What is Marketing Automation? It’s Working & Benefits

Are you tired of managing your online marketing campaigns manually? If yes, you are missing out on the best of what technology has to offer. Running online marketing campaigns is a seemingly high-end and lengthy process, more than what it seems to be. However, marketing automation is the technology that can automatically assist you in managing the marketing processes and multiple campaigns across numerous platforms or channels without leaving any errors behind.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to the technologies and software platforms specifically designed for businesses and their marketing teams to efficiently market their brand on multiple digital platforms, such as via websites, various social media platforms, and email. These platforms automate repetitive tasks and continue them without any error or hindrance.

With a tool offering marketing automation as one of its features, you can easily identify potential audiences online and automate converting those leads into sales. A marketing automation cloud tool can be utilized by both the marketing and sales departments to enhance the quality of digital marketing campaigns and sales activities, as these processes directly influence revenue and growth.

Not only this, but these tools enhance lead generation and conversion and measure the ROI of individual and overall campaigns. Automation offers great time and effort-saving service to companies, allowing them to close more deals and increase revenue. Small-scale businesses, MNCs, or marketing professionals such as yourself can use marketing automation to their respective advantage by manually carrying out activities that are difficult to perform, such as bulk emailing, push notifications, and many more.

Marketing requires you to be accurate, rapid, and creative. However, such efficiency is hard for us humans to offer. Therefore, automation makes it quite convenient to handle marketing campaigns, eliminating human errors and giving you time to focus on expanding your business.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Let’s learn how this technologically efficient process works.
A set of marketing automation tools available are easy to use and aim to design a streamlined and simplified process to complete time-consuming tasks.

• Suppose you are utilizing the right marketing automation tool. In that case, you will be able to collect the complete data of your lead through various platforms and interactions like website visits, app usage, social media activity, emails, etc., giving you a centric view of each customer.
• Hoping you have chosen the right tool, it will rapidly scale the process and further streamline the segmentation to signify the right audience.
• Based on the profile, the software tailors messages for each customer.
• It also creates personalized and relevant messaging across various platforms like email, mobile, social media, and web experiences.

How Does Marketing Automation Help Businesses?

Until now, you must have understood how a marketing automation tool could help your business to the next level. However, the primary areas where a marketing automation tool can help you are here:

1. Helps Track User Engagement Across Every Channel

Marketing automation’s main aim is to offer its users ease and convenience. One of its many features is that it offers a different strategy to suit different digital marketing needs. For example, a campaign being run on social media cannot work for email marketing.

While giving you a complete automated process for your campaigns, automation software also helps you regularly check user engagement with your campaigns. Marketing automation lays down common workflows for different purposes, such as festive offers, cart abandonment reminders, welcome emails, etc. Still, it also gives you feedback on how many consumers engage with your campaigns, giving you a clear idea of your audience’s interests. With this, you can change your campaign approach accordingly to track and enhance user engagement across channels where you are running campaigns

2. Creates Personalized Workflows

If you want your leads to convert, you need to pay attention to your customers’ behaviours, which is an impossible task if we consider doing it manually. Still, with an automation marketing tool, we can track the behaviours of our customers to understand their needs and wants, which may assist us in delivering the right content at the right time.
The Workflow is defined by templates and can be custom-built or modified in the middle of the campaigns. After understanding consumer needs, one can personalize the workflows to target the condition of your audience. Sometimes, by staying consistent in work, the creativity of businesses takes a toll. Hence, this is where automation may assist you, as it offers personalized and template workflows that suit your requirements and make the process faster and easier.

3. Bulk Deliverability of your Emails

It is only sometimes necessary that the emails you send are delivered to the receiver’s inboxes. Many times, it may get placed in the spam folder and stay hidden forever because who trusts spam emails? Using the marketing automation tool improves your email deliverability as you can measure the success of sending the email to the recipient.

Did you know?

According to Statista, in 2023, spam messages accounted for 46.3% of email traffic. Therefore, this means the probability of your emails dropping into your receivers’ inboxes is quite low. However, using marketing automation best practices not only delivers your messages to the recipient’s inbox but also helps you measure the success ratio.

4. Managing Leads and solutions to convert potential customers

The ultimate goal of marketing campaigns is sales and profits. The process is quite tough and huge, from lead generation to management and conversion. However, marketing automation tools assist businesses in this way too. Per Epsilon research, 80% of customers are likely to purchase when they witness a personalized experience from the brand. Companies need to do so manually to avoid disconnection, which is why leads aren’t converted into sales. Simultaneously, only some leads are your genuine leads, and so dealing with each one of them manually is a waste of time and effort.

Here, the marketing automation platforms permit the marketers or businesses to automatically filter the data, reducing errors such as passing all leads to the sales department instead of giving them genuine and correct leads to nurture. As a result, it saves a lot of time for the team to approach the authorities and convert the correct ones giving them a more specific and personalized experience.

