Today’s marketers are under constant pressure to do more with less; to increase sales and productivity with fewer resources and much less time. Luckily, marketers also have marketing automation to support their efforts.
This ever-advancing technology has the power to help increase leads, drive conversions, and ultimately generate more revenue. Furthermore, the most advanced marketing automation platforms are far more than support tools, they are actually changing the marketer’s role by streamlining, or even eliminating, the more tedious day-to-day tasks in their workloads.
Automation has quickly become a critical component of today’s successful marketing strategies. It can boost sales productivity by 14.5% on average, and reduce marketing overhead by 12.2%. The ever-increasing number of platforms and channels means customers are easier to reach than ever before and, as such, marketers are eager to implement cross-platform, omnichannel campaigns.
But to run these campaigns and reach customers efficiently and effectively, brands must push the capabilities of their marketing automation platforms to take over some of the more operational tasks, allowing them to allocate more time and energy to strategy, content, and creativity.
By pushing their automation platforms to do more of the tactical work, marketers can dedicate more time to focus on business-critical, high-level aspects of marketing strategy. They are able to think strategically and be more creative, producing higher quality content and customer messaging. That high-level thinking, added to the efficiencies of automation, can create the best-case scenario of more leads, better productivity, more revenue, and generally more success for both the marketing team and the business overall.
So, what can marketing automation technology do to help best engage customers and improve the business? Here are 5 examples:
1. Fully Automated Welcome Programs
One way a brand can begin to create a lasting relationship with a customer is through a simple welcome program. By reaching out with an initial email after a customer subscribes to an email newsletter or creates an account, marketers can let the customer know what to expect, share more about the brand, and encourage the new customer to begin shopping.
Welcome emails can also be an opportunity to gather even more information about the new customer. If they ask for more information or trigger the customer to take a specific action, the data generated as a result can be used to trigger additional communication, customized on-page content, personalized incentives, and more.
2. Powerful Customer Retention Programs
Advanced lifecycle campaign automation, such as win-back and abandoned cart campaigns, can have a huge impact on a brand’s bottom line. No matter how great the brand, the product, or the website, life can occasionally get in the way of a customer making that final purchase. Customer retention is one of the easiest ways to raise profits, in fact, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase a company’s overall profits by up to 95% according to Harvard Business School.
Automating those retention programs, triggered by abandoned cart or a defined period of inactivity and constructed with timely and relevant messaging, can be just the thing to bring the customer back and re-engage them with the brand. Thus, through marketing automation, a brand can potentially recoup lost revenue with minimal additional manual effort on behalf of the marketing team.
3. Coordinated Multi-Channel Campaign Automation
Most marketers understand the need to coordinate their campaigns across multiple platforms, channels, and devices, because today’s shoppers often jump from one to another. When customers are everywhere, the brand should be as well. Using marketing automation can make this omnipresent status significantly easier for businesses to achieve.
Marketers can target customers with hyper-relevant product recommendations, conditional content, and smart segmentation, not just through email, but also social interactions, SMS messaging, push notifications, targeted ads, and more. All of these coordinated automated marketing tactics work together to help to make customer interactions easier for the marketer and, more importantly, more personal and effective for the customer.
4. Improved Customer Personalization
No one wants to feel like a number, particularly by their favorite retail brand. Marketing automation can help businesses create strong, fruitful, holistic customer profiles. Businesses can analyze these profiles and segment their customers into highly targeted audiences, ensuring the right message gets to the right person, on the right channel, at just the right time. These profiles can be continuously and automatically updated through the marketing automation solution, ensuring that the information is always up-to-date without having to task marketing teams with sifting through massive amounts of data.
5. The Ability to Test, Optimize, and Test Again
While all of the above are great ways marketing automation can help businesses run better, this is by far one of the best. Marketing teams can instantly understand which messages best resonate with each target audience, as well as where, when, and how to send them for optimal results. They can continuously test, optimize, and re-test different messages, creative executions, and even subject lines. This type of information is critical to optimize content, resulting in less time – and money – going to waste.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways B2C businesses and their marketing teams can push marketing automation platforms to do more in the acquisition and retention of customers. By using these tools to maintain a continuous testing loop, marketers can be sure their campaigns are operating at maximum impact, at all times.
Click here to learn how Emarsys’ marketing automation solution can help your business run more effectively.
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