The rise of marketing automation is inevitable. As more and more businesses are shifting online, marketers are looking for efficient and effective ways for marketing campaigns. Manual processes have to be eliminated and repetitive tasks must be addressed so that marketers can look into more important marketing tasks – Growing the business.
But what does marketing automation mean? Who needs it? Why do we need it? How is it helpful to businesses? These are some of your queries that are now running in your mind. Right? But before we go to how and why let’s know what marketing automation is.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation means using all the software and tools to automate marketing activities. Marketing departments automate some repetitive tasks such as email marketing, ad campaign, and social media posting not just to increase efficiency but also to provide personalized customer experience to clients. Marketing Automation makes complicated tasks easier and gets them done in no time, leaving some spare time to perform and plan better strategies.
Who needs Marketing Automation?
According to Forbes, Small businesses spend 23% of their time manually just by inputting data and 80% of satisfied customers never come back.
In discussing who needs marketing automation it is important to know what marketing automation in terms of SME means.
Every small business dreams of a magic button that seamlessly collects customer information data for easy distribution and automatically delivers highly efficient and effective marketing campaigns. We all know the ROI of email marketing is unbelievably high, but you get stuck with one thing: Who is going to collect all customer contact details and information and send well-timed personalized emails? Well, Marketing Automation is your magic button.
Marketing automation is needed by those small businesses who spend their time doing tasks manually and ending up nowhere in the market. Small and medium enterprises do find marketing automation a little problematic at the first but it can be resolved by planning SME marketing strategy according to their workflow and their requirements.
Why do You Need a Marketing Automation Tool?
According to Social Media’s Today 2019 State of Marketing Automation Survey report, 75% of all companies already use at least one kind of marketing automation tool.
It’s clear from statistics like these that automation tools are widely accepted by large brands and marketers. You might be wondering why?
In this blog, we will tell you why one needs a marketing automation software or tool with the top 7 companies for Marketing Automation!
- Huge Time Saver
You don’t have to get your whole team early in the morning to schedule tasks every day on social media or email campaigns. With Marketing Automation you can schedule your tasks in advance which will give you time to focus on other important marketing efforts. This will keep you from flipping from one tab to another and save you from draining your energy.
Ehsan Jahandarpour and Brian Downard published a great infographic on how marketing automation saves both money and time. Here are some key takeaways from that as follows:
- Marketing Automation can boost your reply rate by 250%
- Marketing Automation saves up to 6 hours every week by just automating your ad campaign and social media posts.
- Adds Value to Your CRM
When Marketing Automation and CRM software are combined they can be of immense value to your business. It shows you the marketing and sales activities of all your contacts in one place.
Marketing automation tools give you insights on the location of your contacts in the marketing funnel, the resources they use, and how they interact with them besides enabling you to establish processes that will perform important tasks automatically based on the interactions and will help you to take your business to the next level.
- Get a Bigger Picture of your Data
Marketing automation tools tag all your marketing activities and associate them with the ongoing campaign, it allows you to take a look at the perfect picture of traffic, click, conversion rates, lead generation, and more all in one place. It provides you access to reports and takes a look at the various performance metrics in real-time.
- Personalization, Optimization & Testing
Research and reports say that personalized emails deliver 6% better conversions & many local businesses do not use them.
With great marketing automation, you can easily customize your emails according to your buyer persona. Your email will feel more personal to your customer as if it was sent for them only by incorporating marketing automation elements.
- Lead Nurturing
Digital Marketers mainly benefited from automation software especially in terms of lead management and nurturing. If your business is totally dependent on lead generation and nurturing then marketing automation tools are a necessity. These tools can find a customer who is a prospect and will generate leads and get you in touch with that customer. These tools not only acquire it but also help in retention and managing and nurturing the lead.
- Understanding the Buyer Persona
Marketing Automation helps you understand your customer better and helps you to talk in a language that they resonate with. By understanding their behavior, you can integrate workflows that use other channels with email. You can trigger retargeting ads using marketing automation tools when contacts enter specific workflows and increase your business leads.
- Instant Follow-up for Customer Success
Your quick response matters to your customers. Marketing Automation makes sure your sales-ready leads are being followed up on with the right message by sales at the right time, so it provides sales with the information they need to have the best conversation.
What are Marketing Automation Strategies and How do they help?
There is a different excitement when you subscribe to a marketing automation tool but sadly it won’t last long if you don’t use it properly with marketing strategies. The best approach is to implement these tools into your integrated marketing plan.
