Marketing automation solutions improve influence and engagement with customers and prospects. They reduce mundane and repetitive tasks. This allows the marketing department to focus on marketing strategy. Automation has a direct impact on sales quality by delivering engaging messages made up of offers. The data that is fed must be continuously verified and standardized. Current Marketing Automation solutions make it possible to manage data under optimal conditions.

What is Marketing Automation?

The basic formula of any marketing is as follows:

Definition of leads + Contact information + Campaign = Marketing

Automating these steps using technology and software makes it a marketing automation tool. Thus, a software or a commercial application makes it possible to automatically process certain or more stages of marketing. This is called Marketing Automation.

There are many long and complicated definitions of automation software. In short, they are used to automate the marketing process based on prospects' interests and interactions. They improve the customer experience with increased efficiency and higher conversion rates.

The fundamental goal of marketing is to generate more revenue for your organization. To achieve this, you need to increase traffic to your site. You need to convert that traffic into leads and turn them into end customers. Marketing automation influences the conversion and closing phases of this process.

What are the benefits of Marketing Automation?

The benefits of Marketing Automation are:

• It greatly accelerates the whole campaign
• Marketing intelligence helps you target only leads with a high probability of conversion
• Your employees benefit from important support to find and help the prospect most interested in your services. Thus, he goes all the way to the last mile to ensure that one more deal is done.
• Detailed analytics and statistics help you improve with each campaign

How does it work?

These days, hundreds and thousands of marketers rely on email campaigns to drive more traffic and get better results. They send email after email to their entire prospect list. They hope that the message will appeal to some of them and that the customer will end up buying a product or service. But does it really help businesses?

Sending the same message back to all prospects and customers over and over again can upset them and cause them to “unsubscribe.” » In the end it deprives you of any opportunity to do business with them in the future. This is where a marketing automation system would be a wise investment. This system allows you to nurture your leads throughout the buying process. It also allows you to deliver personalized and highly targeted messages that truly meet the specific needs of the customer.

Features of Marketing Automation Tools

Lead nurturing and drip marketing are the most interesting features of effective marketing automation software. Many software exist on the market. However, not all of them offer all the features on one platform. Before choosing your provider for automation, you need to check if it offers all the essential features.

Marketing automation tools work like an intelligent electronic controller. Leads are nurtured and engaged until they are converted into qualified leads. Then they are motivated to go further into the pipeline. This prevents sales staff from being overwhelmed with leads that never turn into real customers. The product improves ROI for sales and marketing departments. Thus, beginners are not obliged to go through the labor-intensive phases of the sector.

As leads are engaged and nurtured, their interactions are always measured and evaluated. And if they remain inactive, engagement and maintenance continues automatically. However, when the lead becomes active, the software automatically notifies the relevant sales department. Most interactions and information are automatically entered into the customer relationship management system. Thus, all the details of the prospect's interactions with the sales department are displayed. Having an active lead, and all the details about the factors of this success are a great advantage for any sales representative.

Best practices to follow

Many SMEs are interested in using Marketing Automation tools. However, they face some obstacles. To avoid any issues in your marketing automation system, you need to follow best practices. The following pages have been designed with “what works best” in the market in mind.

Integration with CRM and sales processes

It is very important to closely align sales and marketing operations to succeed in Marketing Automation. The marketing team needs to understand the sales cycle and how prospects move through that cycle. In order to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, you need to track leads throughout the sales channel. In addition, it is important to know that by sharing data, marketing automation platforms and CRMs are able to integrate and communicate with each other.

Trend towards hyper-personalization

The trend towards hyper-personalization is the most ideal approach for the market. It helps provide people with what they are looking for and avoid spamming. Thinking about the people who showed some interest in your offers, reacted positively, clicked on your links, and bounced back helps personalize the message and offers.

Avoid autopilot mode

Marketing automation is a good way to save your time and resources by programming certain functions. Nevertheless, it is very important to avoid autopilot mode. Automation can quickly become a means of preventing sales when “contact us” forms are not routed correctly.

Always use a multitasking platform

There are many Marketing Automation platforms on the market. Some offer pure sales or email marketing, while others are limited to commercial prospecting only. On the other hand, multitasking platforms have proven useful for simultaneously managing your sales, emails, and digital marketing campaigns from a single dashboard. This saves time, increases efficiency and increases return on investment.

Like the fingers of one hand, marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) work individually, but depend on each other to perform the same basic tasks. Marketing automation is about starting customer relationships on the best footing, while CRM is about managing and improving those relationships. Without both fingers, the hand still works, but not as well.