Even though it is still relatively new to the market, marketing automation has become essential not only to the growth of startups but also to the survival of businesses of any sizes in such tough and competitive business world.
Marketing automation has become critical in the modern business world thanks to all the competitive benefits it offers which we can safely say that no business can achieve its full potential without.
The main benefits of marketing automation tools are improved lead management, segmentation, nurturing, campaign management, and more. All these features and benefits of marketing automation streamline the processes of marketing and sales and, more importantly, improve the customer experience.
What’s the benefits of using marketing automation for business?
1- Better customer experience
Marketing Automation tools can help any business improve their customer experience. This is done with highly-tailored and personalized campaigns that are sent automatically to customers when they perform specific actions.
These actions could be anything from signing up for your emails to abandoning items in their shopping cart.
Behavioral-triggered emails allow businesses to create a highly-personalized customer experience, which goes a long way in helping your business get increased revenue:
Personalization makes for a massive difference in the results of your marketing efforts:
- Personalized emails result in six times higher transaction rates
- They also result in 29% higher unique open rates
- 79% of customers say they are more likely to engage with an offer when it’s personalized based on previous interactions
- 78% of internet users say personalized content is much more likely to convince them to make a purchase
- 93% of businesses report increased revenue after using customized emails. (Source)
You can learn about the best Marketing Automation Software for Small Business here.
2- Build customer loyalty
A Marketing automation system will give you a regular in-flow of data on the daily activities of your customers, which means you will have everything you need to improve the interactions with your customers. You will have their wants, their needs, and their problems.
This allows businesses to build relationships with their customers by making the communications with them more personalized and therefore more valuable.
Establishing good relationships with your customers can take them on a journey from being a potential buyer to a current customer to a loyal advocate of your brand and/or business.
3- Better customer retention
To achieve sustainable growth of your business, you need to have a balance between customer acquisition and retention. Generating new leads and gaining new customers is great for your business, of course, but so is keeping existing customers, because the latter costs much less.
Marketing Automation software can help with that by giving you insights that enable you to predict your customer’s next decision so you can act accordingly and continue to grow your relationships with your already-existing customers.
4- Increased customer lifetime value
Marketing automation tools can boost your business’s revenue by motivating existing customers to spend more throughout their lifetime with your business’s brand.
The software does this by allowing businesses to automate requests for feedback and review, trigger re-engagement campaigns if the customer suddenly becomes absent or distant, and send your customers exclusive offers on high spending items.
All of these post-purchase strategies – and more – increase your customer’s lifetime value.
5- Bring Information from everywhere
Marketing Automation solutions can work on any channel, and this includes your most important channels like SEO and Social Media.
The solution can then bring all this information in one place and automatically perform lead scoring, qualifying, and prioritizing. This will later help in driving broader, more scalable campaigns that allow you to reach a more general audience.
6- Generate Better Leads
Lead generation is crucial for the success of your business, and Marketing Automation solution will not only allow you to get more leads, but these will be better leads as well.
Marketing Automation tools can give you a more detailed picture of the behavior of your potential customer, helping you understand the prospects more deeply and where they are in their lifecycle right now.
This means you will be able to customize your follow-ups to an unprecedented level thanks to those insights.
7- Increased average order value
Another revenue-boosting feature that Marketing Automation provides is automated product recommendations.
These automated & personalized product recommendations are very useful in cross-selling and upselling in your website and your email.
Not only can they drive conversions, but they can also entice your customers to spend a little bit more in each transaction, therefore, increasing your average order value.
8- Clear and Concrete Metrics of Success
Marketing Automation Solutions will give you real, valuable, insights into your business’s performance. It will provide reporting on the performance of each one of your campaigns and will show you exactly what is working and what is not.
Running an email campaign without having concrete metrics of success is just a recipe for failure, but marketing automation will give you the data in real-time so you can make adjustments to improve the performance of your campaign.
9- Improved accountability of your sales and marketing teams
Marketing Automation makes it very clean where you are having problems with your company. It gives managers a birds-eye view reporting of the business’s pipeline which means that you can easily identify the bottlenecks in your business.
This means that you can, for example, identify a problem in a sales process quickly and effectively and give feedback to your sales team that they need to work on this issue.
This feedback system will increase the accountability of your teams and ensure that any issue is dealt with before it becomes more severe than it needs to be.
10- Increased scale and scope of your email marketing campaigns
Marketing Automation also gives you the benefit of increasing the scale and scope of your email marketing campaigns. Automating email campaigns is significantly more efficient than creating and sending personalized emails manually.
Automation doesn’t only make creating and sending your campaigns more efficient, but it increases the scalability to that beyond of which is physically possible by a team of humans. It allows you to work with a much larger audience.
11- Reduced staff costs and increased ROI
By eliminating the need for your staff to do repetitive tasks, Marketing automation tools can reduce your staff costs significantly while streamlining your workflow at the same time.
This gives your team more time and resources to focus on more high-impact tasks that require skill and brings the most value to your business.
Now, your business will be able to do more with a smaller team, saving money and increasing your ROI.
12- Recovering lost revenue
This is more related to eCommerce websites. As mentioned earlier, you can use marketing automation software to send emails to customers who abandoned their shopping carts to encourage customers to complete their purchases.
This is a customer that you have spent money to get to this point, so when they are abandoning their carts, you are losing money.
Marketing Automation tools will help you learn what the problem is (why they didn’t complete their purchase) and then solve it and motivate your customers to complete their order.
13- Making your team more creative
When your team spends less or none of their time doing repetitive tasks, they will spend their time instead of thinking creatively and strategically. This will allow them to test the waters and push themselves forward, always coming up with new and creative ideas and testing them.
This strategic and creative thinking is more valuable for your business, and it can improve the ROI of your marketing efforts.
14- Harmony between your sales and marketing teams
Whether they are in a small business or a large one, marketing and sales teams tend to have some conflicts with one another.
The sales team always hounds the marketing team for more qualified leads and blame the underwhelming results on the marketing strategy used, while the marketing team blames the sales teams for not being able to close deals with leads that were hard to obtain in the first place.
Implementing marketing automation can help your business solve this conflict. It will provide your sales teams with more opportunities to close deals by giving them more SQLs and more prospects. Of course, these prospects will come from the efforts of the marketing team that uses the marketing automation software to get these leads.
It’s a win-win situation.
15- Forecast Future Campaign Performance
We have mentioned how marketing automation will help you with measuring the performance of each of your campaigns, but thanks to the leaps in AI technology, some Marketing Automation solutions can now use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze all your data, including the history of your campaigns, and forecast the performance of your future campaigns.
This is a feature that will get keep getting better with the advancements of AI technology, so you can expect the accuracy of these future casts to keep improving.
Shortly, this will help you make all the right decisions to get the best results for your campaign before even launching it, which will make A/B testing easier.
As you can see, Marketing Automation can bring so many benefits for businesses of all sizes and can play a critical role in the success and growth of any business. It helps you save time and money, reaches a broader audience, generates better leads and nurtures them to conversions more efficiently, and it makes your team more productive and successful.
It is hard to argue against marketing automation solutions. However, some might not get optimal results with it if they commit these 8 common Marketing Automation Mistakes, so make sure to avoid them to get the best results.
As always, we would love to hear from you, so if you have any questions or comments, please leave them in a comment down below, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
