How to build scalable, fast, and flexible marketing automation solutions to grow your business

68% of businesses rely on marketing automation to organize their strategies, set goals, and support growth. As companies grow, they battle the constant challenge of achieving more in less time and improving efficiency. This extra attention and effort have necessitated the use of marketing automation.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation software comes with predefined rules to optimize, automate, and perform regular tasks. They streamline marketing strategies, improve efficiency, and scale your business. Besides, it leaves marketers more time to manage customer relationships and drive sales.

Automating tasks such as qualifying leads, sending emails, scheduling social media posts, and more eases marketing efforts. And, what’s more? It lets you measure the results of your efforts and effectiveness.

Should You Consider Investing In Marketing Automation?

In a CMO survey, over 90% of the world’s top marketers agreed to the importance of marketing automation for success.

Most SMBs operating on shoestring budgets try to curb expenses, which results in increased workload. But companies that employed marketing automation enjoyed a 25% higher revenue than those that didn’t. Yet, only three-quarters of all companies use marketing automation.

Small businesses aspiring to achieve fast growth must adopt marketing automation to carry out strategies.

The Role of an Automated Process

Marketing automation helps companies with their marketing initiatives and efforts by streamlining tedious, everyday processes. For example, small or large businesses no longer need to designate a specific time to send follow-up emails to prospects or clients. Instead, it can be done by automating pre-crafted email outreach at a scheduled time. By automating email outreach, businesses can harness more significant opportunities to personalize their customer experience, increase productivity and generate leads in less time.

Understanding the Dynamics of Marketing Automation

Marketing strategies comprise campaigns to promote businesses and reach prospects. As new marketing automation software and technologies evolve, automated social media campaigns and email campaigns drive digital marketing outreach to targeted individuals.

Delivering personalized experiences customized for your targeted customers is efficient when assisted with automation. The results? It saves time on repetitive tasks and optimizes marketing efforts. Wondering how? Let us explore some of the ways how marketing automation helps your business grow and prosper.

Outline Your Goals

To purchase a new tool without considering the process and strategy around its implementation is a common challenge. To discern how marketing automation can benefit your organization, it is essential to ask pertinent questions such as –

Who will take ownership?
Who is going to use marketing automation?
Whether the website is being leveraged for lead generation?
How can cross-channel marketing be incorporated?
What are the current KPIs?
How can a value be derived from each department after deploying marketing automation?

Once the answers to these questions are organized, outline your goals and share them with your team. Then, collect feedback from stakeholders and get started.

Lead Scoring Along with Your Sales Team

Lead scoring determines the way organizations interact with their prospects. Based on social media activity, website activity, and past purchases, carry out lead scoring to rank prospects by their potential to convert. The higher the lead score, the higher the buying intention. In addition, it helps your sales team determine the type of offers that can be made to your prospects.

Automate Your Analytics

Imagine the hassle of jumping in and out of multiple platforms, tools, and websites to collate data on traffic generated, their sources, performance, results, etc. Well, don’t. Instead, sync the various data sources for business analysis with your marketing automation software. It will provide a complete breakdown of figures on social media, sales, marketing, support, finance, and more. You can then segment the information to make informed decisions.

No matter which metric you need, the information is on the dashboard of your marketing automation tool.

Capture Leads Via Lead Generation Forms

Optimizing sign-up forms on websites have a significant positive impact on lead generation. Over 68% of B2B marketers use lead capture forms on their websites.

Of course, not all lead generation forms are created the same way, but they share a few common characteristics. For instance, when lead forms are supported with high-caliber visuals of the product, they perform the best. Also, going beyond asking the name and email address and including company name, the number of employees, website, and role can offer more insight about the prospect. It helps you qualify your leads and determine the lead’s chances of converting into sales.

Including a privacy policy checkbox on your form instills confidence in your user so that they can trust you with their sensitive data. Finally, using powerful CTAs that imply the course of action that can help you seal the deal.

