Marketing Automation: why it’s important and how to make the most of it

Marketing Automation is critical to the overall success of digital marketing activities according to 91 percent of Instapage respondents. This is because this practice offers endless possibilities, such as increasing sales, rewarding one’s most loyal users, recovering inactive ones, organizing events and planning actions on the sales pipeline.

What is Marketing Automation?
When we talk about marketing automation, we are referring to the use of software or services on the web that allow you to implement, manage and automate everyday marketing activities and manual processes on different channels. These include sending emails, managing campaigns, populating a database and managing its contacts, which can often be repetitive.

Using marketing automation is a must for any modern marketing team. If you think about it, most companies have the same purpose: to increase revenue and their growth at an affordable cost. To achieve this goal, you need to align your resources with your processes and technology in order to streamline your work and save time and money. The definition of marketing automation is explicated in this regard.

Marketing automation platforms, powered by artificial intelligence, enable the creation of automated workflows to improve efficiency on various tasks. The main business advantage of marketing automation comes from the fact that these tools can scan and analyze tons of data in seconds. In addition, they can provide interesting insights and even perform automated marketing activities based on them.

Artificial intelligence can, for example, track and analyze user behavior on websites and send them hyper-personalized messages based on where they are in their customer journey. Marketing automation can make targeting very precise, ensuring that each consumer receives only communications that are relevant to them. In fact, the goal of marketing automation is to facilitate customer acquisition and retention by raising the quality of service.

Web Marketing Automation applications that give your e-commerce a leg up
Among the other purposes of marketing automation is generating more qualified leads, (according to the Annuitas Group, businesses that implement MA achieve an average 451% increase in qualified leads).

The ideal way to provide a personalized experience on your site is to show different products depending on the interactions the user has performed. Similarly, it is important that pop-ups and banners are tailored to the type of user who is browsing our site. For example, if it is the first time the user lands on the site, we may show him a pop-up offering a discount on the first purchase. If the user has already made his first purchase, it will be better not to show him this type of communication again so as not to frustrate him, as he cannot use it again.

Infinite factors can be exploited to create tailored navigation, such as the place from which the user connects, through geolocation, with the aim of showing him a banner reporting shipping costs for that country.

To enable this, it is important to do some initial segmentation work. The more we segment, the more information we have about our audience and the more we can make communications and the experience in general personalized, making users feel special.

Segmentation is simply the categorization of your database into different user groups. You can create these segments based on any characteristic that may be relevant to your goals, such as based on location in the path to purchase, demographics, occupation or interests.

As another web marketing automation activity, it is very useful to implement cross-sell and up-sell, which is a very effective strategy that involves proposing products similar to the one the user is viewing (cross-sell) and products to add to the product being purchased (up-sell), so as to raise the average receipt. The ideal cross-sell is to show similar products but with a higher price than the one being viewed.

Email marketing, a key branch of marketing automation
The most common application of marketing automation is e-mail marketing, a system in which e-mails are strategically processed and automatically sent to contacts based on a set of predetermined criteria. This practice is different from massive communications, such as a newsletter that you may send every month to all of your subscribers.

In contrast, email workflows aim to personalize the user experience and their relationship with the brand by sending targeted communications that are hyper-relevant to each contact, which are triggered only when they take a specific action or fall into a certain category. Examples might be a user who watches a webinar, one who is not active for a certain period of time, another who abandons their shopping cart, and so on.

Essentially, there are four basic elements in marketing automation workflows. Giving the incipit is a trigger, which is an activity on the part of the customer that starts the automation workflow. Next are delays, then the timing between a trigger and the next action by your company. The conditions, which are the rules that drive the marketing automation funnel (if A is true, do this; if B is true, do that). Finally, the actions-the events that are executed when a user satisfies the previous steps. These can be sending an email, assigning a tag, sending an internal notification, and many others.

In some steps, it is essential to set up automations, especially for e-commerce. For example, to retrieve users who abandon the shopping cart, or to follow up with transactional communications, reassuring the consumer in the various steps of purchase, from order receipt to delivery.

A priori, it is certainly important to have a product or service that works at the base: one cannot think that marketing automation is a magic wand, but it can certainly greatly improve user engagement with one’s site and consequently revenue. Among automations, it is recommended to send emails that tell about your brand and provide information of interest to that specific user, which other users may often not be interested in.

In fact, the use of lead nurturing through marketing automation has seen a 15-20% increase in potential buyers, who were not ready to buy, converted to customers (Protocol80).In addition, with some tools it is possible to identify the most “loyal” and active users, through marketing automation lead scoring. Lead scoring is a point-based system in which you quantify the value of a contact, determined by engagement factors such as pages visited, content downloaded, and emails opened. Giving each lead a numerical score helps determine which users are the “hottest,” so you know which ones deserve the most attention, allowing your team to prioritize them in marketing activities as they represent opportunities.

How to increase the results of your marketing automation campaigns
The table below shows the average open rate and click-through rate among different sectors in 2020:

The 16.65 percent open rate and 1.92 percent click-through rate may seem like low numbers. But the cost of sending emails to 10,000 people is quite low, so if almost 5 people buy your service, it turns out to be enough to reach break-even. According to Campaign Monitor, the ROI for email marketing can reach 4400%. That means 44 euros for every euro spent on an email marketing campaign, which suggests to us that it is worth it!

So, what are the best email marketing practices to implement?

It is highly inadvisable to buy lists of contacts, as they will probably not be really interested in your service or at any rate will not have interacted with the site, so the target audience will be wrong and the e-mail will come across as spam, bringing the company’s professionalism into disrepute;
Send emails at the right time, so as to catch the user at the instant they are inclined to open the email and click. The best strategy for finding ideal day and time is to conduct A/B tests;
Avoid using ‘No-Reply’ in the sender’s e-mail address; it is a message of little care and attention to the customer’s needs.
Include a digital signature;
Personalize the email greeting;
Optimize the preview text;
Use compelling and concise subject lines to increase open rates;
Test your email campaign. This may seem like trivial advice, but missing links or wrong images are a very usual phenomenon, so it is always recommended to check your email preview. The best practice is to send a test email to a small group of people such as colleagues in your company to make sure everything is working well.
Use language that is mindful of Diversity and Inclusion issues.

How to choose a marketing automation platform for your company?
The first and most important criterion, of course, is the type of marketing automation functions the tool provides.

Email marketing is a branch that almost all marketing automation software provides, and since most platforms are primarily focused on it, their pricing depends on the size of your contact database (CRM) or the number of emails you want to send. It is important to compare prices with this fact in mind. Therefore, do not compare plans in absolute terms, but in terms of how many contacts you can reach for a certain amount of money.

In addition to the previous point, you need to opt for a tool that provides scalability. This is because you might think of choosing a small tool that meets your current needs, but probably (hopefully), this will not be able to support you when your business grows.

Usability and simplicity of the interface should be other among the most important criteria for choosing a platform. It does not make sense to invest in something that you cannot fully utilize. Also, having a complex tool can be expensive and is likely to end up wasting your time. The best way to test it is to request a demo or use a free trial before buying subscriptions.

Another important factor in choosing the tool is the type of integrations it provides, as most focus on only one or two aspects of marketing automation, such as email marketing, sales, automation, advertising, etc.

Customer support is also an important aspect, although it is often overlooked. One should always opt for platforms that have a solid support team backing them up.