What is Marketing Automation?

According to Salesforce, marketing automation is technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.

For instance, a business can, with the help of automation, target both existing and potential customers, sending auto-generated emails, messages, etc.

Essentially, with the help of certain softwares, marketing activities are automated, making the process both efficient as well as personalized for the customer.

Ideally, marketing automation is a combination of both software and strategy. Personalized content helps to keep the existing customers happy, as well as convert prospects to leads.

For successful automated marketing strategies, the customers should be the focal point, the centre of everything that the business does. This helps customer relations even after a lead has been gained.

However, businesses need to ensure a steady supply of incoming leads – otherwise, while they are attempting to squeeze more out of the existing market database, the competitor will swoop in and take all the potential targets to their side!

Keeping in mind that the marketing automation software has been implemented effectively, here are some major benefits that businesses can reap:

• Reduction of Human Error

With automated processes, the need for manual work, assessment, overwatch and review are eliminated.

Thus, human oversight and errors are vastly reduced, which in turn improve efficiency by eliminating the cost of correction of any mistakes that might be made.

Along with errata elimination, marketing automation software’s can also perform a far greater number of tasks and cover a wider audience. A task that, when done manually, may take hours, can be done by automation in a few minutes.

• Saves Time

Time, in the face of competitive businesses, is indeed money.

Every minute spent can result in huge profits or losses, depending on how it is utilised, especially with organisations that participate in high stakes businesses, such as stock-broking organisations, or organisations dealing with real estate.

Thus, time saving is probably the biggest and most significant advantage that marketing automation has. The number of customers targeted and reached by automation softwares in a single minute increases multi-fold.

• Strengthens Sales and Marketing Ties

Within any business, these two departments usually work in tandem with each other. Thus, it is often common for these two departments to clash – Marketing teams chastise Sales for losing the leads they obtained, and Sales blaming Marketing for a lack of leads in the first place.

These clashes can be vastly reduced by automation! For instance, following the “Law of Large Numbers”, the greater the number of leads generated by marketing, the more pipelines they create. The Sales department can also work on maintaining the company’s ties with these customers.

 

Thus, both the teams will have increased productivity, reduced costs, and most importantly, stronger ties and lesser clashes!

• Ensures Effective Spending

With marketing automation, there is a huge reduction in labour costs. This enables businesses to relocate the resources and money towards other areas such as sales, research, production, development, et cetera.

 

Thus, organisations are able to optimize their spending, without having to compromise on the quality of their marketing strategies. The money can also be used to enhance area where it is needed more.

Basically – if implemented properly, automation all but guarantees a positive ROI.

• Provides Concrete Success Metrics

The outcome of every marketing campaign needs to be recorded, reported and analysed at regular intervals of time. Thus, there is a requirement of concrete metrics, whose values are generated accurately and in an understandable format.

Automation enables quantification of these metrics into solid values, which help in defining the success or failure rate of any campaign.

 

Other than this, along with defining the success rate, technological tools like Machine Learning and AI can also help predict the success of future campaigns (based on the statistical data of the previous initiatives), thus helping businesses accommodate changes and fine tune their processes and plans, to ensure maximum profit.

• Improves Customer Relations

This is closely related to point number one. When customers, whether potential or pre-existing, are targeted as a part of any marketing initiative, the generated content being sent plays a huge role in determining customer relations.

Personalized messages are known to have a far more positive impact on customer-business ties. This is largely because, with targeted customised content, it reflects that each client is special and crucial to the organisation.

Improved customer relations help ensure longevity is maintained in client-business ties, ensuring a continuous flow of revenue and profit for the company.

Conclusion

These are some of the major benefits of marketing automation. Others include scalability, increased scope of campaigning, improved results, recovery of lost revenue, increased customer lifetime value and allowing for research and creativity.

Do let us know in the comments’ section which benefit did you find the most surprising. Also, if there any other benefits, we would love to hear from you.