What does marketing automation mean?
Marketing automation is a broad concept. So what exactly are we talking about?
Marketing automation refers to the use of software to build sequences of actions based on predefined trigger conditions. Most commonly, the sequences follow if/then logic.
if/then logic in marketing automation
Keep in mind that it’s not limited to automation of email marketing campaigns. Marketing automation has a range of other use cases such as:
Lead generation
Lead scoring
Paid advertising
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Marketing analytics
Social media planning
User onboarding
Nearly any marketing activity can be automated. This wide-ranging functionality gives marketers the time and resources to move beyond repetitive tasks and focus on data analysis and decision-making. Automation also enables capabilities like drip marketing.
To enjoy the benefits of marketing automation, you’ll want to add it to every aspect of your marketing strategy, not just email campaigns norway telephone number data or CRM. That’s where automation software comes in handy. Brevo offers a complete toolbox that helps you to automate your marketing campaigns from Facebook ad management to lead nurturing.
16 can’t-miss marketing automation benefits
When implemented across all your marketing activity, automation can lead to some pretty impressive benefits. Let’s take a look!
1. Smooth customer journeys
Marketing automation allows you to guide your audience through a tailor-made customer journey.
Without automation, you’d need to follow every step of every marketing lead just to respond with targeted content. In upselling and cross selling: how to integrate them into your content marketing strategy? an automation setup, a user enters the sales funnel and moves down through it without any manual effort from your team.
For instance, the path of a user who has been targeted with a Facebook ad might look like this:
A user…
Comes across your paid social ad;
Clicks on it;
Gets added to your remarketing list;
Sees more relevant ads;
Views a product, but abandons the cart;
Receives an email with a discount for the product they viewed;
Gets assistance from the chatbot;
Buys the product.
And this is only the beginning of the email marketing customer journey! After converting, a customer should start receiving cross-sell emails and seeing ads with relevant offers that encourage them to make repeat purchases, over and over again.
2. Cross-channel marketing campaigns
Cross-channel marketing automation allows you to follow prospects and customers across an array of different channels.
Marketing automation tools typically combine bahrain leads advertising campaigns, live chat, SMS marketing, email sending, CRM, and other features under one roof — making it easy for you to build custom cross-channel marketing workflows and reach your customers wherever they go.
A cross-channel marketing automation workflow in Brevo
A cross-channel marketing automation workflow in Brevo
With automated sequences, you can reach cart abandoners with relevant offers by email, target warm leads with Facebook ads, or send SMS notifications to webinar attendees.
3. Attribution made possible
Marketing attribution is the way to assess how different marketing campaigns have contributed to reaching your desired outcomes. In multi-channel marketing, it’s the only way to evaluate the performance of individual marketing channels and set priorities.
Doing marketing attribution without automation software is simply impossible.
Imagine you’ve reached a prospect with a Facebook ad campaign, brought them to your company blog, and nurtured them with a series of marketing emails. After receiving your third email, the prospect has bought your product. Unless you’ve connected all the touchpoints with an automation solution, you can hardly track the entire path of that user. In this case, you’ll attribute the sale to that last email.
Marketing automation eliminates unfairness and offers visibility into the role of every customer touchpoint leading up to purchase.
4. Dynamic personalization
Dynamic personalization is the act of customizing the content a user sees based on their online behavior or specific characteristics or demographics. With more than 70% of people expecting companies to deliver personalized interactions, email personalization drives up to a 15 percent revenue lift.
Imagine personalizing all your marketing content manually. Not only would it be time-consuming, but it’d hardly be possible from a technical perspective.
Automation software dynamically personalizes chatbot replies, emails, ad copy, and any other content forms. It collects and processes large amounts of customer data instantly to adapt content to each individual user and deliver unique experiences. No wonder marketing experts love it!
5. More (high-quality) leads
80% of companies see an increase in lead generation after implementing marketing automation. You can be one of them!
To generate leads at scale, you just need to create a lead magnet, build a signup form, and put it where your target audience is most likely to find it. The rest of the work will be done by your marketing automation solution.
You can also build a lead generation chatbot to identify potential customers by their behavior, spark their interest, and add their contact information to the relevant segment.
There are countless ways to automate lead generation. You can set up PPC campaigns, use lead gen tools, or do referral marketing — just to name a few. But regardless of the method(s) you choose, the result is a steady stream of leads.
6. Effective lead scoring
Marketing automation eliminates the challenges of manual lead qualification and allows you to create a solid lead scoring model.
An automated lead scoring model dynamically qualifies leads using predefined criteria like user actions and events. With a marketing automation system, you can build a setup that assigns points to leads and then triggers certain actions depending on the lead score. Take a look at the example workflow below:
lead scoring automation
A lead scoring workflow set up with Brevo
Instead of constantly monitoring lead activity, you can include lead scoring in your marketing workflows and use scores as triggers for immediate action.
One of the use cases of automated lead scoring is dynamic list segmentation. You can use marketing automation to group contacts based on their scores in real time. With automated list segmentation, you’ll always reach your audience with relevant messages.