Marketing automation is an integral part of any digital media marketing strategy with good reason. Recent studies showed that marketing automation had a 77% increase in conversion rates. The advantages have led big companies, such as Netflix and Charles Schwab, to implement various marketing automation strategies that you can also use in your own business. We’ll tell you some of the best marketing automation tools to help streamline your marketing processes and make your job easier.
Table of Contents
Marketing Automation Definition
First, let’s define marketing automation:
Marketing automation is the technology and software that handle routine marketing tasks, without the need for any or much human action.
Examples of marketing automation include email marketing, social media scheduling, and running ad campaigns. Marketing automation makes marketers’ jobs easier and helps personalize the marketing experience for clients. There is marketing automation software to help you with lead generation, finding qualified leads, lead nurturing, improving customer experience, and other marketing efforts. Automated marketing platforms simplify your marketing processes and provide invaluable customer data. For example, you could use Mailchimp to help you run an email marketing campaign.
Marketing Automation Services
It’s important to know what kind of marketing automation services there are and what services are the best fit for your company. There are various marketing automation services available. Here are some of the most common marketing automation services:
Customer Journey
The customer journey is an essential part of connecting with your customers. It provides personal attention for prospective customers, new customers, and interacting with and retaining old ones. This service helps lead customers through the awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy stages in an automated manner. This process also helps make meaningful upsells and extended services to customers.
Email Marketing and Automation
Email is one of the oldest but continually enduring and effective services. This service and strategy help keep a steady form of contact. Email marketing allows businesses to stay in the mind of the customer. With more than 90% of people checking their email every day, there’s a high possibility that your email will get noticed, clicked on, and ultimately that the customer will take action. Whether informing customers about changing store hours or an exciting new product, this is a direct line to them.
Social Media Marketing and Automation
While a marketing expert will carefully craft these social media posts, the automated process will increase efficiency. Instead of having someone post and share engaging content with your social media audience all day, this process allows you to share posts at appropriate times. This service involves tools to help you create an editorial calendar and schedule your posts ahead of time.
Campaign Automations
With any marketing strategy comes marketing campaigns. For a digital marketing campaign to be successful, there needs to be the appropriate amount of reach. There is less time and energy devoted to starting and ending campaigns by automating campaigns, allowing google ad agencies and businesses to schedule based on previous years’ data and best practices. For example, there might be certain times of the day or days of the week when they might work best. As with any campaign, you want to attract, delight, and engage your customer. Making this process automatic makes the process that much easier.
Live Chat Software
Many clients would prefer to chat on your website rather than pick up the phone and call your business to ask their questions. A live chat solution can help improve customer service, enhance user engagement, and increase lead generation for your website.
Monitor Leads
Once your business has reached the appropriate customers based on likes, interests, and needs, this service allows the sales team to monitor when a customer performs a desired action. These actions let the customer move down the sales funnel or conversion funnel. Leads could include getting a customer’s email address or engaging with a social media post by commenting or liking it.
Benefits of Marketing Automation Software
There are several benefits for you to adding software that automates marketing tasks to your business, including:
Streamlined Processes
Automation software makes marketing easier. It is much simpler to automate tasks rather than do them manually. It helps you prioritize tasks and makes it easy to hand off jobs between various teams on your staff.
Personalize the Customer Experience
You don’t have to worry about sacrificing personalization for your customers when utilizing automation software. Technology is advanced these days, and software can improve the customer experience.
Insight Into Customer Data
Software can give you insight into your customers that humans simply can’t. Marketing automation software can track customers across various channels.
Marketing Automation Software
Several marketing automation solutions can help you streamline your business. Let’s discuss some of the best options that might help you with your business.
Mailchimp
You have probably seen the Mailchimp name and logo at the bottom of emails in your inbox from time to time. Mailchimp allows you to create an email or a series of emails that send automatically, based on predetermined triggers.
ManyChat
Not all marketing automation is about email! There is also software to automate some of your conversations on other platforms. ManyChat is a chatbot that can help you with Facebook Messenger and SMS discussions. ManyChat is simple to use and gives you information about your users that can sync to your CRM.
Omnisend
Omnisend is an “omni” channel marketing automation platform specifically for e-commerce. You can use Omnisend to add several channels within the same automation workflow, like SMS, Facebook Messenger, email, push notifications, and others. It is also user-friendly and offers templates to make creating landing pages, forms, and other content quick and easy.
How Marketing Automation Benefits Customers
Your business isn’t the only one to benefit from marketing automation. In many ways, automating benefits consumers, too.
Serves Better Content
Marketing automation helps your business learn more about your audience, which allows you to provide them with content that they want and that interests them.
Answers Their Questions
Software allows you to anticipate and answer your customers’ questions quickly and easily. You can automate responses based on previous purchases, in-product actions, or lifetime value.
Offers a Better Experience
Consumers might not like the idea of automation, but it provides them with a better overall user experience. It stores, collects, and uses their data to pre-fill forms, send them targeted emails that meet their needs, and customer service that is familiar and helpful.
Marketing Automation Agencies
Marketing automation agencies help streamline all the services and strategies that your business may want to implement. These agencies allow your company to reach potential leads and make the sales that keep you in business. Agencies can help in many aspects such as social media automation, email marketing, data-driven analytics, and everyday tasks that don’t require individualization. Keep in mind that with automation, such as social media posts, you will still need to keep your customers engaged. In general, using a marketing automation agency will save your company time and money by not wasting it on strategies that don’t produce results. Using these agencies is also a prevalent practice.
Digital Marketing Automation at SEO Design Chicago
When looking into marketing options, many different agencies and services are available. Many successful companies are already embracing automation. In fact, 49 percent of companies today use a marketing automation system or software. Marketing automation is a growing service and will only continue to grow as the digital marketing world grows and expands. Marketing automation allows companies to become more organized, efficient, and practical and prioritize marketing tasks more efficiently. Automation is the future of digital marketing. It’s also a meaningful way to keep up with the growing demand for more content and audience engagement. Contact us at SEO Design Chicago today if you need help choosing a marketing automation agency! We are the experts in digital marketing and a full-service agency. We can help you streamline your marketing and sales and make your business run smoother.
FAQ:
- What is marketing automation?
- What are marketing automation services?
- How do you automate marketing?
- What is a marketing automation platform?
- What is an example of marketing automation?
Contact Us Today!