What is Marketing Automation? A Comprehensive Guide [2023]

If you have been wondering what is marketing automation? Marketing Automation is a process that uses an automation service to automate repetitive marketing tasks. Email Marketing, Social Media posting, Ad Campaigns, etc. can all be done easily with the help of Marketing Automation.

Marketing Automation is the best way with which you can identify and nurture potential customers and leads. The efficiency of your sales can also be increased by Marketing Automation, which in turn will help you turn a big base of leads into a group of happy customers using various strategies and tactics.

One example of Marketing Automation put to use would be: Early on in the journey of a potential customer, education and awareness is the key task for your business. Marketing Automation can help you automate the process of supplying useful information and content that will help develop trust and respect for your brand. Further along, the journey, when the customer has narrowed down on the type of product that they are interested in, Marketing Automation will help you reach out with targeted messaging, specifically catering to groups that can grow your brand. In the end, a comprehensive and well-informed lead is handed over to the sales team.

Now that it is clear What is Marketing Automation, it is important to know how it works

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

After getting your answer to what is marketing automation here comes the next question how does it work: There are many tasks that need to be taken care of while doing marketing which are repetitive manual tasks. These include reminders, follow-ups, reporting, and drafting emails. These tasks are very important in their own right, however, being repetitive takes up a lot of time, which could have been redirected to something more productive.

Marketing Automation helps you by setting up those manual processes and repeating them automatically. You can put your attention to other tasks while the automated tasks keep on running in the background

Marketing Automation works by sending specific content to leads based on their behavior and data.

For example, You try to promote your new product or service by hosting a webinar, where you invite new leads by sending emails. When they fill up the form in the email, they are funneled into a new email list by your marketing automation tool.

Then the Marketing Automation tool automatically sends out emails to begin your lead-nurturing campaign. Then they are routed to your sales team when the leads are qualified and informed.

Common Issues that Marketing Automation can solve for your business

The very next doubt that one might have is what is marketing automation good for. Marketing Automation can streamline your workflow and help you get over a lot of challenges. One of the biggest issues that Marketing Automation can solve for a business is to generate and maintain leads and keep the potential customer interested and engaged throughout their journey. Marketing Automation can help you process the huge lot of data that you would need to collect to generate and maintain leads.

Marketing Automation is often perceived to be a middle-of-the-funnel tool that nurtures and qualifies your leads with automated email sequences. However, the truth is that Marketing Automation can only reach its full potential if it is deployed across the customer lifecycle. Marketing Automation can bring a lot of benefits to your business if it is deployed and executed properly.

Some of the issues that Marketing Automation resolves for your business are:

• Excessive Manual Tracking

Throughout the journey of a customer or a potential customer, each and every action that they take is an added data point that can be used by your marketing strategy. This is because all the actions taken by the user show you what a potential customer would be interested in. However, the problem is that manually tracking all this data is next to impossible

Marketing Automation can help you in this regard. You can use the inputs across various channels to understand the needs of the customer and accordingly deliver the content that they want because all the data points are now being collected by the Marketing Automation tool.

This helps you to generate organic leads in the end which can be nurtured into customers because you are delivering the right content to the right prospects. The role of Marketing Automation doesn’t end here. You can also create loyal, repeating customers by creating personalized workflows

• Processes that are not Streamlined

Marketing Automation has a huge role to play in bringing your whole business together by streamlining all your processes and keeping your customers at the center of it all. Processes that involve various functional teams can be created by Marketing Automation and this would lead to the reduction of customer effort at every touch-point of their journey because all the aspects of the business are being integrated. By doing this, you would be able to provide a unified customer experience to your customers.

If you can effectively apply marketing automation, you can get rid of complicated off-hand procedures because everything gets saved in the central data storage of your business. All of this leads to the internal workflow being easier.

• Not being able to generate good leads

Lead Generation is probably the biggest factor determining the growth of a business. If the repetitive steps between marketing and sales are automated, then your team can automatically focus on strategy and lead generation. This would mean an increase in prospects and customers.

Marketing automation can also help you get a detailed picture of a potential customer and his behavior. Marketing Automation can help you bring together information from several touchpoints by employing automatic scoring, qualifying, and prioritizing leads.

