Marketing Automation can significantly decrease your workload while increasing your customer satisfaction. In this article, we will explain what marketing automation is, its benefits and how you can apply it to your business.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is when businesses use marketing software, or an automated marketing platform, to automate monotonous marketing work.
Marketing Automation enables businesses to automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns. The technology behind marketing automation makes these tasks faster and easier to do.
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation can increase your efficiency since you will be saving time by automating repetitive tasks. This way, you have more time to spend on tasks that are not possible to automate such as cultivating customer relationships and improving your business operations. The marketing software takes care of repetitive tasks so you can focus on the vision.
Marketing Automation also helps you track data more efficiently, putting your data to work and giving you important information in a scalable way. Plus, it keeps your data up to date automatically. This means that, with marketing automation, managing your data will be easier than ever.
This way, marketing automation will also enable you to create a personalized marketing strategy. Because marketing automation turns your users into leads and once you know who your leads are, you can segment them by behavior or characteristics. You will be able to create more personalized content through segmentation capabilities and reporting that you achieve with automation.
What can marketing automation do for your business?
Now that we know what is and the benefits of automation, you need to understand what processes in your business you can automate. In order to do this, you can start by focusing on the customer journey, rather than on the needs of your business, and identify potential touchpoints where you can use marketing automation in order to increase customer satisfaction.
We will give you some examples of how you can automate your business and tools that you can use to automate, so you can evaluate if they are useful to your business.
1. Automate your email marketing.
A simple and effective way to automate your marketing is to automate your marketing campaigns. You can use tools to automatically send emails triggered on actions, for example when someone signs up for an event or a newsletter. You can also automate emails to people that already interacted with your business, for example by sending abandoned cart notifications or reminders to write a review of your products.
Email automation tools examples:
> Hubspot Email Marketing Software
2. Automate your text messaging.
If you use text marketing, you should also think about automating this process! Through SMS automation you can automatically send appointment, event, or meeting reminders, promotional messages for special deals and discounts, abandoned cart notifications, restock notifications, and any other important information that is relevant in your business sector!
SMS automation tools examples:
> Twilio
3. Use a social media scheduling tool.
If you create content for your business’s social media you know how time-consuming this task can be. Thus, you should automate social media posting. And the good news is that some social media already allow you to schedule posts. However, if you prefer to plan and schedule content for all social media on a single platform, there are some platforms for that, such as SproutSocial.
4. Use trigger workflows to publish data between apps.
You can also do simple automation that starts with a trigger on one app and then it sends information to another app. For example, when you update your profile pic on Facebook it automatically changes profile pics on other social media that are connected. Another example: when you post a Youtube video this is automatically posted on a WordPress post.
If you want to explore more of these types of automation, you can try to use IFTTT.
5. Automate your customer database.
If you track customer data, such as dates and notes of phone conversations, past purchase records, and other interactions as they proceed through the buyer’s journey, then your business can benefit from customer database information.
For this, you can use Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a software that tracks customer interactions, as a centralized database and sync data between apps to automatically make updates as soon as anything changes on a customer account.
When you use marketing automation and CRM together you can analyze the full picture of a prospect’s interaction with your company and offer a seamless journey for your customers.
To get started, you can try to use Hubspot Marketing Automation Software.
6. Automate the process of responding to customers.
Automating the process of responding to customers can be a challenge because we are removing the human element and we are not offering a personalized experience to our customers.
However, for businesses that receive several customer requests and if these requests are repetitive, then using chatbots to automatically respond to customers can increase customer satisfaction, because businesses are able to respond immediately to customers’ needs. By automating the process of responding to repetitive requests, you save time to better respond to more complex requests.
Chat automation tools examples:
> ManyChat for Facebook Messenger and SMS.
> EngageBay for website chat.
To Sum Up…
Through marketing automation, you can save time by using software to do repetitive tasks. If you use automation to improve your customers’ experience, you will not only be more efficient, but you will also increase customer satisfaction.