Marketing Automation Best Practices

Having an insight into how marketing automation is necessary for your business, we have also listed down some of the best practices you can perform in real-time and generate a profit-driven ROI

1. Simplifying the lead scoring process through the insights and detailed analytics often available in the dashboards of marketing automation tools.
2. Mapping out a lead flow will help us interact with our target customers at different touch points.
3. Knowing your buyer’s journey and being able to analyze their engagement.
4. Create your content library by designing engaging, interactive, and relevant messaging templates to reach your leads and customers through all customer cycle levels.
5. Effectively capturing leads by limiting distraction and improving the user experience.
6. Remember to analyze as you move further. Some campaigns may not work for you, and some may do exceptionally well; this is what you must examine. Dig into the tool’s analytics and make necessary changes in the system.
7. Impress your stakeholders by justifying their investment using the analytics and data from the marketing automation platform.

How Does Marketing Automation Affect Customers?

Marketing automation has a huge impact on customers because it enables businesses to target their customers’ pain points and offer them valuable solutions by providing the right product/service at the right time.

1. Offers the Right  Business Solution

The right marketing automation tool assists businesses in prioritizing work as well as managing leads. These platforms offer quick solutions to the users by automating the marketing process based on the past actions of the customers.

2. Delivers Relevant Content

Do you ever go around showing wedding attire to people looking for shoes? With marketing automation tools, you can always show your customers only what they are interested in. Using their behavioural traits, you can customize your campaign and target more specific content to them, suiting their requirements with the information you have for each prospect.

3. Incorporates Seamless & Omnichannel Experience

A marketing automation tool collects the data, stores it, and then uses it to deliver a personalized experience for your visitors. With the right marketing automation tool, we can easily target our audience irrespective of their available platforms—emails targeting their specific needs, pre-filled forms, convenient customer support, etc.

Leading Marketing Automation Tools

Here are some of the leading  Marketing Automation platforms that can help to ease your business processes:

Salesforce

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a set of tools that come with automation features. It offers a comparatively friendly platform that efficiently offers excellent, accurate services by decreasing technology-related complexity. Businesses of any size or level can use it because the platform is budget friendly and offers an error-free backend to work on. This automated marketing platform is a great place where one can run multiple functionalities and scale their businesses with high-tech UI support.

Userfox

Userfox is the most recent player available in the market but has gained popularity with its great service level and functionality. Acquired by AdRoll, everyone expects the platform to witness the power of both teams altogether. This platform is a must-use for tech companies because it has a lightweight interface and an amazing email marketing feature.

HubSpot

The platform describes itself as inbound marketing software. It offers a bit of every service but does not perform at a describable level. At the same time, HubSpot offers great and additional functionality because it offers benefits beyond email marketing. This all-in-one tool is a great choice for medium and small-scale business owners.

Marketo

Marketo is also considered a reliable tool with great features that assist marketers in managing email campaigns. Marketo also has a marketplace with dozens of integrations; in that case, this platform is also called LaunchPoint. It is a great choice for giant firms. Compared to other marketing tools, Marketo is high-priced.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a brilliant and well-established marketing tool for small businesses. It is affordable. However, you get what you pay for. If you have a non-technical background, it is not difficult to access the platform because it offers basic functionality.

Eloqua

A fully accomplished brand, Eloqua comes with plenty of features of marketing automation, and it also offers exceptional service. Likewise, Marketo and Eloqua offer integrations with third-party services. If you require great assistance and guidance from your technological vendors, you must try this one out because their service is remarkable.

Which Marketing Automation Tool is Right for Your Businesses

Here is a comparative analysis of all marketing automation tools along with the Salesforce marketing automation tool:

From this comparative study, you can better decide which marketing automation tool would be the best for your business. Below are some of the key functions that the Salesforce marketing automation cloud offers for streamlining all your automation needs. 

Why Should You Go For Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Your Automation Needs? 

Comprehensive Marketing Automation

SFDC marketing automation offers a suite of tools that help you with multi-channel marketing. It allows you to automate and tailor your marketing campaigns across different channels, such as email, mobile, social media, and web channels. This feature aids marketers in developing seamless customer journeys and efficiently handling interactions

Enhanced Lead Generation and Nurturing

Marketing automation with Salesforce automates customer behaviour tracking and asks for follow-ups based on where the customer is in their buying journey. This way, prospects feel valued, which increases the chances of conversion.  

AI-Powered Personalization

It uses Einstein AI capabilities to deliver personalized content and optimize engagement strategies. It automates personalized content recommendations and monitors performance, which contributes to enhanced customer experiences and marketing ROI. 

Proven Success Across Industries

Salesforce Marketing Automation Platform is leveraged by top companies such as Coca-Cola and Adidas for their marketing needs. These businesses have reported significant improvements in engagement metrics and cost reductions.

Therefore, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Automation stands as a comprehensive solution for businesses that are looking to boost their marketing automation. Its versatile features enable data-driven insights and marketing efficiency to achieve marketing success. 

Wrapping It Up!

Businesses nowadays have numerous activities to perform, and marketing campaigns suffer unbearably. Using the right marketing automation tool, you can quickly increase your chances of creating a big name for your business. 

Salesforce marketing cloud, Eloqua, and Marketo are some of the most popular options for automating marketing campaigns. They are also capable of solving all your business problems. If you are still confused and looking for expert advice, you can contact our expert team for a free Salesforce consultation.

Investing in such highly efficient and competitive platforms has always proven to be an asset to the development of businesses. Utilize a marketing automation tool and skyrocket growth like you never imagined!