The issue with leads doesn’t end at lead generation. You need to nurture the leads and guide them through their journey at the end of which they will be your customer. Not every lead will provide you with a sale, so wasting time on them is futile. You will need to nurture leads and a small team handling both sales and marketing won’t give you the time and effort to nurture leads. Marketing Automation can come to the rescue yet again, by saving you time so that you can put the time to nurture leads.

5 Best Marketing Automation Software for Your Business

The software that you choose to help you with Marketing Automation can turn out to be one of the most important factors determining the success of your marketing strategy.

So if you have been thinking about what is marketing automation’s best software, given below are the top 5 options that you can go for:

Sendinblue is a one-stop solution for all your marketing and sales-related needs. And one of its most powerful tools is the Marketing Automation software that it provides. It comes with a huge suite of advanced features that will help you get the best out of the Marketing Automation system

Sendinblue lets you run campaigns on autopilot. It also manages your email database based on contact behavior. It has the capability to update contact information in real time.

Sendinblue comes with a drag and drops editor that helps you map out the journey taken by your customer. You can also use their on-site tracking feature which is integrated with all the major apps and eCommerce platforms. You also get all the basics like A/B testing, real-time data collection, etc. with Sendinblue

Pricing: Free for up to 2,000 contacts. Paid plans start at $65/month for unlimited marketing automation.

Marketo is amongst the best-known Marketing Automation tools currently available in the market. You can not  only manage email campaigns but also help out your sales team with the help of the multitude of features that Marketo offers

If you are a business that is ready to expand and is ready to take advantage of the multitude of advanced tools offered by Marketo, then this is the perfect software for you.

Pricing: $1,195/month

Eloqua can be compared to a luxury sportscar. It comes fully packed with features and is capable of giving you the highest level of service you can think of. The downside? It will also put a huge dent in your pocket.

The immense amount of time that Eloqua will spend on teaching and helping their clients optimize and get the most out of their software, kind of justifies the huge price tag Eloqua. Along with all of that, it also has integrated CRM and marketplace features

If you run a business that is looking for the absolute best Marketing Automation software, this is the one for you.

Pricing: $2000/month

Customer.io lets you get exactly what you want from it because it is a very flexible Marketing Automation tool. It is flexible because it can be customized to exactly how you want it to be. But you do need to put in some time to understand and learn the software. This task is made easy by its intuitive and easy-to-use UI.

You are also entitled to very fast, personal customer support if you use Customer.io. A feature that sets Customer.io apart from all the other software is that it can send emails based on preset events, rather than page views.

Pricing: $75/month

Constant Contact is the go-to marketing automation tool for any small business looking to delve into the field of marketing automation. It gets the basics right and that too in a very user-friendly way, so that even complete beginners can get the most out of this software.

Added to all of this is the affordable pricing of this software which makes it perfect for any small business owner with a small budget

Pricing: $15/month

Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Automation Efficiency in 2023

A Marketing Automation Tool by itself isn’t enough to achieve any noticeable results. You need to have a Strategy regarding Marketing Automation which will be the ultimate difference between successful implementation of Marketing Automation and failure.

Here are some amazing Marketing Automation strategies that you can use:

• Automating Chat

One of the best ways to convert leads into potential customers is to answer their queries and help them get informed. This, however, would take a lot of resources and time.

An easy way to solve this problem would be to have a chatbot on your website. The chatbot can automatically respond to any question that the user might have.

• Setting up Drip Campaigns

Drip Campaign refers to a type of automation that involves a flow of emails triggered by user actions.

For example, if a user has joined the mailing list of the company, they automatically receive a welcome email. Alternatively, if a user visits a certain product page, they receive content related to that kind of product so that they can get informed about the product.

• Creating Automatic Nurturing Campaigns

Nurturing a lead is a very important task because not all leads are ready to buy what you sell. You need to inform and qualify your leads so that they reach the stage where they are ready to invest in your product.

With the help of Marketing Automation, you can send dynamic content which is customized according to the stage of the consumer journey that the lead is currently in

• Segmenting Contact Databases

This strategy involves collecting a lot of information about your leads using Marketing Automation and then using that data to segment your database. This would help you, even more, when it comes to customized target marketing.

Conclusion

It is quite evident that Marketing Automation if used correctly and strategically, can help your business in ways more than one. You need to select the proper software and then set up strategies and you’ll be able to solve a plethora of problems.

For additional information, visit our blog Marketing Automation vs CRM.

Frequently Asked Questions