At one time, the term ‘marketing automation’ may have conjured up images of transformers, but it has become increasingly popular in today’s day and age. Put simply, marketing automation is an umbrella term for any solution or tactic that businesses use to streamline and automate marketing activities and operations.
While marketing automation is still considered a young market, the marketing automation industry is estimated to reach a whopping $6.3 billion by 2026.
This means that marketing automation is all set to be the staple for every successful company’s marketing strategy. Here are 5 reasons why marketing automation is a worthwhile investment for businesses today and tomorrow.
But before that, let’s talk a bit more about the mainstay of the digital era.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to the process of using software to automating repetitive marketing tasks like email marketing, social media posts and others. Marketing automation helps throughout the sales funnel-right from the process of finding customers to converting leads to conversions.
If you’re not using marketing automation for your business as yet, there is no time like the present. According to a report,80% of marketers attribute their success to marketing automation.
Benefits of Marketing Automation for Businesses
Now that we have established that marketing automation is widely used by companies and is all set to increase in the near future as well, what exactly is it used for? Let’s look at some major benefits of marketing automation for businesses.
Lead Generation
Qualified leads are the holy grail of marketing automation. Lead generation is the process of identifying target customers for your business and getting them into your sales funnel.
Let’s suppose you run a business and you’re attracting traffic to your website or page. While some of these customers make it to the end of the sales funnel, as shown above, others leave without making any sales. Now, your aim is to reel in the customers who left in the middle. How do you do that? Email marketing is a viable solution but imagine how taxing it would be to customize an email for every single person?
Lead Nurturing
This is where marketing automation will help immensely. You can pick a software program that streamlines this emailing process. It will then automatically send emails to these ‘missed’ customers based on their browsing habits. This way, a customer may be tempted to revert back to your page and increase chances of lead generation and conversions.
Marketing automation also provides detailed insights on potential customer behavior. Marketing automation platforms and software enable companies to discover and understand your prospective customers’ interests and where they are in the sales funnel. This way, you can schedule your follow-ups around these insights for better results.
Improved Cooperation between Marketing and Sales
In business, the challenges that arise from discrepancies between marketing and sales have been an evergreen topic of debate. Now with the integration of CRM and marketing automation, you can put this worry to rest, a term that we call CRM marketing automation.
Often, sales and marketing have different viewpoints on targeting a customer. While sales know when it’s best to contact a prospect, marketing is more aware of what stages their intervention is required. When you put these two together, you’ll get far better touch points.
Personalization
Since customer data and insights are stored in different systems, it can often be hard to achieve effective personalization. However, with CRM marketing automation, businesses can send tailored messages that are based on each customer’s behavior as a result of better identification of customer data points like past purchases, interests, and so on.
Hence, CRM marketing automation helps provide customers a satisfactory and seamless customer experience, improving sales.
Get Started on Marketing Automation
To sum up, it’s safe to say that marketing automation increases the chances of a customer completing the sales funnel-sometimes by making efforts to lure them and other times by making communication between different segments (read: lifelines) of the business simpler.
As a customer goes through different stages of the customer life cycle, marketing automation platforms allow you to provide the right content at the right time. Get on the relevant marketing automation platforms and spur sales in no time!
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