What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the process of leveraging software to automate your marketing across online platforms. When used effectively, marketing automation can help saas businesses benefit from artificial intelligence and creative workflow templates by cost-effectively automating repetitive marketing tasks, such as sending reminder messages by email and answering simple FAQs.

In light of the enormous potential e-commerce currently offers, marketing automation also allows your company to compile and interpret customer data in order to gain value from market size and growth rates, targeted customer demographics, and purchase history. An extensive database filled with quality leads can be analyzed by your marketing department to identify and utilize patterns. These findings can be incorporated to design online marketing campaigns and invigorate dynamic features that boost the efficiency of your advertising expenses and maximize revenue.

Components Of Marketing Automation

What is marketing automation software, and what are its components? Understanding this question will be crucial when employing each component to work in tandem to fulfill your company’s needs. The whole process begins with forming a central marketing database that your company will use to hold all the consumer data you collect. This database will be crucial in establishing lead qualification criteria and informing future marketing campaigns. The next component is an engagement marketing engine which will automatically determine individual customer needs at digital touchpoints in the buyer’s journey, including product identification, viewing prices, and the transaction. Next, an analytics engine identifies, models, and predicts your sales potential and future trends. Finally, some of these crucial components can be combined to create what is known as a marketing technologies (MarTech) stack. Marketers will use a MarTech stack to optimize their marketing techniques and improve spending decisions. This group of technologies can often streamline your sales pipeline, increase customer acquisition, and boost revenue.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing automation works by optimizing customer experience based on shopper data from interactions on digital platforms ranging from your app usage, websites, emails, as well as social media. Using customer data will allow you to better attract, understand, and cater to your customers in order to automate personalized experiences with relevant, timely interactions. 

Common Problems That Marketing Automation Software Can Solve For SaaS Companies

• I need to do more with less.

Make the most of your time and resources with marketing automation systems. Engage with more potential online through automated messages and scale these interactions across different channels as your client base grows. Automate repetitive tasks and free up your agents to focus on the tasks that can’t be automated, like content creation and humanizing complex customer service needs.

• I don’t have a way to track or optimize user engagement.

Automatically track and analyze user interaction reports on all digital platforms and use patterns found in customer data to implement efficacious strategies with your marketing team. Identify how you can improve the customer experience using real-time feedback data and statistically optimize interactions to upsell or cross-sell when you connect with your target audience.

• My leads aren’t qualified.

Start by creating a model of your ‘ideal customer’. Use digital marketing automation to analyze customer data and identify patterns of leads that embody your clientele. Engage with online shoppers through conversational chatbots to determine faster and more effectively who the most qualified leads are. Pre-program the chatbot to ask qualifying questions to determine whether or not leads fit the description of your target audience and use the information you collect to best serve every individual customer and streamline your sales funnel.

• My leads aren’t converting, or I have a leaky sales funnel. 

Analyze customer data and identify patterns that lead to the greatest conversion. Give yourself the best chance for success by statistically identifying your target audience, avoiding bottlenecks in the process, and tapping into the practices that will best sell your product or service. Clarify the essence of your brand, build loyalty, and close the deal with the right-timed solutions for your consumer.

• I’m experiencing marketing inefficiencies and tech gaps.

Automation marketing software is evolving and has become accessible to anyone looking to start an e-commerce brand. These innovative software systems have made user-friendly digital marketing automation tools that will quickly help you eliminate marketing inefficiencies that you would be unable to identify otherwise. Keeping up with digital trends will ensure your business will be competitive and deliver relevant content to assist buyers when they are ready to commit to the sale. 

What Does Marketing Automation Mean For The Customer Journey?

One of the many benefits of marketing automation is that the customer journey is streamlined and personalized. Rather than going through the lengthy process of lead forms, follow-up emails, and cold-calling, marketing automation gives consumers the power to serve themselves online instantly wherever and whenever they want. Customers always want the faster and more convenient option, so making your services available immediately and on their terms will ultimately increase customer satisfaction and give your brand a competitive edge.

Sales and marketing automation will allow you to reach customers with personalized content catered to their position in the customer lifecycle. Individualized experiences using customer data can provide relevant and timely information about your services as well as recommendations for products that you offer. Deliver dynamic content through multiple channels such as emails, SMS, social media campaigns, and your online store webchat to maximize convenience for as many customers as possible.

What Does Marketing Automation Mean For The Customer Experience?

Marketing automation solutions give consumers all the control, allowing users to choose the channel and timeline in which they interact with your brand and make their purchases. Having instant, 24/7 customer support will allow you to appropriately connect with a greater number of consumers and cultivate a trusting two-way relationship that will give your customers confidence that their money is going to the right place. Predictive analytics can steer and help to showcase your brand with content marketing that bypasses ad-blocking and reduces cart abandonment. This level of convenience will be crucial in driving long-term loyalty and converting one-time customers into lifelong brand advocates.

Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing Automation 

• Why does marketing automation fail?

