According to statistics from the consulting company Emailmonday, marketing activities are automated in more than half of the organizations. At the same time, 82% of automation cases are accounted for by email marketing, 67% – by SMM, 60% – by analytics. These numbers are likely to grow, as marketing automation is a great opportunity to simplify workflows and perform some tasks using the software. For example, you can automate audience analysis and segmentation, customer retention and reactivation, abandoned shopping carts, email newsletters, social media posts, and ad campaigns.
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Which Companies Need Marketing Automation?
Any company can automate some of its marketing activities. However, the size and scope of the activity do not play a decisive role. Therefore, experts have come up with a small test questionnaire to help you understand if you need marketing automation for your business. Remember, your answers will always be unique because of your situation – whether you have an essay writer service, an online store, or any other type of business.
Answer the following questions:
- Is your task to find and attract buyers on the Internet?
- Can you accurately calculate the revenue of your marketing campaigns?
- Do you sort your customer lists based on the likelihood of making a purchase?
- How actively do you use email newsletters?
Before embarking on a marketing automation project, you need to think about a strategy. Decide what needs to be automated first, assign responsibility, and choose a platform. But, first, let’s find out what marketing processes can be transferred under the control of automation.
What Can Be Automated?
In the modern world, more and more processes and routine actions can be entrusted to special programs. For example, the manager can make a list of everything the marketing department does and see which of them can be automated. Naturally, the more such points are typed, the more tasks you can solve and the less money you will have to invest in it.
Most often, companies automate:
- email newsletters,
- creating a landing page (landing pages),
- working with the database, keeping it up to date and segmentation,
- increasing customer loyalty, for example, birthday greetings or personal discounts,
- communication on the site (chatbots),
- analysis of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
In addition to external activities, internal channels can be automated. Imagine the situation. Marketers launched a promotion, the client saw the ad and came to the store. However, sellers have not yet received information about the promotion. As a result, people leave without a purchase; loyalty falls, the promotion “does not work.” So, pretty much everything can be automated. Nowadays, even such things as music education get automated – so, marketing has already been heavily streamlined.
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How Internet Marketing Automation Works
Let’s take an example of an online platform essaywriter.org. Let’s say it is visited by 500 visitors daily, of which 80 sign-up, 40 fill up their cart, and 20 buy. A marketer can manually analyze user behavior on the site, set up retargeting to those who have collected a cart but have not bought anything, and send a newsletter to customers. Or, you can configure all these actions once you create templates and completely automate the process.
A special program will segment the user database (just go in/collect the cart/buy) and launch a separate email newsletter for each of these groups. And then, it will analyze the number of unsubscriptions, repeated returns, and purchases.
Strategy Development
After the manager chooses which marketing processes to automate, you can create a marketing automation system strategy.
Explore what your competitors have automated and which will work for your company as well.
Decide what measurable goals should be achieved after automation. For example, cut the staff of marketers in half or increase the number of repeat purchases by 10%.
Think about your content strategy and prepare templates for fast customer engagement at every stage.
Select the marketing channels you plan to use. For example, in addition to email newsletters, you can automate communication with customers on social networks and the company’s website and communication through the corporate website for employees.
Choose a suitable automation platform or several different services. Then, determine which of the employees will work with the platform, conduct training.
Analyze how the automation process is going, what results were obtained, and what can be improved.
Key Steps to Implement Marketing Automation
Don’t wait to create a perfectly tuned automation strategy – start putting it into practice.
At the first stage, inform employees that artificial intelligence will now perform some of the marketing tasks. The update may affect not only marketers but other departments as well. For example, salespeople, HR professionals, and other employees can use dedicated services in marketing automation. If necessary, provide them with training on how to work with the new services.
Launch a marketing automation platform. First, configure it so that it solves the tasks that you prescribed in the strategy. Then, download the templates and content you want.
Choose which processes you automate in the first place, do a test run and fix any bugs you find.
Start the marketing automation process as usual and track the results.
The level of competition between companies is growing every day. Anyone who tries to do promotion and solve all marketing tasks manually finds himself at a deliberate disadvantage in front of competitors. Automation allows you to find leads, spending less time and money. And successfully convert them into buyers.
