Marketing automation certainly promises a lot: more conversions, new leads and revenues, all while requiring minimal effort. Automation has resulted in increased leads and revenue for businesses that use it, as well as a 14 percent increase in sales productivity and a 12 percent decrease in marketing overheads.
Marketing professionals can benefit from automation in terms of greater productivity, cost savings, and a better customer experience. It may seem hard to start an automation project for your business, but with the right help, it’s a lot easier than you think!
The 4 key steps to follow into automation
It’s critical to create a workflow before deploying automated marketing procedures. This gives your team time to plan for new procedures and ensures that automation produces the best results for your company. There are four important steps to follow:
1. Choose the Appropriate Tasks
Look for the most common marketing tasks performed by your staff. This is where the greatest benefits from automation can be found. Use content optimisation tools for efficient results. Simple automatic response emails, for example, can significantly minimize your team’s administrative strain. Make a list of all of your present marketing responsibilities and choose the ones that are both time-consuming and automatable.
2. Select the Appropriate Automation Software
When it comes to automation software, the options are endless. Filtering out the best ones might be difficult, especially when you’re first starting out. Later in this post, we’ll introduce you to the best of the crop, but it’s also worth mentioning that software suited to your business may exist. Expand your investigation to make sure before you make a long-term commitment. Most platforms let you try out the software for free, so you can see which is best for your situation and which isn’t.
3. Train Your Team
Although automation enhances marketing productivity immediately, it needs an investment in training for relevant personnel when new software and procedures are implemented. It’s critical that team members comprehend how automation fits into their daily routines and how their roles may be refocused. Emphasize the advantages and allow employees to thoroughly evaluate new systems while addressing any reservations they may have. Companies are investing more money in marketing automation now and in the future because they think it will become one of the most important marketing skills soon.
4. Evaluate the efficiency of automation
The story does not end with the implementation of automation. We propose reviewing what’s working well, what could be better, and the impact of automation on important indicators on a regular basis. This enables you to make the necessary adjustments at the proper time.
Platforms for Automation at the Top
. Marketo
Marketo is a tried-and-true platform that tens of thousands of marketers rely on. Campaign management, automated emails, lead creation, budgeting tools, visitor tracking, and tailored messaging are some of the features available.
. HubSpot
HubSpot is undoubtedly already familiar to you, and for good reason. It has a content management system, email marketing, performance monitoring, lead ranking, and real-time analytic data, and it’s well-integrated and user-friendly.
. Customer.io
It’s all about communicating on this platform! Client.io creates personalized email messages based on customer behavior and your own pre-determined rules using data from customer interactions. Customer.io’s data may also be used to create a detailed profile of each lead.
Conclusion
Automation has a lot of benefits. Marketing professionals want to be more efficient, save money, be more productive, have better customer service, and be able to use more analytic data.
With proper planning, defined goals, specialist training, and optimized content, any organization can implement and achieve great success with marketing automation. And these procedures still have a long way to go; the AI market is expected to be worth $16 billion by 2022, making now an extremely exciting time to automate your business.