For marketing automation benefits to reach their full potential, you must achieve a steady flow of leads. This will be crucial when analyzing how your brand can convert more leads into customers and acquire more business from bottom-line buyers. Oftentimes, marketers will use customer data to strategize how to maximize revenue from their current customers and overlook generating more leads from the available market. It is essential to understand that even if you are working with a large database filled with quality leads, your database will decay over time by ~22.5% every year. It is critical that you wait to invest in marketing automation until you have a sufficient database with replenishing leads in order to obtain the most benefit from your automation software.

• What does “bad” or “good” marketing automation look like? 

Bad marketing automation is designed to trigger actions based on ill-informed data, like sending emails based on the number of clicks at a given time. It is essential to collect data that paints a detailed picture of who your leads are and what they are interested in buying. A good marketing automation strategy will consider all behavioral inputs from customers to inform the automation strategies for content delivery. Actions such as email clicks, social media engagement, as well as viewing prices, are crucial to content marketing automation because they all provide context revealing when customers need specific information and which channels most greatly influence the buyer’s decision. Automation marketing solutions identify the crucial moment when it is appropriate to add live support that humanizes your brand and the transaction. This will be crucial in improving customer experience and driving loyalty through purchase satisfaction. 

• When is the right time to invest in marketing automation? 

To survive this competitive online market, you will need to provide a secure and dynamic online experience. Once you are consistently generating new leads and are required to scale your efforts to serve them properly, B2B marketing automation can help your brand convert those leads into valuable customers. Marketing automation tools are best put into practice after you have mapped the buyer’s journey, tracked customer data across all channels, and have agreed upon marketing and sales techniques that can be effectively scaled for your brand.

• How do I choose the best marketing automation solution for my business?

When choosing your brand’s marketing automation software, it is often more important to focus on the provider of the service rather than the individual features. Privacy and transaction security issues are foremost on consumers’ minds today. Providing data safety assurance or trusted site seals will demonstrate that the protection of customer data is important to your business. Focusing on a long-term partnership with a marketing automation provider will be the most important strategic choice for your brand. Do your research and make an informed choice that will benefit your business in the long run. G2crowd is one resource to help get you started and introduce you to some well-known B2B marketing automation providers.

• Marketing Automation Software Grid (G2Crowd)

What Are Some Marketing Automation Best Practices? 

• Be specific about what you want to achieve. Quantify your goals with real numbers to justify your investment in a marketing automation platform.

• Think about how you want to segment your audience. Use your customer database to find out who your ideal customer is, how to engage them, and show them why your product or service is their best choice.

• Create a flowchart. Map out the buyer’s journey from start to finish for every type of customer that approaches your business and every digital touchpoint along the way. Be sure to include every pathway for customer acquisition, product identification, every sales channel, and every purchase outcome. Follow-ups, feedback reviews, and discount offers are also important to include as they drive repeat loyalty buyers.
  
  
• Test everything. Trial run each and every pathway along your sales pipeline and make sure that everything runs seamlessly. Make your customer experience as convenient and straightforward as possible.

Why Integrate Chatbots And Marketing Automation? 

Chatbots are a powerful form of marketing automation that lets customers reach out to brands in real-time, giving consumers instant access to 24/7 customer support on their terms and timeline. Program your chatbot to answer FAQs and engage with customers through qualifying questions that bridge the gap to seamlessly transition to live agents if it becomes necessary. These ongoing conversations will allow your brand to attain a unified prospect and customer view so that agents can serve customers more efficiently. Using the context already provided in chat, your agents can more efficiently follow up leads after chatbot conversations because they will be able to focus on the complex issues while the chatbot answers the more trivial requests. Ensure that your customers notice your chat function with proactive notifications, which contain specific content catered precisely to what the customer is viewing. A recent survey has shown that 85% of consumers are interested in receiving proactive customer service notifications when shopping online. The customer data you collect from your conversations will also help you adopt a powerful account-based marketing strategy for up and cross-selling.

8 Ways To Use Chatbots And Marketing Automation Software For SaaS Companies

• Lead generation

Increase lead acquisition and scale customer interactions with marketing automation. Automatically qualify leads 24/7 and streamline your sales pipeline.

• Data collection

Collect data from all customer interactions on all platforms to provide a complete picture of the customer journey. Reveal inefficiencies at digital touchpoints that can be eliminated to improve your marketing strategy.

• 24/7 customer support

Provide customers with the power to self-serve anywhere, any time, with 24/7 customer service chatbots.

• Customer involvement

Engage with customers through conversational marketing through email, online chats, SMS, as well as social media.

• Successful sales

Drive sales and convert more leads with automated lead qualifying and increased customer acquisition. 

• Segment prospective customers

Use customer data to reveal who your ideal customers are and how you can customize marketing strategies to your target audience.

• Customer loyalty

Build long-term relationships with loyal customers through authentic and personalized conversations and buying experiences.

• Launch new products

Design optimized multi-platform marketing campaigns for brand new product releases.