What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation software is an advanced platform designed to help marketers get leads; Nurture leads according to Funnel and analyzes campaign behavior and performance. And has gradually become an essential resource for B2C or B2B sales and marketing departments to increase revenue.

Marketing Automation (MA) software is often compared to customer relationship management (CRM) software because of their overlapping functions. But CRM acts as a separate platform for the sales department. While MA is built to scale and accelerate marketing effectiveness.

Unfortunately, there are many misconceptions about the concept; as well as how the Email Marketing process works. With so many different marketing automation tools available today; Marketers in particular need to understand what these tools offer and the differences between them.

So in this article, I will help you do that. Ready yet!

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation is a method to help optimize customer data from many different sources. Develop multi-channel marketing strategies.

MA allows you to scale your business to build relationships with multiple clients across multiple channels. Give them a consistent experience based on each audience’s interests or needs.

That is, when you correctly segment your audience, marketing automation allows you to build valuable and meaningful relationships with leads, by providing relevant content.

MA in general helps to automate several marketing processes in the overall strategy. It does not mean that MA software will help your brand run automatically like a robot.

What Is Marketing Automation Software?

As I mentioned above; Marketing Automation software is designed to help marketers attract and nurture leads along the customer funnel. Thereby classifying customers based on behavior, helping to increase the performance of marketing strategies. These tools include several key functions such as:

   [+]   Email

   [+]   Social Media

   [+]   Web Marketing

   [+]   Multi-channel marketing

   [+]   Customer analysis.

Marketing Automation is a superior method to exploit customer data from multiple sources; develop strategies.

For example, large enterprises often use Eloqua or Marketo, Pardot while small and medium enterprises are suitable to use Infusionsoft, Salesfusion, or Hubspot because of the reasonable cost.

So how are these softwares similar and different? Let’s go to the next part.

General Features Of Marketing Automation Software

While CRM and MA (Marketing Automation) software are inherently different, they also have some features in common. Basically; Marketing Automation software is more specialized but can still be seen as a subsection of the CRM platform under certain circumstances.

Email Marketing

Email is one of the oldest forms of digital communication but still extremely effective.

Although users are somewhat annoyed with email marketing or marketing automation due to the less subtle abuse by marketers. However, email is still the most effective means of communicating with customers if you know how to use it effectively; Make a great start to your Marketing Automation campaign.

This is a feature that helps you send bulk emails to the right customer segments. Some of the more advanced platforms even send triggered emails as soon as a customer performs a certain action like filling out a form or downloading a file.

Marketers can also use Marketing Automation tools to create, edit, and use web forms to generate more leads and nurture them through the main pipeline.

Basic Email Marketing Automation Features

List the features and see them as a checklist when making comparisons with Marketing Automation software!

   [+]   Send Mass Emails And Segment Emails

All marketing automation providers allow users to send bulk emails to different customer segments, often including native email or email templates.

These features make marketing personalized, content sent more relevant, helping to create more trust in the eyes of customers.

Research by Mailchimp shows that marketing campaigns with segmented marketing automation have 14% higher email open rates than campaigns that don’t.

   [+]   Send Behavioral Activation Emails

Emails of this type will be sent. When customers perform fixed behaviors such as downloading files, signing up for files, follow-up emails confirm to customers about your business’s interest in them.

While almost all marketing automation tools offer automatic behavioral email triggers, 43% of marketers don’t use them at all. This means that newcomers can fully take advantage of the opportunity to excel in marketing automation.

   [+]   Collect Forms

The form builder gives you the freedom to build and edit your own Marketing forms.

The Marketing Automation software will provide the code for you to embed on the web. The information entered by the user is automatically saved and organized in the software. These codes allow you to collect email addresses and other lead data when viewers need to exchange for files, vouchers or receive newsletters…

   [+]   Optimized For Mobile Phones

You probably already know. Most people often check email by phone. Therefore, making sure that the email content is both computer-friendly and mobile-friendly is a must.

Nearly all tools have updated mobile optimization features. Allows you to preview the email displayed on the phone interface before sending.

Advanced Features

These features provide users with more advanced functions. Not always found in other Marketing Automation platforms.

   [+]   Automatic Personalization

Personalized Email Marketing has come a very long way in the evolution of marketing. Using automated personalization, it is possible to pull in quite a bit of customer information from a CRM or contact list to create the right email.

These tools use automatic tagging to select, combine, and merge content in the mail. Marketing teams often use automated personalization to send mass emails while keeping the “personalized” feel to the recipients.

   [+]   A/B Testing

Mail tools will allow you to run different versions of the same email strategy to your test audience. Analyze which versions of your emails have better engagement rates and even automatically send the best performing versions to the rest of your list.

I often use this feature to find out which emails have the best subject, content, appearance, delivery time, or to test elements that need improvement.

Lead Nurturing

Some marketing automation tools offer pretty good lead nurturing. Not only does it help companies track, segment, and communicate with leads to convert prospects into paying customers.

To give you a better idea, I will list the basic and advanced features of lead nurturing that I have used and amusing.

Basic Lead Raising Features

   [+]   Lead Database

Similar to a CRM customer database, Marketing Automation’s Lead Database provides insights into lead behavior such as tracking general data such as customer interactions on the web, subscriptions to email campaigns, and more. Like and share on social email, talk with Marketing, then buy and sell, and finally customer service.

A Lead Database can even connect to the business’s CRM and share the relevant Lead Score.

   [+]   Drip Campaign

As the primary form of new Lead Marketing Automation nurturing for sales, lead content drip campaigns aim to build trust with businesses, expand brand awareness, and deliver content at the right time.

