Implementing marketing automation is one of the best ways to develop more effective and scalable campaigns. Automation leads to a variety of benefits and is worth considering for businesses of all sizes.
This article will cover ten key reasons to consider automating digital marketing across email, social media. While the transition can be confusing at first, you’ll gradually learn how to leverage automation in order to achieve your marketing goals.
Saving Time
The most obvious edge marketing automation can offer is the ability to develop larger and more sophisticated campaigns in less time. Automating some of the most repetitive aspects of digital marketing gives your team time to focus on more important tasks.
For example, marketing automation makes it easy to set up targeted campaigns that trigger in response to certain actions.
Rather than copying and pasting a message to each new reader, you can configure the same email to send whenever someone subscribes to your newsletter.
Reducing Staff and Other Costs
For the same reasons, automation can lead to a significant reduction in overhead and help maximize your marketing ROI. Paying employees with a salary or hourly wage to perform these tasks is much more expensive than delegating them to third-party software.
Depending on your needs and the size of your company, you could access marketing automation at little to no cost.
On the other hand, many providers offer custom enterprise subscriptions for larger organizations. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding the right option for your business.
Increasing Revenue
Automation typically results in a substantially higher customer lifetime value and can help optimize nearly every aspect of your digital marketing strategies. You’ll be able to spend less money for even better results, giving your brand the revenue it needs to grow and invest in other areas.
While automation often leads to an immediate impact, it also provides the tools you need to make consistent adjustments and continue improving your ROI over time.
You’ll notice both a short- and long-term increase in sales, revenue, and customer lifetime value after automating your digital campaigns.
Having More Accurate Data
Customer data is a vital element in all kinds of marketing campaigns, and marketing automation tools provide critical information about your audience.
For example, you’ll be able to analyze which types of campaigns worked best with different audience segments for more fine-tuned targeting later on.
Access to more robust information is one of the most important benefits of contemporary marketing automation software. This data gives you the tools you need to make more informed decisions and identify your best and worst strategies.
Constantly reviewing past results and trends is crucial for sustainable success throughout all channels.
Better Communication Between Teams
Effective digital marketing requires cooperation from multiple teams, which can be highly resource-intensive for businesses that still run campaigns manually.
Current marketing automation tools automatically track customer data and make them accessible to your team and throughout your organization.
Lead scoring systems are incredibly complicated without an automation program to track customers and assign points automatically. Your sales team will automatically be notified when a lead crosses the line from marketing qualified to sales qualified.
This process streamlines the sales cycle and facilitates seamless customer interactions across multiple teams.
In turn, you’ll be able to target each subscriber at certain points in the sales funnel without using unnecessary time or resources to collect this data.
Better Personalization
Customers expect more personalization than ever, and marketing automation makes it easy to personalize your campaigns in a variety of ways.
While people often associate the word “automation” with generic content, you’ll actually be able to target customers much more effectively with automation software.
If a user adds an item to their cart but leaves your store before finishing the purchase, you can create an automatic cart abandonment email to win them back.
This gives you the opportunity to send the right emails to the right readers at the right times, ensuring that your messaging is always relevant to each customer’s experience.
Messages can be further personalized by adding product recommendations based on a user’s previous behavior on your site. Almost every element can be customized in order to optimize each email and respond to your audience’s needs.
In short, marketing automation allows for significantly larger and more sophisticated strategies compared to manual campaigns.
A/B Testing
With the right tools, your team will be able to analyze the performance of every message and compare results based on numerous factors. A/B testing is one of the most important aspects of a sustainable approach to digital marketing.
If you’re stuck between two ad headlines, for example, split testing enables you to test both on a small scale and see which one achieves better results.
Consistently running tests helps you identify what’s working and what you need to change—no matter where you are now, there’s always room for improvement.
By automatically collecting large amounts of data, marketing automation software speeds up the comparison process and allows you to run a greater volume of tests.
Every A/B test will lead to a small improvement as you gradually tweak your strategies based on prior tests. Over time, those minor adjustments will lead to significantly better results.
Automating Email Marketing
Automation can be incredibly powerful in virtually all digital marketing channels, but it’s most closely associated with email campaigns.
In fact, some automation tools focus entirely on email marketing, although it’s usually more efficient to manage campaigns from an omnichannel perspective.
If you’re approaching email marketing automation for the first time, you should consider using some basic workflows before implementing more sophisticated techniques.
These are just a couple of ideas to help you get started with automated email campaigns—don’t be afraid to try out other strategies.
Welcome Emails
Most customers expect a welcome message after subscribing to an email newsletter. This is the perfect opportunity to give new leads some basic information about your brand and start customer relationships with a positive interaction.
A good welcome email naturally leads readers to continue engaging with your brand. You can start that process by offering a bonus (discount, free shipping, etc.) to new email subscribers.
In turn, that will motivate them to open your welcome message, return to your store, and potentially make their first purchase.
Cart Abandonment Sequences
Cart abandonment is another critical automation workflow that can lead to an immediate boost in sales. The majority of online shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase, so even converting a small percentage of these users will help you generate significantly more orders.
Like welcome emails, cart abandonment messages should include an exclusive bonus that will make subscribers reconsider their decision.
You may also add recommendations for similar products in case they’re no longer interested in the items in their cart.
While you can always experiment with different frequencies, this sequence typically performs best as a set of three emails. The first should be sent within an hour in order to contact readers while your products are still fresh in their minds.
From there, you should wait at least 12 hours before the second message. Sending two emails too quickly will run the risk of turning readers away.
Finally, set up one last email for 24 hours after they leave your site—this reminder should include the best discount as a last-ditch effort to convert abandoned carts.
Automating Social Media
Similarly, many of the benefits of email automation also apply to social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Contemporary marketing automation software streamlines the process of managing cross-channel campaigns including social media, email, and more.
Keep in mind that “automation” doesn’t mean “automatic”—it’s crucial to understand what can be automated and what requires a more personal touch.
In the same way, your social media profile should be balanced between different types of posts rather than only creating sales-driven content.
While some posts need to be created at specific times, automation allows you to schedule a consistent content drip. You can supplement these posts by manually writing time-sensitive content.
Chatbots are another way in which marketers have started to implement automation into their social media strategies.
Even the most complex chatbots can only handle a limited range of questions, but they can still take the pressure off your support team by helping customers with routine questions.
Finally, social listening software is a great option for any brand that’s new to social media marketing automation.
These tools automatically check for mentions on all social channels, and you can also use them to search by hashtags, keywords, and more. You’ll get the information you need much more quickly than you would by checking social media feeds on your own.
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Marketing automation offers better efficiency, scalability, and results relative to traditional tactics, and businesses that fail to adapt are already falling behind.
These are just some of the countless ways in which automation can take your approach to the next level.
from Feedster https://www.feedster.com/marketing/10-reasons-to-automate-your-digital-marketing/
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