What is marketing automation?
Many businesses that run their operations online have been turning to marketing automation over the past few years to save time with repetitive tasks. But the way marketers view the power of automation is changing. A marketer’s world revolves around finding what matters most to their customers. More than just a way to reduce manual tasks, marketing automation is becoming a tool that humanizes customer experiences. It’s a means to uncover thousands of reasons for your leads and customers to associate with you.
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- Why invest?
- Customer experience
- Solutions
- What should you automate?
- Improve lead gun & qualification
- How can reduce sales cycle time?
- Why Zoho Marketing Automation?
Why should businesses invest in marketing automation?
The primary reason for implementing marketing automation is to complete repetitive tasks and eliminate inefficiencies from a business’s day-to-day, whether it’s sending email campaigns, posting on social media or a blog, or managing inquiries. Marketing automation is the smart long-term solution to efficiently accomplishing these goals.
Beyond that, though, marketing automation also provides a lot of insights that marketers can arm their sales team with. Knowing what content generated the most traffic, what landing page brought in the most leads, or what email content got the most number of clicks can all be beneficial to understanding your audience better. With marketing automation, you can leverage features to qualify and prioritize your leads effectively, as well as to manage the sales funnel.
While 4 in 5 users have reported better lead generation and ROI using automation, almost 74% of marketers say marketing automation saves them a ton of time—roughly six hours per week!
What role does marketing automation play in customer experience?
Marketing automation helps you stay proactively connected with leads and customers throughout their buying journey. You can map out the entire customer journey, detailing how they interact with you, and monitor how the relationship evolves.
If visitors express interest and submit their email addresses, you can send them a welcome email and tell them what you’re all about. You can eventually pitch to them without having to send a ton of promotional emails. Automation also helps you determine the optimal time customers are most likely to engage. Instead of spamming leads with promotions, you can send your message at the perfect moment and make it count.
Meanwhile, you can set up a workflow that sends retargeting emails to customers who haven’t interacted with you in a while. Set the period after which customers would become inactive, and automation will send occasional reminders to them.
The key to great customer experience is to send relevant content with a touch of personalization. Automation can help you find that key for your business.
What solutions can marketing automation provide?
What should you automate?
You should automate any repetitive and predictable tasks you have to do to achieve a goal. Here are some areas that you should consider leveraging with automation.
Emails
Automated emails can significantly increase your revenue. The conversion rate for email automation is said to be 58% greater than that of promotional campaigns.
Social media posts
Scheduling social media posts is one of the best uses of marketing automation. Rather than logging in every time you have to post a piece of content on social media, you can spend a few hours on a month’s worth of content and schedule it to be posted well in advance. All you need to do after that is track and engage with the audience.
Customer service
Creating an automated system with a chatbot can help you identify different conversation scenarios and customer pain points. Automation can provide your team with insights on identified needs, empowering you to fix problems quickly.
How does marketing automation improve lead generation and qualification?
Automation allows businesses to take complete control of lead generation, from converting website visitors into leads and nurturing them to increasing sales qualification until they are ready to buy. Apart from the ability to design a unified lead generation flow for a business, a key feature of marketing automation is that it allows you to personalize your interaction with each lead based on their behavior and their current sales readiness stage. Personalization makes the delivery of your message more timely, targeted, and relevant.
Consumers today are self-educating and will research the information they need before making a purchase. The more involved you are in their research, the better chance you stand in closing the sale. Automation campaigns help you educate leads over a period with relevant and clearly defined content, making those leads sales-ready.
Using marketing automation, you will certainly be able to create a marketing strategy that generates more—and better quality—leads, all by focusing on the best possible audience to hear your pitch.
How can marketing automation reduce sales cycle time?
Customer and lead data collected by marketing automation software can tell who is the most engaging, what they are interested in, and how long it may take them to make a buying decision. Marketing automation helps nurture leads through behavioral triggers and indicates what they’re actually interested in. You can prioritize leads by scoring them and ensure only those who are nurtured and qualified are passed on to the sales team. This in turn provides the sales team comparatively less time to close a deal.
Automation also empowers your sales team with a quicker response time. It allows you to set up actions that trigger not just a quick response, but also a relevant one to the leads. By responding right when a lead triggers intent, your sales team can provide a solution exactly when needed. This can greatly increase the chance of closing a deal quickly.
Marketing automation also makes the follow-up process faster and easier. Automated messages that can also be personalized enable the sales team to have relevant touchpoints with each lead on a regular basis, further reducing the time spent on manual tasks.
Why Zoho Marketing Automation?
We believe we have always gone the distance when it comes to providing a privacy-first and customer-centric automation experience. Zoho Marketing Automation aims to provide a reason behind everything that happens in your business, from why people visited your website and what stage your leads are currently in to how a recent successful campaign fetched more returns.
It’s not just that. With Zoho Marketing Automation, try out all the variations to discover the most effective way to stay in touch with your customers—organize events, promote webinars, send surveys, set up drip nurturing, run social campaigns, and deliver timely text messages. Take control of your customer engagement across multiple avenues without having to worry about missing anything essential.