To write a basic definition, marketing automation is the use of software applications and computer hardware to create processes to replace marketing operations (and tasks) for our marketing purposes.
Software applications in today’s marketing world, has a lion’s share in marketing automation. Expectation from a simple marketing automation software is able to create an email newsletter, with some automatically created content if possible.
Personalization of the message to the customer has lion’s share on the marketing purposes. Personalization, still has a big importance, because managing marketing budget for sending the right message to the right audience at the right time is very important. In today’s world still some parts of the marketing budget goes to the audiences that do not want the message we sent (or simply some of the marketing budget goes to the people who do not want to get messages from us) .
Data manipulation (or data operations) has the lion’s share among the processes. A message created in marketing automation, requires many data points from multiple software systems. A personal message, requires at least the name of the person which may come from our CRM system. We may want to take attention of that person with a better discount on specific products, based on that persons previous purchase history, which may come from our Accounting or Orders software system. Only this single aim requires us to make integration between our Marketing Automation, CRM and Accounting systems. Then, we need to make adequate data manipulation to select the right persons for the right message.
Other reasons, that make Marketing Automation important are; gather traffic to your product or service (or website), convert that traffic to prospective leads, generate sales from those leads and increase your revenue on the previous customers. The best marketing automation tools all of these processes are executed automatically.
A simple business case on how marketing automation works is: A person browses sneakers on your web store. He/she sees a pop-up which says get a 10% discount offer on all sneakers when he/she fills-out a simple form. When the person fills the form, the marketing automation software sends a personalized message (according to the filled form data) in your corporate email template.
Another simple business case is for abandoned shopping cart emails. Sending an email, designed to get attention of people who abandoned their shopping cart in your website. Those people may get a reminder or a small amount of discount to have encourage! to finish their purchase.
There are many examples of how you can use marketing automation. Here are some;
- Automatically sharing your message at different social media accounts.
- Dynamic pricing to your products according to behaviors of people.
- Use all interactions of people with your company for creating right marketing messages.
- Create set of rules and journeys for your visitors, customers and prospective customers.
- Integrate all software in your company such as Accounting, CRM, Service, ERP for your marketing purposes.
- Manage all your leads, sales, marketing and other tools from a single dashboard.
Adobe Campaign, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Oracle Eloqua and Marketo (now Adobe Marketo) are the best providers of Marketing Automation Software.
Companies save lots of time converting their repetitive marketing tasks to automated processes.
People (customers) tend to respond more and faster, when they get personalized marketing messages. This improves ROI.
Quality of the leads jump over the expectations. The higher of the quality of the leads, the more sales.
Abilities and corporation of sales, service, production and marketing people in the company increases.
The last one in my mind is the awareness to your company. Marketing automation has a huge positive impact on the awareness to your products or services.