Here are some of the best marketing automation strategies which will help you to take your business to the next level.
- Use Dynamic Content for Enhanced Customer Engagement
For the best marketing automation tool to work, you must use dynamic content which will drive your interaction with your leads. Implementing wrong content or sending wrong content to your lead could result in the loss of a potential customer.
- Set up a Drip Marketing Campaign
Having a Drip campaign for your marketing automation efforts is marketing at its finest because it is all about your customers. Drip campaigns take action based on customer behavior. Drip Campaign tailors your content to each lead based on their behaviors. Drip campaigns are all about what customers want, it’s a win-win for your company and the customer in question.
- Reduce Communication Gap
The biggest problem every workplace faces is a communication gap. Sometimes the customer information is with the accounting department but it is more important to marketing information. This communication gap reduces the quality of communication of each department with customers or leads to the loss of potential customers. With the use of marketing automation software, customer contact information is available to every department and it makes it easy for everyone to contact leads and potential customers.
- Segmentation
There is a lot of information you can obtain from your leads. Making a list segmentation can be done manually but this takes a lot more time and humans do commit mistakes so to make it easy Marketing automation software helps you with list segmentation. With tools like AgileCRM or Active Campaign, list segmentation can be achieved easily.
- Study and Hack
Every industry has top performers and leaders and there is a reason they are called that, they stand out in the market and adapt new technologies and innovations effectively and efficiently. For you to implement robust marketing automation strategies you need to study these top performers and select accordingly.
Now that you are aware of marketing automation and its strategies. Martech is here to help you pick the best marketing automation tool to help you and your business stand out in the market.
TOP 7 MARKETING AUTOMATION COMPANIES OF 2021
- ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is cloud software providing Customer Experience Automation. It provides email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools to create a next-level Customer Experience.
Functional Areas of ActiveCampaign
- Email Marketing: ActiveCampaign creates personalized email. It sends the perfect email to the right candidate. It helps you send different types of emails as follows:
- Triggered emails: Automatically send emails when your contacts are most interested.
- Broadcast email: This email helps you to send information all at once.
- Targeted emails: Sends the right message to the right person.
- Email Autoresponders: These are the mail that can be called welcome series. These are auto-generated mails.
- Email Funnels: Set up email automation that turns your contacts from leads to paying customers.
- Schedule Emails: Schedule emails for events, holidays, and sale teams.
ActiveCampaign drag and drop email design lets you create a beautiful and perfect email campaign.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation helps you to automate tasks and save you some time. If you are new to marketing automation ActiveCampaign automation lets you step up an automated workflow in a minute. Take your business to the next step with email automation, or automate text messages or any other part of your customer lifecycle with ActiveCampaign.
Process:
- Automate your email followup
- It finds you your most engaged contacts
- Integrate your favorite apps & You are all set to go with some time in your kitty to focus on something more important to focus on growing your business.
Sales CRM with Automation:
A sales CRM with automation stops time-eating tasks from piling up on your desks. Keep CRM with your leads and not in your head for you to do manually. It keeps your sales process going smoothly and seamlessly. Rather than looking at it manually, it gives you an entire view of your sales pipeline in one place.
Process:
- Notify your sales team.
- Update deals and Create tasks
- Nurture leads automatically.
Improve conversions and retention effortlessly with ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation Platform which is also the number 1 Customer Experience Automation Platform.
(Source: ActiveCampaign.com)
- Adobe Experience Cloud
Adobe offers its services and solutions through three cloud solutions. Experience Cloud allows marketers to create personalized emails through integration with Adobe Dreamweaver. Adobe Marketing Cloud, now includes the Marketo Engagement Platform, allowing you to manage, personalize cross-channel campaigns across B2B and B2C use cases.
Adobe Marketing Cloud Functional Areas
Parallel Sales Enablement & Marketing Channelization
Adobe Marketing Cloud equips sales with prioritized leads, customer insights, and relevant content enhancing sales and marketing both at the same time.
Personalized Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
With Adobe, you’ll get more reach, more agility, and better results due to its predictive content and A/B testing. You tend to deliver a relevant and rich Customer Experience every time. Every time you do this you are just one step closer to implementing an effective ABM strategy to scale.
Data Analytics and Attribution
With Adobe Analytics and attribution, one begins to understand what content is driving progression and revenue, and which is not.
