A Brief Overview of Marketing Automation

Some form of marketing automation is used by 75% of companies, according to a report. If you're interested in marketing automation and its potential benefits for your organization, below is a summary about basic concepts about the topic.

1. What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the use of software and marketing platforms that automate marketing activities and improve the efficiency of marketing programs. Repetitive marketing activities such as email marketing, social media posts and digital marketing campaigns can benefit from such automation. Marketing automation can help nurture leads and convert them into happy, paying customers. Therefore, it not only leads to increased efficiency but also increased revenue.

2. What are the benefits of marketing automation?

Ideally, marketing automation is at the heart of customer relationships helping reduce friction and dissatisfaction and increasing happiness and delight. For example, delivering personalized email filled with content that is relevant for a specific customer based on their profile serves to truly connect with and meet customer needs, and increase conversion rates. According to Marketo, companies can expect three clear benefits: increased revenues, more productive sales reps and more pipeline. According to another study, by emarketer, companies using automation saw conversion rates as high as 50%.

3. What can marketing automation do? Can it be used for spam?

Marketing automation can help trigger messages to customers automatically based on your customer data. Some of its most important features are email marketing, lead management, campaign management, and social marketing. It can enhance the customer experience by bringing together sales, marketing and customer service to create a seamless customer experience. Yes, it can be used to spam by unethical marketers but the advantages of marketing automation outweigh the risks. It can deliver outstanding marketing based on customer preferences that ultimately leads to improved conversion rates and increased revenue.

4. What are some popular tools? Are they easy to use?

There are a number of tools offered by companies such as Adobe, Salesforce, and HubSpot. They include Marketo by Adobe, Eloqua offered by Oracle, Pardot by Salesforce, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Constant Contact and Active Campaign. Yes, these tools are designed to be easy to use and manage whether they are simple emails or more complex digital campaign task management. However, it doesn’t mean that you can maximize its value without any effort on the user’s part. You need to bring with a strategy, goals, the right process and team, and content.

5. Can small businesses use marketing automation?

Absolutely. In fact, small and medium businesses, and even smaller companies across all industries are increasingly using marketing automation software to reach their customers. It is true that large, B2B companies (software, manufacturing, business services) that were tech-savvy were the early adopters of marketing automation but now B2C companies such as those in healthcare, financial services and retail have understood the value of automation and rapidly adopting it for customer engagement. A whopping 75% of companies use some form of marketing automation today. See this report.

If you want to learn more, go to this article on best practices for marketing automation.