What is Marketing Automation?

Aligning your team, process, and technology to achieve your marketing and sales goals is a hassle, and that’s where Marketing Automation comes to the rescue.

The adoption of marketing automation platforms is on the rise, and according to Invesp’s numbers, 63% of marketers will be spending more on their marketing automation budgets really soon. So what are they investing in?

Marketing automation is software that automates repetitive marketing activities like email marketing, social media posting, and ad campaigns and scales these operations by giving you the ability to tailor a workflow for each. It is specifically designed to ease time-consuming tasks and responsibilities, thereby increasing the productivity of your marketing and sales teams, and easing the communication between the two.

Think of a time when you used to send an email to each individual separately to inform them about a new service or promotion, how annoying was that? Well, marketing automation takes care of this by allowing you to simply upload a list of contacts to a database, and send unified emails from there. Marketing Automation allows you to segment this list, and send emails based on similarities between multiple prospects, enabling personalized content they’ll find valuable to utilize the full power of email marketing automation.

What Industries does Marketing Automation Serve?

Marketing automation offers excellent help to various industries, like eCommerce, education, consulting, health and fitness, and SaaS. It’s also a perfect fit for B2C organizations, like retail stores, hotels and restaurants. Overall, marketing automation can be an exceptional asset in any sector that is looking forward to growing their leads.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing automation can be used in a variety of ways. With a great marketing automation platform, you can automate inbound marketing newsletters, manage leads, create landing pages, manage all your social media activities, analyze marketing efforts and draw up automation workflows down to the last detail.

Learn about Marketing Automation in this example:

  1. You send an email to fresh leads inviting them to join you for a webinar that offers valuable content around a topic you want to be known for.
  2. To attend the webinar, leads are directed to fill out a form. Everyone who responded is added to a new email list.
  3. An email nurture campaign is sent to everyone on that list automatically. It begins by sending an email thanking everyone who attended the webinar. They are then sent a link to download a content item you’ve created (case study, ebook, infographic) on a comparable topic a few days later.

Similar to the above example, “automation” is there for a reason. To automate repetitive time-consuming work. In fact, 36% of marketers use marketing automation platforms to remove repetitive tasks from their daily routines.

Whether you’re automating the funnel of a lead coming into the website, or reaching out to inform your clients about a new e-book, marketing automation gives you the power to control, track and optimize all marketing campaign automation from A to Z.

On a social media level, automating your work is even easier. The purpose of social media automation is to create and schedule posts so they’re automatically sent out on the date and times that are best for engagement and interactions.

This will aid in the segmentation and targeting procedures so you can efficiently identify the relevant audiences you want to message and automatically tailor messages to each prospect based on their profile. With a click of a button, you can create relevant and personalized messaging for email, mobile, social, online experiences, and more, giving individualized experiences for your clients in an effective manner.

What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

Getting more tasks done in less time

You have complete control over your productivity and efficiency now that marketing automation has eliminated the need to manually repeat the same mundane tasks over and over again. With the extra time, your marketing team has more time to strategize, ideate, and focus on scaling the entire marketing operation.

Tracking and Optimizing User Engagement

Marketing automation can boost user engagement by nurturing users with personalized messaging. You’ll obtain a better understanding of your customers’ and prospects’ preferences, allowing you to modify and customize all marketing messages and promotions.

Improving Lead Conversion

Marketing automation can increase the number of leads in your pipeline and help you build a closer relationship with your customers. The numbers support this, astonishingly, 77% of marketers using marketing automation tools reported an increase in conversions.

Providing Smooth Omnichannel Experiences

Your marketing automation software collects, stores, and uses data to provide a tailored experience for your customers, such as pre-filled forms, targeted emails that add value, and customer support that seems as familiar as the store down the street. Customers get the same experience regardless of how they contact you thanks to automation.

What is the ROI for Marketing Automation?

Get the Most Out of Your Budget

Using a marketing automation platform gives you a 360-degree view over all your running marketing campaigns, which puts you in firm control over the budget you’re willing to spend on each campaign individually. With this, you’ll have all the proper testing time to see which campaign is working best to shift the bulk of your marketing budget there.

Grow Revenues Faster

Using a marketing automation platform gives you a 360-degree view over all your running marketing campaigns, which puts you in firm control over the budget you’re willing to spend on each campaign individually. With this, you’ll have all the proper testing time to see which campaign is working best to shift the bulk of your marketing budget there.

Boost Team Productivity and Morale

Without the need for the daily scheduling of social media posts, sending individual emails and creating landing pages from scratch, your team will have more time to perform creative work. They’ll be happier and create brand new marketing ideas in no time!

How Can You Make the Most Out of Marketing Automation?

Clearly Outline Your Objectives

Before investing in a marketing automation platform, make sure to use real numbers to back up your marketing objectives. Here are a few marketing objectives examples you can aim for:

  1. Engage current customers by sending 2 newsletters per month
  2. Increase engagement on social media by sharing 20 posts per month
  3. Increase lead conversion by 3% by creating a workflow for product launch landing page

Prepare for Seamless Collaboration

The marketing automation platform you choose will have an impact on almost every department in your company. As a result, you’ll want to make sure that everyone on your team is comfortable with the platform you’ve chosen.

Create Detailed Workflows

Use thorough illustrations of your marketing automation workflow to efficiently and effectively communicate big picture goals to your entire team. Workflows will help you bring big and small ideas to life and keep the entire team on the same page.

Segment Your Target Audience

Take a deep look at current customer information to decide who you want to engage and how you’re going to deliver your marketing messages to them.

Plan Your Content

Create a content strategy that includes messaging that is intriguing, engaging, and relevant to all your customer lists and segments.

Take Your Time

The most successful marketing automation companies in the world deploy their products in stages. To offer yourself the best chance for success, test early and optimize marketing campaign automation as you go.

Analyze Your Progress Consistently

Testing goes a long way. Keep an eye on what’s working and what’s not. Utilize part of the time you’ve gained from automation to go deeper into the performance numbers generated to implement the improvements that will take your campaign automation to the next level.

Frequently Asked Questions

Automation works by setting up the triggers (signup to list) and actions corresponding to that trigger (send an email), then activating it once all the actions have been added.

  1. Signup to list
  2. Goal achieved
  3. Specific date
  4. Replied SMS
  5. Contact update API
  6. Email opened
  7. Link clicked
  8. Order completed
  9. Cart abandoned
  10. Custom event (Choose a custom trigger; i.e: when someone’s lead score is > X, -> add him a tag | For ecommerce; i.e: When a last abandoned product is item X -> send him a browser abandonment email or browser push message…) and many other actions that you can do.
    RSS changed

  1. Send email
  2. Send SMS
  3. Send browser push notification
  4. Add to list
  5. Update contact
  6. Remove from list
  7. Add to automation
  8. Remove from automation
  9. Add tag
  10. Remove tag
  11. Create new task
  12. Add to task
  13. Sync to third party
  14. Notify team

Yes. You can add or remove contacts to or from your Facebook or Google custom audiences. This allows you to create a more personalized experience for your leads by retargeting them with relevant ads based on their customer journey‘s stage.

Yes. VBOUT has in-depth insights and metrics to help you monitor and optimize your automation.

VBOUT has predictive models built specifically to work with the VBOUT data set, as well as deep integration with leading AI platforms such as OpenAI, Google Cloud, and Amazon. Our AI-centric features include predictive email sending, subject line analyzer, AI content generation, sentiment analysis, and intent detection.

With these features, you can benefit from advanced data analysis and automation capabilities that help you create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns. Start your free trial and learn more about how VBOUT’s AI capabilities can help you achieve your marketing goals.

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