Suppose, you’re a retailer of laptops and other electronic peripherals. A customer lands on your website, and browses a few laptops, but does not make any purchases.

What strategies do you have in place to connect with customers to inspire them to make a purchase?

This is where marketing automation comes into help. Automated emails can be triggered when a customer browses certain products on your website. These emails highlight the features and benefits of the laptop models customers were looking for and suggest additional products they might be interested in. As an additional benefit, you can also share a discount code to help customers make purchases more affordable.

Exploring the blog is like going on a journey – a journey to find out more about marketing automation and how it can help your business grow and succeed.

So, let’s get started.

What is Marketing Automation?

Simply put, marketing automation refers to the use of a tool that helps businesses streamline their marketing processes and maximize their customer engagement.

Marketing automation tools enable businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as customer segmentation, customer targeting, lead nurturing, and personalization. Also, it helps businesses create personalized content, track customer activities, and optimize their customer lifecycle. In the long run, it helps businesses better serve their customers and grow their business through marketing.

As per a survey conducted by Statista in 2022, 43% of marketers stated that automation would improve customer experience. 38% of respondents have cited the time efficiency benefit of automation.

Best Strategies to Boost Your Business With Marketing Automation

Here we have outlined the best strategies that you can use to get the most out of marketing automation:

1. Bring Marketing and Sales Together

The sales and marketing teams are both focused on maximizing the value of a business by bringing in more customers. Yet, misalignment between them is more common.

We found that only 8% of businesses have their marketing and sales departments closely aligned.

According to a survey conducted by Marketing Prof, bringing a sales and marketing team together can help businesses in multiple ways:

• 36% increase in customer retention.
• 38% better sales-winning ratio.
• 20% improved annual growth rate.

When aligning sales and marketing teams, organizations gain enormous advantages, so why are most organizations so unsuccessful in doing so?

The common barriers to sales and marketing team alignment include:

• Lack of communication
• Different goals and objectives
• Lack of trust
• Conflicting incentives
• Siloed departments with different reporting structures

Do businesses have any strategies to overcome the barriers causing misalignment between their marketing and sales departments?

CRM marketing automation solutions like Salesforce Marketing Cloud can facilitate team alignment by providing a unified platform for both sales and marketing.

With this marketing automation solution, both departments learn each other’s objectives and strategies, allowing them to collaborate effectively. Automating processes isn’t the only thing marketing automation can do, it can help streamline others, like lead scoring and customer segmentation.

2. Gather an All-Around Perspective of Your Customers

The first step in creating a marketing plan for a business is to understand its customers.  Businesses that have a detailed understanding of customer needs can create a personalized experience that drives customer loyalty.

Businesses can reap the following benefits from leveraging the personalized experience:

• 80% of customers are likely to purchase a business that offers a personalized customer experience. (SlideShare)
• 92% of marketers believe that personalizing the customer experience is crucial to their success. (Econsultancy)
• Personalized experience can help businesses to boost customer loyalty by up to 20%. (Accenture)

How can a business create a personalized experience for its customers?

Marketing automation best practices are not only about the automation of repetitive, mundane tasks. A marketing automation platform can also help you organize customer data and gain a larger understanding of your customer base, which can be used to create targeted campaigns and personalize communications.

Marketing Cloud Personalization powered by Interaction Studio is one of the best marketing cloud platforms that empower businesses to make 1-to-1 engagement a reality.

Marketing Cloud Personalization enables businesses to collect customer data and use it to create personalized experiences for customers.

This can help to boost customer loyalty, increase customer engagement, and increase sales by providing a more tailored and engaging customer experience. Additionally, it can help businesses to create targeted campaigns to drive conversions and increase revenue.

3. Optimize Your Omnichannel Engagement

Do you know businesses with effective omnichannel strategies are likely to retain 89% of their customers?

What Does Omnichannel Engagement Mean?

Simply put, omnichannel engagement refers to the practice of providing a unified experience across different channels for customers.

For instance, a customer is browsing your business through a website and then switches to a mobile app. Having omnichannel engagement means despite the change in browsing devices, the customer experience remains constant. The customer has access to the same features and content. This unified experience helps businesses to boost loyalty and sales.

Why businesses should invest in omnichannel engagement?

• 73% of customers prefer to use multiple devices to shop online. (Harvard Business Review)
• Businesses with omnichannel marketing strategies in place are likely to experience a 9.5% increase in annual revenue. (Aberdeen Group)
• Omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value. (Think With Google)

How is your business fair in terms of omnichannel marketing strategies?

When it comes to optimizing your omnichannel marketing strategy, technology is your ally. Provide personalized experiences across email, mobile, advertising, web, and across all channels to enable retailers to accompany their customers on their journey marketing automation platforms can help businesses in multiple ways.

4. Visualize Marketing Campaign Performance and Take Timely Action

Do you know nearly 70% of marketing campaigns are failing due to inadequate monitoring and improvements to meet growing customer needs? The failure rate of businesses without effective marketing campaign monitoring strategies is five times greater than that of businesses with such strategies.

Visualizing marketing campaigns’ performance and taking timely action can help businesses to reap multiple benefits, such as:

• 83% of businesses that track and monitor marketing campaigns make better, customer-focused decisions. (Content Marketing Institute)
• 79% of businesses have a higher level of customer engagement.
• Businesses using marketing analytics to track and improve campaign performance have seen an average of 9.3% of ROI. (McKinsey)

How do you track and visualize the performance of a marketing campaign to get the most out of it?

With marketing automation tools like Marketing Cloud from Salesforce, companies can have real-time insights into their marketing performance. Leveraging the power of AI-driven analytics, this tool makes it easy to get a unified view of campaign performance across all channels.

Real-time insights into the performance of the marketing campaign allow businesses to make better decisions that are tailored to the needs of their customers based on their current behaviors. A key benefit of this marketing automation system is that it helps companies adopt BI (Business Intelligence) and make informed decisions, which in turn can increase ROI and customer engagement.

5. Embrace Big Data for Smarter Decisions

Data is the new gold for business across all industries. Data creation, capture, copying, and consumption, as estimated by Statista, will reach 180 zettabytes by 2025, three times more than the amount generated in 2020 (64.2 zettabytes).

What strategies do you have in place to embrace customer data to bring intelligence to business decisions driven by customers’ needs?

Effective strategies for analyzing big data can help businesses in the following ways:

• Smarter business decisions that resonate with customers.
• Improved customer acquisition and retention.
• Focused and targeted marketing campaigns to ensure maximum engagement.
• Improved efficiency.

Marketing automation platforms like Marketing Cloud Intelligence powered by Datorama provide centralized dashboards where businesses can analyze and act on their data. Having a precise understanding of customers’ behaviors and preferences lead the business to bring personalization to its offerings.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence enables business data to be visualized in a variety of ways to make it easily understandable for all employees across the organization. In addition, big data allows businesses to predict future customer behavior and prepare accordingly.

Final Take

Marketers today have an array of tools at their disposal to help them keep pace with the changing landscapes of marketing and technology. We have discussed the best marketing automation strategies to help businesses boost business growth. These marketing automation strategies can save businesses time and money while helping them to shape their marketing efforts to reap long-lasting results.