(Source: Adobe Experience Cloud.com)
- Autopilot
AutoPilot is an email marketing and Marketing Automation platform for eCommerce. It connects customer information from a variety of tools and elements. You get a view of your customer data in one place making the automation journey easier. It also creates a personal journey that changes accordingly to the customer’s behavior.
AutoPilot Functional Areas:
Email Marketing: It measures email performance based on opens, clicks, and revenue. It sends personalized and engaging emails that make you more money and your subscribers love. Email Marketing is considered one of the top marketing automation tools.
Marketing Automation: The customers are on a unique journey. It allows you to define your target audiences to target each stage of the customer lifecycle. Marketing automation helps you to automate tasks so that you can grow your eCommerce business.
(Source: https://journeys.autopilotapp.com/blog/best-marketing-automation-software/ )
- Pardot
Pardot is a leading B2B Marketing Automation Solution for SalesForce Customers. It provides new ways to drive your leads and boost revenue generation. It increased the lead by 50% Boost engagement. Pardot tracks customers as they interact with your company so you can tailor your outreach.
Pardot Functional Areas
Email Marketing: Pardot Salesforce Email Studio helps you to create personalized emails with drag and drop. It combines the power of data-driven campaign management, automation tools, and online and offline data to trigger personalized email messages across the customer journey.
Digital Marketing Platform: Pardot engages customers across every channel: email, social, web, & mobile. It automates and manages every campaign running, publishes content, analyzes results, and optimizes as you go.
Mobile Studio: Pardot through location-based technology automates your mobile marketing efforts.
(Source: Pardot.com)
- iContact Pro
Before becoming a marketing automation consulting firm iContact Pro was an email marketing company. It offers email marketing tools to help marketers deliver personalized messages. The delivery of messages is then enhanced by advanced tracking and reporting.
iContact Pro Functional Areas:
Smart Sending: Everyone does not open their inbox every second. So send the emails when your customer is likely to check his inbox with the iContact Pro Smart sending mail feature. Using data of previous clicks and responses of your customer, iContact adjusts time accordingly to send the email. 36% open their emails at 8 AM say iContact.
Salesforce Mass Email Marketing: iContact Integration with salesforce mass email helps you to run email campaigns smoothly and effectively. It is a game-changer feature that saves time and energy. It also helps you to track your email campaign success with its personalized emails. iContact is the perfect and best email marketing automation tool if you have salesforce already.
(Source: iContact.com)
- Oracle
Oracle offers various cloud marketing services. Each service brings its strength to meet marketing needs. Eloqua is one of the services which help you in marketing automation. Oracle equips marketers with lead management tools to engage the right audience at the right time.
Oracle Functional Area:
Eloqua Marketing Automation: Oracle Eloqua empowers your marketing automation implementation. Oracle creates closed-loop marketing and sales activities and manages cross-channel B2B marketing campaigns that nurture leads across each stage of the buying process. It is a perfect solution to nurture and manage content-captured leads. Its email marketing solution is smoothly integrated and it provides insights at every stage of the customer journey. It also helps marketers to connect with their customers to build the right customer experience.
Explore these unique features of Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation
- Campaign orchestration
- Segmentation and targeting
- Lead management
- Advanced intelligence (AI)
- Asset management
- Sales and marketing alignment
- Marketing measurement
- Platform
(Source: Oracle Eloqua)
(Source: Oracle Eloqua)
- ZETA
Zeta is a data-driven marketing platform powered by AI. Clients can harness the platform for a single view for insights. Zeta is beneficial for retail, media, financial services and healthcare spaces. The platform’s managed and strategic services offerings from Zeta allow users to enter a strategic partnership and build their campaigns with industry experts.
Functional Areas of Zeta:
Email Marketing:
Zeta offers personalized emails that resonate in real-time. It connects with all other channels taking your business to the next level with email marketing. Personalization of your content and product offering powered by AI. Zeta predictive analysis drives performance across all touchpoints. Zeta’s data handling tool allows you to add, score, and use new data sources in seconds
These are some of the top Marketing Automation which will help your business and team save time and energy to focus on more effective and robust marketing strategies.
(Source: Zeta)
Implement and Relax!
Marketing automation tools are a must if you want to grow your online presence and gain more followers on social media that ultimately convert into sales.
It provides key metrics, analytics, and handles all your marketing efforts in an optimized way that would be relatively expensive if left in human hands. After all, spending just some money on your favorite marketing automation tool to generate extra revenue seems worth investing in and sensible enough.
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