Set up a drip campaign by selecting pieces of content that are likely to convert customers in the funnel. And the drip campaign will send that content to the lead at the specified time or based on the customer’s trigger actions.

In my experience, drip campaigns are best set up as a logical progression from one lead action to the next. For example, if a lead downloads a certain file from your website, what will they do next? Follow up with an offer related to that product or even more.

   [+]   Automate Tasks And Alerts

Marketing Automation tools with task automation and alerts cut down on manual time and storage. As automation becomes more common, businesses will of course get more done in more optimal time.

Advanced Lead Raising Features

   [+]   Customer Segmentation

For quality and effective segmentation, it requires a lot of information such as demographics, expertise, behavior on social networks, etc. of the leads. And this feature depends a lot on the lead score. Customer segmentation tools streamline the process, based on export-to-report standards, eliminating the need for old-fashioned spreadsheets.

   [+]   Score The Lead

Lead Scoring is a method of ranking leads by their score. each user’s score is based on their interactions with the business, engagement frequency, and where they interact. In addition to behavioral information, lead scoring often incorporates demographic information such as where you live or work, industry, etc.

Lead scoring plays a huge role in determining how businesses interact with potential customers. Advanced scoring features take into account recent behavior and adjust the lead’s relevancy score. The group of high-scoring leads will often be the ones with the intent to buy, which helps the sales team make the right offer.

Social Media

Marketing automation software often has many social media analytics tools that allow you to track what your customers post on social platforms, who have shared your content, with whom.

Related extras include creating polls, sweepstakes, lucky draws… The ability to trigger an event also allows you to prompt customers to share content when they love it. your.

   [+]   Post And Schedule

Referring to Social Media, it is impossible not to mention media management.

Therefore, Marketing Automation software should include a post-scheduling feature. This feature saves up to 6 hours/week. Especially useful for the Marketing team when running specific planned Social Media strategies or repeating evergreen posts to help nurture customers.

   [+]   Collect Information

Social Media Marketing is not just about posting somewhere in the middle of nowhere and hoping to get potential customers.

Social Media Marketing works effectively when you can create conversations with customers, whether it’s just a message asking for prices or interest in an upcoming product. The tools that have the ability to crawl will easily scour Social Media to analyze: who is mentioning the most about your product or brand, or related keywords.

   [+]   Interaction By Message

After collecting new leads’ contact information by scanning social media, Marketing Automation will allow you to use automatic messaging directly to these new customers. Creating conversations, providing quick service to those who really care, and even doing damage control (e.g. chatting with someone making a negative comment about the business).

Analysis And Reporting

After scaling your marketing personalization to a wider audience, you’ll go into in-depth analysis. Most Marketing Automation tools work similarly to business intelligence software with dashboards showing important KPIs, easy-to-understand images as follows…

   [+]   Website Analysis

Obviously, almost every business analyzes web traffic through Google Analytics (because it’s free and very powerful). Regardless of which marketing automation software you use, make sure it can integrate with a website analytics tool so you can see all your traffic information on a single, consistent page.

Moreover, with the aforementioned integration feature, you will see the effectiveness of the entire marketing activity going on, how it affects website traffic, how much is the conversion rate and how is the ROI.

If you have advanced analytics, you can also understand the impact of Target Keyword, changes in SEO Online Marketing with Content as well as the ranking of pages on SERPs.

   [+]   Multi-Channel Analysis

Not just websites, most marketers want to analyze all strategies in a single platform, right? So, when looking for a Marketing Automation tool, you need to make sure you can connect your data to the following sources:

⇒   PPC strategy and retargeting display ads

⇒   Social Media

⇒   Ecommerce Platforms

⇒   Direct Mail

⇒   Call Metrics

⇒   Traditional media (TV, radio, billboards)

⇒   Online directory (Yelp, Yext, YP.com)

   [+]   Lead Funnel

It is clear that marketing automation and analytics have taken marketing from an art to a science.

Marketers rely on detailed metrics from open sources, and it’s just a click away and a click away to learn how customers engage with their content throughout the marketing funnel.

It’s a process since Marketing is purely based on emotions to know when to convert a customer into a lead to make a sale.

By aggregating data from Marketing strategies, businesses can understand the full story of Marketing Funnel as well as their effectiveness, including:

⇒   Types of content that nurture or “lock” leads to customers

⇒   What kind of content slows down lead conversion?

⇒   Some cases where leads fall out of the funnel

⇒   Or the time when businesses should quickly “close” leads to achieving orders…

   [+]   Conversion Rate & ROI

This is probably the feature that marketers like the most.

One of the specific metrics available for marketers to report to the boss about the success of their strategy is the conversion rate and return on investment (ROI). Marketing automation tools allow marketers to track spending, analyze conversion rates of channels.

SEO, Paid Media And Digital Advertising

These 3 supporting features you will find in most Marketing automation tools.

   [+]   Target Personalized Customers

Businesses that do not personalize marketing to customers will gradually be left behind in the competitive marketing race. Personalized retargeting campaigns, detailed targeting for advertising campaigns, and multi-channel nurturing campaigns can take advantage of all the places that customers often go. You can rely on the omnichannel data of each specific audience to target and segment them.

   [+]   Free And Paid Search

Understanding the competition and pushing the website to the top of the SERPs is a lot of work, do it regularly, and do it continuously. Because when the competition out there changes, if you do nothing, you are going backward.

Collecting website analytics, ad campaigns, and digital campaign targeting into a single interface can make your workflow simpler and provide greater insight into your campaigns.

   [+]   Customize Landing Page And Collect Customer Form

With this feature, Marketing Automation will provide you with a custom Landing Page builder and lead capture form that you can customize to suit your ads to attract attention.

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