Millions of businesses use marketing automation to save time and energy on tedious tasks. Not only does automation allow businesses to streamline processes but also frees up the mental capacity for ingenuity and innovativeness.

As such, utilizing marketing automation is a standard practice in the digital business landscape. But such frequency of use has also given rise to complexity in execution. Many businesses end up going through the motions when it comes to marketing automation, instead of making it work for them.

That’s why, today, we’ll be discussing the right way to make use of marketing automation to reap maximum benefits. Before we get to that, however, it’s essential to understand what we mean by automation, and how it can benefit organizations if used the right way.

We’ll also discuss some potential pitfalls that numerous businesses succumb to when it comes to implementing marketing automation. By the end of this blog, you’ll have a better understanding of how to tailor marketing automation for your company while avoiding the common pitfalls.

So let’s dive in.

What is Marketing Automation?

In order to know how to use marketing automation the right way, it’s essential to know what it is. Essentially, marketing automation is the use of various software and tools to automate common marketing functions that might otherwise be repetitive or tedious.

Yet marketing automation is about more than just efficiency – it’s about personalization as well. As we shall discuss below, marketing automation provides businesses the opportunity to customize their email marketing and ad campaigns to fit their customers’ taste.

As such, this technique allows streamlining of marketing efforts across multiple platforms, channels and teams. However, it is important to note that marketing automations provide the best results when they are centered on the customer.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

Now that we’re familiar with marketing automation, let’s take a look at how effectively using it can benefit businesses.

1. Marketing Efficiency

The most evident benefit of marketing automation is the improvement in marketing efficiency. As businesses can delegate the execution of repetitive marketing tasks to software and tools, this frees up employees to turn their attention to more pressing tasks.

As such, marketing resources can be redirected to focusing on more important things such as brand perception, customer retention and relationship building. In addition, it also frees up time to focus on long term marketing strategy which is essential for business success.

2. Improved Lead Acquisition

Marketing automation often deals with email marketing. Since marketing automation allows emails to be triggered by certain events, and scheduled to be sent at a certain time, therefore it improves response rate and open rate among users.

That’s because the events that trigger the email send can be set according to the highest lead converting actions. As a result, users only receive emails that align with their interests, and at times when they are most likely to respond to it. This not only improves the frequency of lead acquisition but also its quality.

3. Improved Alignment Between Sales & Marketing

Thanks to marketing automation, sales and marketing departments can align their activities better than ever. That’s because marketing automation ensures that only sales-ready leads make it through the conversion funnel.

The automation process allows the marketing department to build relationships with the user, all the while passing the user through the conversion funnel. By the time the user gets to the end, they are ready to be contacted by the sales department, and therefore more likely to convert.

How to Utilize Marketing Automation Effectively?

There’s clearly a lot of benefits to utilizing marketing automation. But if that’s true then every business using marketing automations should be making millions of dollars and booming in growth.

The reality is that it’s easy to lose sight of what’s truly important when implementing automation processes. And many businesses end up going through the motions, implementing automation just for the sake of it. As such, they are unable to achieve the many benefits of marketing automation.

Here, we’ll describe some of the best ways to utilize marketing automation to connect with customers in meaningful ways and develop efficiency within the organization.

1. Automating Email Series

The most prevalent use of marketing automation occurs in email series. Writing and sending emails that are relevant to particular events is a slow and tedious process. That’s why businesses now use marketing automation to schedule entire email campaigns that are triggered by certain user-based events. Let’s take a look at some of the most common emails.

a. Welcome Emails

The first interaction between countless users and businesses is in the form of welcome emails. Welcome emails are usually triggered by users submitting some contact information on the website through a lead form.

Businesses often use welcome emails to onboard users to the platform as well as orient them to the services and products offered by the company. Here’s a look at how Airbnb uses welcome emails.

b. Re-Engagement Emails

Re-engagement emails are a great way to reconnect with customers and remind them of your brand again. Re-engagement emails are often triggered if a user doesn’t interact with the brand in any way for a set period of time such as 30 days.

These timely reminders help reignite cold leads and build customer relationships. Some businesses also use re-engagement emails to lure customers back using discount offers or other promotional efforts.

Here’s a look at Sephora and how it uses marketing automation to win back customers by offering discounts on purchases of more than $50.

c. Confirmation/Transaction Emails

Having to write order confirmation emails is both tedious and a huge waste of time. Marketing executives don’t have the time or energy to sit around and write a personalized order confirmation email for every user.

