What Is Marketing Automation [Types,Benefits,Plans,Tools]

Introduction

Marketing automation software can allow you to measure & optimize your marketing workflows for both new & old leads.

Automation tools can help you with everything, from automating email marketing to helping with content marketing and chat communication.

You can easily use these tools to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

How Does Marketing Automation Work ?

Marketing automation is the use of software to do repetitive marketing tasks automatically.

Marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks like email marketing, posting on social media, and even ad campaigns, not just to save time but also to give their customers a more personalized experience.

Marketing automation is a set of tools that makes these tasks faster and easier to do.

Types Of Marketing Automation

1. CRM (customer relationship management) automation:

CRM is the core of all your marketing efforts, using CRM automation you can streamline tasks, generate more leads & boost conversions.

Related: 5 Ways To Automate Customer Support Without Degrading Service

It also gives you an important place to store customer information like email addresses, purchase history & other demographic information.

It can help with internal tasks as well, contain lead scoring or letting your team know about potential new clients.

2. Email Marketing Automation :

Several times prospects interact with your company before they become customers.

Drip email campaigns can share useful information about your company, product, or industry trends at this point to build trust with the customer and keep the relationship going.

You can also use effective content to boost users engagement & conversions.

3. Mobile Marketing Automation :

With the help of mobile marketing automation, you can reach mobile users more effectively & you can also personalize marketing campaigns at a large scale.

It can send real-time alerts, in-app messages, custom offers, and suggestions for products.

Also, it can send messages automatically based on time or events.

4. Social Media Automation:

Using social media automation, you can schedule & publish content across multiple channels easily & you can also automate responses.

Likewise, through your social media accounts you can track how many people found your site.

5. Advertising Automation :

Advertising automation can help you with retargeting because it changes its strategy automatically based on how people act.

Related: How Will Process Automation Improve Your Work Tomorrow?

For example, if a customer visits your product page, advertising automation will show your product ads on the next sites that customer visits.

You can connect automation to any advertising tool you’re already using, like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or Twitter Ads.

6. Chatbot Automation :

Using Chatbot automation, businesses can start a live conversation through text or speech-to-text instead of calling or talking to a real person on the phone.

It can gather basic details & information to track the products they like most, by talking with customers.

It has been used in many platforms including twitter, facebook, text messages, other social media platforms, etc.

Benefits Of Marketing Automation

i. Increase conversion rate :

Marketing automation software increases your conversion rate & conducts your leads more efficiently.

Using marketing automation software you can retarget your website visitors who don’t convert, which will increase your CRO ( Conversion Rate Optimization ).& also it will track your leads.

ii. Personalized Marketing Strategy :

Using marketing automation software, you can create more personalized content through its divisions capabilities & reporting.

Also, with marketing automation you can select your personality on various channels.You can select them with social ads, on social media or through email campaigns.

iii. Saves Time :

Businesses can save time by automating their regular marketing tasks using marketing automation software.

Marketing automation software can create various campaigns to send scheduled-customized emails to any number of customers, automate messages for multiple social media channels, or set up auto-responders for every day follow ups.

iv. Maintain Consistency :

Using marketing automation software you can schedule your tasks in a timely way so that you can maintain consistency in your progress.

Also, with this software you can set up timely follow-ups for all of your customers’ responses or post on all of your social media channels at the same time, without any delays.

v. Lead Nurturing :

You can analyze & automate the whole process of lead nurturing using marketing automation.

Using email automation you can send personalized emails & also automate lead categorization using lead scoring.

Also, you can improve your follow-ups through auto-responders.

Marketing Automation Features

• Follow what a prospect accomplishes :

Trying to follow a prospect as they move through a funnel is one of the most time-consuming things that sales and marketing teams have to do.

With the help of marketing software, this process has become much easier.

You can set up your tool to notify you when a lead takes certain actions that indicate they are ready to buy, so you can jump in when it’s the right time and focus on other important tasks until then.

• Changeable content :

With changeable content, you can do just that by showing different content based on who is looking at the site.

This feature has been shown to have a big effect on how many people visit and interact with a site. Best of all, it can take more than one shape.

Landing pages, emails, forms, and templates can all use changeable content.

• Segmenting a smart list :

With smart lists segmentation, you can divide your database into even smaller pieces based on any custom criteria or a mix of criteria.

So, if you have a piece of content that would only be interesting to a small group of people in your database, a smart list is the best way to reach them.

Smart lists can be used for remarketing or retargeting, which is a way to increase sales.

• A/B testing :

As we said before, A/B testing is a way to make small changes to content to see which gets the most leads.

You can use A/B testing with marketing automation software to improve your campaign and learn more about what your lead database likes.

With this information, you can make your content more useful and improve your metrics.

• Artificial intelligence :

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help you get more out of marketing automation by making interactions with leads and customers more personal.

These game-changing innovations can be used to personalize email marketing, nurture campaigns, create cross-selling opportunities, and keep customers longer.

Plan, set up, and improve your programme for marketing automation.

