With a rapid increase in technological advances especially in the age where AI, deep learning, and automation lead our way, it seems wise that right now is the best time to utilize these advancements to boost your businesses. One such breakthrough is the marketing automation specifically tooled for businesses to enhance productivity, expand sales, and generate revenue, eliminating the tiresome tasks while saving those work hours.
Keeping in mind how big data and customization have become essential to improve revenue and engagement for business, marketing automation has become a fundamental part of the process.
Let us dive into understanding the idea around marketing automation with its two main types.
Marketing automation has been broadly classified into two groups, namely – Internal Marketing Automation and External Marketing Automation.
i) Internal Marketing Automation is the task of automating internal marketing processes like tracking and reporting marketing activity or clearing the data stored in your CRM system.
ii) External Marketing Automation, on the other hand, is all about automating the external marketing activity like email marketing drip campaigns.
Now, this being told, there are a variety of reasons why marketing automation has the ability to boost your business in a never-seen-before way. It brings with it benefits that can prove to be indispensable to your business.
Better Targeting of Messages
If you are a business owner, enthusiast or an amateur you would understand how important it is to target messages to increase user engagement and bolster your business. No matter how flawless the content be, it is important that it targets the right audience.
According to the DMA Email Report, more than 75% of email revenue originates through triggered campaigns handled automatically, rather than a generic non targeted campaign.
Doesn’t it make sense to make your messages targeted specifically?
Enhanced Customer Experience
Today customers are more responsive and need elaborate solutions. Hence, today your business needs to adapt to ways to improve customer experience and automation does exactly that. Research estimates that 70% to 80% of decision-based processes can be automated in business to deliver what customers want.
Better Quality of Leads & Increasing them
Automating the marketing process can allow you to rightfully engage a customer and convert them from prospective clients to happy customers. Starting right from lead generation to lead nurturing, automation takes up an efficient approach to engage and convert the prospect to a customer. Each and every message prepared is scheduled to be sent out at the right time to get better results.
In addition to this, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture the leads have shown an increase of a whopping 451% in the qualified leads. It places sturdy marketing platforms and customer behavior tracking methods to understand your prospect and strategize a campaign specifically targeting them, thus increasing your reach through chatbots, emails, and private messages.
Efficient Marketing
Marketing automation decreases the requirement of your work staff to do marketing tasks. With the cutting down of staff costs, the team is now ready to focus on much more important tasks that can add value to your organization. Not only does it improve the ROI on the money invested for employment, but according to Forbes, 63% of companies that use these tools outgrow their competitors.
Increased Cooperation Between Marketing And Sales
Automating the marketing process gives you the opportunity to bring that right balance between marketing and sales team which can prove to be a boon for your business. Methods like lead scoring allow you to find the target customer and land on a decision whether they are ready to advance to communication with your sales team or not.
Cost Efficiency
Studies believe that automation is becoming more common and that 86% of working professionals assert that it makes work more productive and organized. While optimizing costs, marketing automation allows you to focus on the rewarding aspects of work and draw savings. Additionally, it saves you a lot of time allowing you to expand holistically.
Allows Combining Of Data From Different Channels
To understand the customer better, you need to broaden your customer insights and marketing automation is the best way to do that. It allows you to integrate the data from various channels like purchase history, demographic, and contextual information and thus increasing your knowledge base about customers.
Amplify Web Traffic
Marketing automation even gives you the capability to organically and efficiently increase web traffic to your website by incorporating various different tactics such as social media campaigns, email drip campaigns, customized and targeted messages, automated engagement, and whatnot.
Raised Profits
Undoubtedly, putting money in marketing automation is not cheap. But given the benefits it has to offer, the investment is totally justified. For instance, 78% of marketers stipulate that automation tools have significantly helped in increasing revenue.
Shortened Sales Cycle
Marketing automation has an intrinsic impact as it educates people freeing the sales team from doing so. It even quickens the response time and the automated follow-ups become more easy, fast, and customized. It has been estimated that automating the marketing process saves 1500 hours a month per business.
But just how every coin has two sides, so does marketing automation. Even though automation has so much to offer when compared to its cons, it is tough to completely overlook them. Here is a review of significant barriers that come with marketing automation:
Significant Barriers of Marketing Automation
Lack of an effective strategy
If there is no strategy in place to bolster your business, marketing automation will most likely fail. Hence, it is imperative to devise an action plan for automating the marketing process by laying out goals, target audience, and other necessary components.
Lack of Employee Skills
To make automation successful, a skilled employee is required who has a knack for marketing and consumer analytics. The team that works with marketing automation needs to be thorough with the working platform while having complete knowledge about all the stages of project development, digital marketing strategies, and build an automated design accordingly. Currently, it is very rare to find such specialists who can handle this technology.
Complex System Setup
The whole idea behind marketing automation is to understand the target audience and decide what works best for them. This process can be a little too complex to implement in an automated design by businesses, hence finding it difficult to actually incorporate this system.
Blasting Irrelevant Content
It is very critical to understand customer dynamics and what works for them through a personalized marketing campaign. Thus, marketing automation may require time-to-time human intervention in order to curate and set campaigns. Otherwise, the content may not be customer-centric and the prospect might end up classifying your business as spam and lower your chances of converting a quality lead.
Budget Constraints
Market Automation comes with a considerable cost as it requires you to pay for setup and maintenance as well. However, it is a choice for each business between payroll expenses and loss of productivity v/s higher outputs, efficiency, scalability, and sustainability in business. After all, it is like an investment worth the risk.
Upon elucidating the information about marketing automation, it is quite clear that this technology has the power to bolster your business’ output and scalability. However, it is important to note that all this needs to be carried out judiciously. While it allows your business to rationalize, computerize, and analyze your customer better, it can sometimes be too difficult to handle and implement. All in all, the pros of marketing automation outweigh the cons and you can wisely use it to engage your customers and experience better results.
