, periodic product updates, and drip campaigns are some ways you can reach customers proactively.
Boosting lead generation:
The aim of any good marketing campaign is always lead generation. From leveraging social media to chatbots, marketing automation software can help you identify and nurture potential leads.
Detecting issues in the sales funnel:
A sales funnel helps businesses understand and map a customer’s purchasing journey. A data-driven sales funnel optimized with a marketing automation tool can empower your business in many ways.
A marketing automation tool lets you understand your customer’s behavior at each sales funnel stage. It also allows a/b testing of your campaigns, recalibrates what’s not working, identifies the most engaging content of your sales funnel, and acts proactively to engage/reengage customers.
Assessing lead quality
A marketing automation software will assign a score to every visitor landing on your site, tabulating every interaction the lead engages in. Then it will grade these scores with perceived value.
This process helps you qualify potential leads but also helps you differentiate between a bad lead and high-quality leads based on demographic, behavior patterns, location, social media presence, and so on.
Streamlining marketing and sales process
By taking care of your mundane marketing tasks, not only increases productivity but also improves team collaboration, boosts sales activity through lead generation, and increases the campaign ROI.
How to Use Marketing Automation to Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Developing a cohesive marketing strategy is much more than using automated marketing software. However, you can leverage your marketing automation tool to scale your marketing efforts considerably. Some of the best practices to boost your marketing strategy with automation tools are:
- Understanding customer behavior by mapping out their purchase journey
- Improving collaboration between your marketing and sales team with gainful insights into the sales funnel
- Conducting a content audit by tracking and identifying the most engaging content, campaign monitoring, and running a/b testings
- Rehashing the analytics to identify key ROI metrics and KPIs
- Collaborating with your sales and support team to identify issues in the sales funnel and recalibrating campaigns accordingly
- Mapping out campaigns and activities that will get you the highest engagement
- Identifying technologies needed to support marketing efforts
- Aligning your campaigns and targets with business goals
7 Benefits of Using Marketing Automation
By now, you must already have realized the strategic importance of marketing automation. To reiterate, marketing automation can help you:
- Provide a seamless omnichannel experience and enhance customer engagement
- Simplify and automate mundane marketing activities
- Profile and segment your customers based on lead quality and behavior tracking
- Increase sales conversion with enhanced cross-selling and up-selling
- Download accurate, insightful analytics to measure key performance metrics
- Collate lead scoring and streamline customer data management
- Nurture your lead by guiding them through each stage of the sales funnel, timely follow-ups, and after-sales engagement
Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools
The cloud-based software retrieves authorized aggregated data from multiple channels, collating them in a single platform. With 150+ connectors, and a custom connector feature, cross-channel integration has never been this easy.
Market segment ratio:
Industries used:
Pricing starts at:
Inbound marketing software that does a little bit of everything, Hubspot is perfect for small business owners and startups.
Market segment ratio: 55% Small business, 39% Mid-market
Industries used: Marketing and Advertising, and Computer Software
Pricing starts at: $45 per month
ActiveCampaigns offers 750+ pre-built automation with its Customer Experience Automation Platform (CXA) with more than 850 integration with cross-platform channels like Facebook, Microsoft, Salesforce, Shopify, etc.
Market Segment ratio: 93% Small business, 6% Mid-market
Industries used: Marketing and Advertising, and Health, Wellness and Fitness
Pricing starts at: $29 per month.
Considered one of the best email marketing and automation platforms for growing businesses, MailChimp allows its customers to easily create multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Market Segment ratio: 72% Small business, 19% Mid-market
Industries used: Marketing and Advertising, and Information Technology and Services.
Pricing starts at: Has a free version.
Ranked as one of the easiest-to-use automation software, Insider provides a single platform for individualized, cross-channel experiences.
Market Segment ratio: 46% Small business, 30% Mid-market
Industries used: Apparel and fashion, and Retail
Pricing starts at: Provides custom quote
How GrowthNirvana can Help You
GrowthNirvana is a cloud-based SaaS automation tool that lets you connect all your ad accounts across multiple channels in one unified platform. With pre-built integrations that connect with 150+ data touch points, it gives you automated analytical reports in minutes.
Another key offering on the platform is what is called a “custom connector”. If any of your usual connectors seem missing from the list of integrations, GrowthNirvana will build it for you – that’s a promise.
Some USPs of using the GrowthNirvana automation platform:
- No infrastructure is needed since it is cloud-based
- Offers full-funnel reporting
- 60+ expert-built dashboard templates that can be fully customized, branded and white-labeled in minutes
- Offers custom connectors, in case there is any missing integration channel
- Helps you detect bad data through accurate analytics
Also read: https://growthnirvana.com/blog/cross-channel-marketing-attribution/
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