That’s where marketing automation comes into play. Whenever a user signs up for a service or completes a purchase, the trigger sends an automated personalized email to the user confirming the purchase/subscription. Here’s an example of how Upwork uses marketing automation to send confirmation emails to users for new account signups.

d. Abandoned Cart Emails

Finally, businesses use marketing automations to automatically send abandoned cart emails. For e-commerce stores, this is an extremely helpful feature of marketing automation considering that at least 10% of users who receive abandoned cart emails end up completing their purchase.

By automating abandoned cart emails to send after a user abandons their order, businesses can end up regaining lost revenue. All of this is made possible due to the timely emails sent through marketing automation processes. Below is an example of how mailto uses abandoned cart emails to prompt users to complete their purchase.

2. Generating Lead Magnets

Other than automating email series, using marketing automation to generate leads is a tried and tested method nowadays. One of the surefire ways of generating contact information from users is by offering them content in return. This content used in exchange for users’ contact information is called a lead magnet.

So what does marketing automation have to do with it? Marketing automation allows businesses to trigger pop ups when users land on a specific page. By using platforms such as Landingi, marketers can make lead magnets that offer e-books, PDFs or other valuable content in exchange for user contact information. Triggers such as scroll length, time delay or event action can be used to automate when the pop up appears for the user.

Here is a common example of a lead magnet.

3. Devising Process Flows

CRMs such as Hubspot and Salesforce are common nowadays. These CRMs provide marketing automations that allow businesses to set process flows for common marketing functions. For instance, if a business wanted to segment the audience and send each segment customized emails, the process flow features in CRMs would help them do just that.

These process flows allow marketers to set the trigger for each email send as well as establish the time delay between emails. This means advanced email series can be accurately sent to the correct recipients without a human ever getting involved in the process.

4. Utilizing Automation in Chatbots

Automated chatbots are a great marketing automation tool as well. The latest artificial intelligence chatbots allow businesses to set automated rules for interacting with users that present a query.

This allows businesses to minimize customer service representatives’ cost and allocate resources to more useful business functions. It also means that only the most qualified leads reach the marketing executives.

Thanks to this marketing automation ability, businesses set process flows that provide automatic responses to common queries from users. This also helps improve the browsing experience for users.

5. Automation in Google Ads

One of the most useful features of marketing automation is the ability to automate paid marketing campaigns. While this automation for paid marketing is limited to Google Ads only, it is mighty useful for marketers who need to optimize their paid campaigns on a regular basis.

Google Ads allows businesses to set automated rules for campaigns statuses and bid strategies. So for example, if you set CPC at $2 for a particular campaign then the automated rule will automatically pause the campaign when CPC exceeds $2.

Similarly, suppose you want your Google Ads to appear only on the first search engine result page. So you set the maximum bid at $5 with the automated rule to increase bid by $1 if the ad drops below the first page. This marketing automation will automatically increase the bid to $6 if your ad falls below the first search engine result page.

The Common Pitfall in Marketing Automation

So far it seems that marketing automation is a miraculous solution to automating all marketing activities. However, it’s important to remember that there’s a common mistake businesses make when it comes to marketing automation.

This pitfall involves developing advanced marketing automation flows without considering the users as the central focal point of the automation strategy. Those businesses that automate their marketing activities without considering what users are looking for have no benefit from marketing automation.

In fact, many businesses consider putting users in outdated automations sufficient. The practice of running users through the same old automation series and passing on interested users to the sales department is basic and inefficient. As such, marketing automations end up operating on their own, disjointed from the rest of the organization.

Conclusion

Marketing automations present a fantastic opportunity for businesses to enhance efficiency, build personal relationships with users and improve conversion rates. By using marketing automations in emails series, chatbots, process flows and in paid marketing, businesses can not only build long lasting relationships with users but also offer them a personalized experience with the brand.

However, too many businesses are blind to the common pitfalls of marketing automation which includes developing disjointed process flows that do not improve customer experience or retain leads. As such, it is upto the marketing department of a company to recognize that in order for marketing automation to perform effectively, they need to keep audience needs as the focal point of marketing activities.

Equip Your Business for Marketing Automation with Accurate Digital Solutions

Implementing marketing automations can be tricky, especially if you don’t have your marketing strategy figured out. Accurate Digital Solutions has helped dozens of businesses build automations that keep users engaged and streamline marketing activities.

If you’re confused about how to get started with marketing automation, contact us and get professional help in devising smart marketing automation capabilities. With our extensive marketing automation services, you’ll be taking full advantage of automation processes in no time.