Leverage The Potential Of Email Marketing

Marketers cannot undermine the potential of a robust email marketing campaign. No marketing tactic has proven its worth the way email marketing has. Thanks to email marketing automation tools, you can acquire new leads, nurture your prospects, and promote your products. Here is how you can go about it –

Automate your email marketing using automation software.
Set up automated welcome emails for new users.
Entice them with a discount/deal for better results.
Enrich your promotional emails with insights generated on your automation tool.
Provide them a personalized, highly engaging experience.
Reach out to high-intent customers based on their behavior on your website.

Following these steps can open up growth opportunities for your business.

Automate Personalized Emails

Personalized subject lines of emails boost open rates by 26%.

Marketers understand the power of personalization. They know how to use it in email marketing effectively. For example, once you have ascertained the list of prospects, send them a warm, personalized welcome email. Then, express your appreciation for their loyalty through offers/discounts on your merchandise.

When you incentivize a potential or an existing customer for their engagement, it fosters brand loyalty. In addition, it increases the likelihood of getting positive reviews and recommendations.

Reduce Churn Through Customer Retention

Marketing automation offers insights you need to address your current customers’ pain points. Use the information to provide better service/support. It will enhance their loyalty and trust in your business. Marketers know that it costs less to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

Create a Robust Content Marketing Strategy

Create a robust content library by using a marketing automation platform. The challenging aspect of writing regularly is to come up with a topic to write about.

Leverage an RSS reader to generate blog fodder. Once you have picked up the topic, talk about the origin of a trend or an idea. Discuss how it evolved. Make future predictions. Add your analysis. Add secondary research from other sources that offer a different perspective.

Another way of curating content is to gather existing content and build upon the topic by giving it a voice. Be intentional about the topic you choose and ensure it fits the theme.

An essential aspect of curated content is attribution. Attribute content that is not yours. Include links to their source.

Create content partnerships. If you hatch an idea for a content campaign but do not have the time or resources to make it happen, approach your partners/customers to see if they’d be interested in co-branding a piece.

Outsource content. If one team handles the copy, the other team can handle the operational aspect, or vice-versa. Everybody wins! If co-branding content pieces do not sound feasible, outsourcing content might be best. It will save time and resources.

Simplify Database Management

For SMBs and startups, streamlining their data collection process right from the start is critical. This is where landing pages and web forms come into play. By employing landing pages and forms to fill your database, you let your marketing automation tool do the heavy lifting. So, power your marketing campaigns and improve sales intelligence by accessing all your prospect and customer data in one place.

Schedule And Automate Your Social Media Promotions

It isn’t easy to track those who engage with your posts or don’t. When you automate Social media marketing, you can identify and recognize the list of those who engage with your brands. By employing tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite, you can schedule your updates and automate your campaigns.

Provide Customer Support Even When You Are Unavailable

Employing marketing automation tools help you take care of customer issues even while you are unavailable. For example, setting up automatic replies assures your customer that you care. In addition, when you resolve your customer concerns, it solidifies their trust in your brand.

Scale Up Your Communication With Customers

While the human factor is a critical component of customer experience, personalized one-on-one interactions pose a fundamental business challenge. It is also difficult to scale, especially for SMEs and startups. However, marketing automation platforms such as Work help businesses streamline their communications without compromising the human touch.

To summarize, marketing automation software automates marketing efforts, streamlines marketing workflows, and measures the marketing campaign outcomes. These tools help marketers create segmented, personalized, and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects.

Best Marketing Automation Software to Streamline Marketing Efforts

Marketo
Pardot
HubSpot Marketing Hub
BuzzBuilder Pro
ActiveCampaign
GetResponse
MailChimp

Acing Your Marketing Efforts With Automation

Business growth is challenging to achieve with manual efforts, so it is imperative to invest in marketing automation. Marketing automation is a game-changer for SMBs and startups. As you strive to achieve growth, consider how the right marketing automation software can empower your team to generate more ROI and scale your business.

Read Also : Decoding the future of Martech

About the authors: