In the early 1930s, Carl Bark, the renowned American Disney cartoonist coined the phrase: “Work smarter, not harder.” Perhaps it’s your motto today, especially when you need to deliver digital marketing services or tasks that should be right, fast, and consistent.
And here comes the role of Marketing Automation, your companion technology that helps you pursue and evaluate your digital marketing activities consistently with minimal effort—Smarter and not harder!
Whether you are a digital marketer or thinking of hiring a digital marketing agency, marketing automation will help you perform better, satisfy more customers, and drive further revenues.
Hence, in the following lines we will be touching bases with the aspects of Marketing Automation, as follows:
What is Marketing Automation?
Why Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation workflow
Leads Collecting in Marketing Automation
Email Marketing Automation
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is one of the latest updates in the marketing field and the first integration between marketing and technology. This digital marketing service helps you, monitor, optimize, and fulfill your marketing tasks.
We can also define it as the best integration between all your Windows programs and digital channels, including websites, social media platforms, email accounts, and even CRM systems—That makes all of them work as one channel while analyzing and reporting with no mistakes.
As web-based applications, Marketing Automation platforms function with no need for prior installation or deployment from your side. You can access your integrated platform anywhere, anytime.
Why is automation essential for smarter decisions in digital marketing?
Marketing Automation can help you increase your organization’s sales, educate, and build trust with the existing leads. It helps you cut the cost and time needed for lead generation, by scoring and classifying the leads; by knowing which are hot leads, which are cold, and which are not qualified at all.
This cutting-edge digital marketing service also helps you restore old leads by nurturing them with updated information, benefits, or services, increasing upsell, and cross-sell with your current customers, attaining retention. The customer behavior which appears throughout the customer journey should guide you while managing your organization’s different digital platforms.
Automating your marketing process will keep your organization continuously in touch with its customers, make them more loyal, and build an inbound leads system. Implementing this digital marketing service will definitely benefit your organization with more business deals and loyal customers.
What is the workflow of Marketing Automation?
As we said before, one of the significant strong points of marketing automation is that all our digital channels work as one. The workflow in marketing automation enables you to build unlimited scenarios, boost customer engagement, and generate more leads. This flow consists of three main elements: Trigger, Process, and Action.
Let’s imagine a potential customer visiting any of your digital marketing channels. What shall you do as a smart marketer? Figure out what the customer needs or what he\she is thinking of. This leads you to give the customer a trigger that makes a condition (process) that leads to action; That is what we mean by the automated workflow.
Automation as a vital digital marketing service enables us to build up a scenario or more that helps the customer take a specific action. Like an automated advertisement that shows up if the customer is interested in a specific product. The ad. keeps appearing everywhere in the customer’s digital channels. Also, sending out personalized emails to your customers acts as a trigger that motivates them to take a specific action.
In our automation scenarios, you can control the response time to be in days or hours. For instance, a visitor landed on your website seeking for a product, service, or a page. Here it leads to the condition/process of sending a welcome email that motivates this potential customer to take any action; either by calling, visiting your social media accounts, chatting with your representatives asking for help, or take the action and buy a product on your e-commerce website.
Whatever the scenario is, you can imagine and build it based on the customer’s needs through three main automated steps (trigger, condition/process, and action).
How can Marketing Automation help you become a smarter marketer?
1. Lead collecting
It’s the goal of your sales manager or sales director. According to research conducted by Harvard University, a time of Zero-to-30 minutes, since the customer contacts your company via an online platform is the most efficient time to respond. (You can take a look at the whole topic from here).
In Marketing Automation, you can do it easily by using some applications, such as a form builder in your digital platform— that should be already integrated with your CRM program. If he/she is a new customer, they will be automatically saved in your CRM under the campaign’s name and the traffic source (i.e. from which platform the customer has reached you; your website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, etc.).
The benefit of this digital marketing service lies in avoiding the common mistakes that happen from the manual exporting and importing of data. This step will be assigned automatically to the salesperson. The required data can be classified by sequence, area, country, and industry—all are supported through unlimited customization.
This automated integration also provides delivering sales signals; Once a returning customer/user has used any of the platforms managed by your sales representative, the latter will get a notification immediately on this customer’s query, need, and which platform leads to you.
These details will make the customer feel more satisfied by getting a response from the Account Manager instantly, asking how to help him/her. The concept of this digital marketing service leads us to what we were talking about earlier in this post; the more efficient the responsiveness is, the more satisfaction you achieve.
2. Nurturing Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing is an efficient digital channel if not abused. That is why full automated email campaigns in marketing automation are more professional and not annoying to customers.
Email marketing campaigns are cost-efficient if compared to SMS. That’s in addition to the versatile content that emails can deliver; You can send out information accompanied by photos, videos, audio files, or documents that support your marketing campaigns.
And in case of blocked creativity, marketing automation systems provide dozens of email templates that can meet your needs, whether a welcome message, news, apologies, or promotions. Those templates are ready-made and customizable with an interactive preview to test your email’s design and responsiveness to the different screen sizes before sending it.
Important to all smart marketers is another feature included in this digital marketing service – it is the automated mailing list. An automated mailing list will help you avoid spelling mistakes since there is no need to export data from CRM to importing it in your email. Also, the segmentation feature in your mailing list is useful to meet your needs by categorizing your targeted customers more easily; classified by title, the amount of the closed deals, or by industry.
Hence, you can choose the category that fits your campaign’s key message the most. In other words, each segment includes customers whom you need to target on a specific condition. And after creating the content and design, and setting your targeted persona, you can either send your email immediately or schedule it, which is the best choice if you are in a different time zone from your audience.
“Measure Your Campaign Performance” is another feature supported by Marketing Automation platforms. It reports all the information on your email marketing campaigns; telling how many emails:
– Delivered
– Bounced
– Unsent
– Unique opened: that means how many subscribers has viewed your email, or how many time it appeared
– Unique clicked: that is how many subscribers used the link or downloaded an attached file—which indicates your customer interest—and here you need to give every interested customer a priority by instant action.
– Unsubscribed: It is essential to contact the unsubscribers. That will reveal your weak points, help you solve them, besides enhance your brand reputation by giving solutions, and taking actions to sustain customer satisfaction.
All these intelligent integrations will help you as a smart marketer to stay consistent. That’s why we recommend you dive deeper into marketing automation, or hire a digital marketing agency; It will ease up your mission and help you master your campaigns effortlessly.
Based in Egypt, IZDHAER supports the integration with the smartest marketing automation platforms. IZDAHER also provides an array of other digital marketing services, including social media marketing, SEO and PPC management, media production, and more.
Contact us today and let’s see how to market your business; smarter, not harder!