To get started, you should think about what you want to do and how you will do it.

Figure out what you want to do with the help of marketing automation.

1. Plan :

If you can explain exactly what you want and what you want to achieve, it will be easier for you and your stakeholders to look at automation platforms and choose one.

Make a list of your needs and wants and figure out which solution meets the most important ones.

When you do this, make sure that sales and marketing are working together. Remember that both teams have to work together to get things done.

2. Implement :

Once you’ve picked the platform, you’ll need to figure out who on the team needs to use it and train them.

Someone needs to own the technology and be the person to go to with questions.

With the right marketing automation solution, your marketing and sales teams can share people, tools, and processes.

It should work with your:

• CRM system
• Score first
• Insights on sales
• Workflows between departments

Once the marketing automation is set up and running, you should check in often to make sure it’s doing what you want.

3. Measure :

Reporting and marketing analytics help you show that your marketing efforts are having an effect.

They make sure you measure all the necessary data, account engagement, and the combined effect of sales and marketing activity.

Learn which key performance indicators (KPIs) are the most important to track and which areas of marketing give the best return on investment (ROI).

4. Optimize :

Once you start getting data and KPIs, you will be able to tweak things to get better results.

When you can split your income between multiple activities, you can figure out which marketing activities work best for the top of the funnel and which work best for the bottom of the funnel.

You could, for example, decide that event marketing is your best bet.

Trade shows may be a good way to get leads, but webinars are a better way to move leads through the funnel.

Without multi-touch attribution, it’s hard to find out this information, and your campaigns might not be as successful. Know your audience and what they like.Quick & easy because you don’t need to know how to implement.

Related: 10 Best SEO Automation Tools for Every Content Marketer

List Of 21 Best Marketing Automation Tool

All-In-One Marketing Automation Tools

1. SocialNowa

Using SocialNowa chatbot, you can automate your business process in just a few minutes.Set-up is quick & easy because you don’t need to know how to implement code.

2. Manychat :

ManyChat is a chatbot that can perform this function on Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages, WhatsApp, and SMS.

3. HubSpot :

HubSpot marketing hub focus on inbound marketing is unmatched.They also come with CRM, Sales, and Service Hubs, which make it easier for your team to work together, even between departments.

4. Marketo :

Marketo, it is able to automate marketing on any channel and for any type of engagement.

5. Omnisend :

With the omnisend automation tool, you can add email, Text messages, notifications, Facebook Messenger, and more to the same automation workflow.

6. Salesforce

With Customer 360, Salesforce brings together your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams from anywhere. This is one integrated CRM platform that runs all of our connected apps.

Social Media Automation Tools

7. Buffer :

With Buffer’s automation tool, it’s easy to schedule and curate content, and the “Reply” and “Analyze” features help social media teams connect with all the other teams they need to work in businesses today.

8. HootSuite :

HootSuite automation tool features help you to schedule content, curate from a library that has already been approved, and listen to what people are saying about your brand and industry.

9. Sprout Social :

Sprout Social is a director in usability, customer support and satisfaction, return on investment (ROI), and user adoption.

10. Mention :

Mention lets brands keep track of all the places where they are mentioned in digital media. It also makes it easy to keep track of competitors and industry trends automatically.

11. CoSchedule :

The automation tool on CoSchedule gives you ways to plan and strategize social media content before it happens.

Email marketing automation tools

12. Mailchimp :

Mailchimp is in the process of changing from an email marketing tool to a full-fledged marketing automation solution.

13. Constant Contact :

Using constant contact automation tools, you can set up automated trigger campaigns, automatically collect new emails, and send follow-up messages to different groups.

14. Automizy :

Automizy gives you a bunch of features that help you get more people to open your emails, such as an AI subject line tester, the ability to resend emails that haven’t been opened, AB testing, and segmented email automation.

15. Customer.io :

Throughout the customer lifecycle, Customer.io’s email automation tool is all about keeping in touch with potential customers.

Advertising automation tools

16. AdRoll :

AdRoll software makes it easy to run ads on display, social media, email, and other channels.

17. Zalster :

Zalster is an automated advertising tool that takes care of ads on Facebook and Instagram.

18. Metadata.io :

Metadata.io is one of the few tools on the market that lets B2B marketers run ads based on the accounts of their customers.

19. Revealbot:

Revealbot simply focuses on facebook & google ad platforms.Its automation tool provides in-depth ad campaign analytics.

Referral marketing automation tools

20. TapMango :

TapMango’s customer loyalty automation platform takes the old card reader and makes it more useful for customers today.

21. Referral Rock :

Referral Rock makes it easy to set up the right kind of referral programme for your business, from “refer a friend” to “influencer marketing” to “business partner programmes,” so you can set it up once and let the referrals come in on their own.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is here to stay, and B2B marketers and business owners all over the world have found it to be a smart choice.

No matter how big or small your business is, you will benefit from using marketing automation platforms in your marketing strategy.

There are a huge number of tasks that can be automated to make your business run better and grow.