When it is used strategically, marketing automation has a wide range of advantages, especially regarding how your business is experienced and perceived by its customers.
Marketing automation covers a range of technologies that are designed to automate marketing communication across several marketing channels. They can be used for automating email, push notifications, Facebook and other social media, Google Ads and SMS campaigns. When it comes to the definition of marketing automation, there is often an emphasis on how it benefits marketing, sales, and business success overall. However, when used strategically, marketing automation can also improve the customer’s experience and boost customer engagement, allowing it to grow your company’s revenue exponentially.
Marketing Automation Purpose
Marketing automation technologies are used to drive revenue and allow the business to be run more efficiently. It also enhances the customer experience and boosts customer and business relationships. Today, customers have become accustomed to personalised, targeted messages and have become increasingly unengaged with mass marketing strategies to inform them about the latest discounts and offers.
Regarding marketing campaigns, the better the campaign can resonate with them individually, the better the revenue will be. In practice, marketing automation can bring passive sales as marketing processes and multifunctional omnichannel campaigns work around the clock. Along with this, it also enables scalable communications in real-time.
What Can You Do with Automated Marketing?
Automated marketing messages can improve customer loyalty and engagement while driving sales. Some of the most common examples of what you can do when using marketing automation in business include:
Welcome Email Sequences
Welcome email sequences can also function as confirmations of a newsletter subscription. The sequence can include reasons and reminders of why it’s worth being a customer of your business. The first messages can vary based on different factors, including whether or not the customer has already made a purchase and where and how that purchase was made.
Loyalty Programs
You can use marketing automation to supercharge any loyalty programs you might have for your customers. Research suggests that companies that excel in customer loyalty will retain around seventy percent of their customers. On the other hand, companies that do not offer loyalty schemes will struggle to retain just 20% of customers. Personalisation and automation of marketing messages to enhance loyalty programs can allow you to grow your revenue by up to thirty percent.
Purchase Follow Ups
An email sent after a customer has made a purchase is not a transactional message but an eCommerce marketing extension. These emails are sent after the customer has received their order. They mainly ensure that the brand is kept fresh in customers’ minds for future transactions.
Abandoned Cart
Abandoned cart emails are sent to remind and re-engage customers who have added items to their shopping baskets but have not gone through the checkout and completed the purchase. They can make a big difference to sales numbers by ensuring that the brand and the items added to the cart are not forgotten, encouraging customers to return and purchase.
Opt-In Emails
Opt-in emails or subscription confirmations can also be automated to ensure that everybody on your email list wants to be there and is happy to hear from your company in the future. A single opt-in message will help you confirm that a recipient is successfully subscribed to your email marketing newsletter. A double opt-in expects new subscribers to click on a link within the email to ensure that they want to sign up for the newsletter after providing the information in the sign-up form. This can help you get the most from your email marketing efforts by confirming that your subscribers are real people rather than spammers.
Abandoned Browses
Browse abandonment messages may not be as commonplace as abandoned cart messages, but they can make a big difference. These messages are sent to remind and re-engage customers who have been browsing your products and services but did not place anything in the shopping cart. When done well, they can be a very effective way to capitalise on a customer’s interest and intent.
Re-Engagement Emails
These emails are sent for the primary purpose of activating customers that are inactive or passive. For example, if you have a customer who used to be loyal and once made a lot of recurring purchases but has not purchased or signed up for anything in the last month or two, these messages can be sent to re-engage them. They can also be automated, allowing you to focus on what’s essential while you have peace of mind that inactive customers are being reached out to.
Upselling and Cross-selling
Automated marketing can also be used for the purposes of upselling and cross-selling. For example, you might email a customer who has just purchased a particular product to let them know about other products you sell that might be relevant to what they have just purchased. For example, you could market ink cartridges to a customer who has recently purchased a new printer.
Celebration Messages
If you want to use marketing automation to improve the relationship between your brand and its customers, then celebration messages can be a good idea. Automatically send emails to wish your customers a happy birthday, for example, or congratulate them on being a customer of your business for a certain amount of time.
More Examples of Automated Marketing
Many of the main examples of automated marketing are appropriate for email marketing campaigns. While some say email marketing is becoming a thing of the past, it is hard to deny that email marketing has one of the best ROIs of all the different marketing channels you can use. Research finds that B2C marketers that make email marketing a main priority receive an almost 90% higher contribution to revenue than competitors that don’t. However, there are many alternative ways that you can utilise marketing automation in your business. These include:
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is an opportunity that your business does not want to miss out on. When done correctly, marketing via text message can have a very high conversion rate due to increased customer engagement. Along with this, SMS marketing can also enhance the customer experience. Since customers are more likely to open, read, and engage with text messages immediately, they can be highly effective.
Google Ads
When reaching out to customers who are not interested in marketing emails or texts, you can use automation features such as Google Customer Match. This allows you to target Google Ads in a manner that is more personalised to your audience members and increase the chance of reaching audiences that are similar to your existing customers and converting them.
Push Messages
Suppose you have a mobile app for your business. In that case, it’s definitely worth considering automating targeted marketing communications and campaigns to customers through push and in-app messages to their mobile phones. These can be automated to coincide with various events and triggers and keep your brand fresh in the customer’s mind.
Facebook Ads
Since Facebook is getting more and more reduced cookie data, it’s crucial to come up with a system for Facebook advertising that is highly targeted and effective to boost revenue and drive more sales on the social media platform.
Direct Mail
While digital marketing is often the main marketing type used by businesses today, you can now improve offline and paper marketing strategies by combining automation and AI with direct mail and other print marketing options.
Trends That Have Made Marketing Automation More Important
Marketing automation has become increasingly important due to significant changes in digital marketing trends over the past few years. These include:
Excessive Amounts of Customer Data
Today, businesses are collecting more customer data, often scattered across a range of channels and systems. This can prevent the formation of a unified customer experience and leave vital customer touchpoints missing. Using the right tools can help you make sense of and organise this data better while allowing you to create customer audiences and segments easily.
Reduction in Third-Party Cookies
In the past, digital marketing was primarily based on third-party cookies. However, when cookies are not fired at all or are gone faster than in the past, there’s a growing need to gather and make use of what is known as first-party data, which doesn’t use cookies. This can be done by asking for customer identification, such as an email address.
Customers Want Personalisation and Relevance
Finally, customers today expect content on products and services that they can relate to and that resonates with them, along with a pleasant customer experience.
Automated marketing is not only beneficial for email but can be used with a wide range of digital marketing channels for better efficiency, driving revenue, and increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
