The term “marketing automation” has cropped up in recent years. A number of companies – Salesforce.com included – offer cloud-based platforms supporting it.
Some of our clients have integrated their Salesforce orgs into marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Hubspot, and Act-On. There are roughly a dozen marketing automation platforms on the market.
At Soliant we ourselves have implemented Pardot for our own marketing efforts and are quite pleased with how it has served us.
Marketing automation is about listening.
Online marketing has seen a tidal shift in recent years, evolving from a “broadcast” model (banner ads and email blasts) to a “dialogue” model.
Customers now expect a high level of interaction and self-service. Lately, consumers are far more likely to learn about your products and services on their own well before being ready to speak to your sales team.
Defining Marketing Automation
It’s important to meet customers where they are. Companies looking to update their marketing practices will likely have come across the term “marketing automation.” However, many medium and small businesses struggle to pin down a definition of the term and how it works.
More than one thing, marketing automation describes a set of tools and practices that allow companies to automate, analyze, and integrate their marketing and sales processes.
In this post, we take a look at three main aspects of marketing automation – segmentation, email, and web analytics. We explore how these tools can help your company categorize customers, send targeted communications, and deliver a comprehensive user experience that moves prospects down the marketing funnel.
Segmentation — Know Your Customer
The first commandment of modern marketing, central to using a marketing automation platform, is “Know thy customer.” Marketing automation helps you fulfill this edict. It allows you to deepen your customer knowledge and behavior, segment them into specific profiles, and target your communications accordingly.
In addition to grouping customers by job title, region, or industry, you can include information about their web behavior. This includes blog posts they click on, products they view, and how they respond to email campaigns. You can set scoring rules and trigger workflows when a potential customer hits a certain established threshold.
Using this data – alongside information from your CRM software, social media, and so on – automated tools can score your customers. You can then segment them appropriately and recognize when they are ready to move onto the next stage in the sales cycle.
Make Email Personal
Marketing automation tools also allow you to send individually tailored, automated emails. These can go far beyond the impersonal email blasts or alternatively manual processes of the past.
You can set up auto-response and drip campaigns that respond to customer requests and walk them through a personalized sales campaign. (This is generally delivered via an individual, personal sales account associated with one of your sales team members). Instead of a mass email, customers receive targeted communications that respond based on where they are in a prescribed set of stages in the sales and marketing funnel.
These automated email tools can track if the customer opens your message, how long they spend reading it, if they forward it others, and how they adapt as a result. They also allow you to develop and refine optimal marketing practices by testing different messages, subject headings, and personalization types.
Marketing automation also ties in closely with the forms on your website. Integrating marketing automation forms and tools into your website and social media can help you track, analyze, and respond to potential customers’ behavior.
You can see what they clicked and bought, how long they stayed on the site, and where they came from. Then you can use this information to assess potential customers’ interest and craft targeted responses.
Connect your CRM to Your Website
The same goes for social media pages. Marketing automation tools can help keep track of what posts garnered the most likes and follows. This helps you turn friends and followers into customers and clients.
By integrating marketing automation tools into your website and social media pages, you can understand what your customers are doing. You gain visibility into product pages they visit, blog posts they read, and whitepapers they download. This allows you to respond in a way that meets their individual interests and needs.
Marketing automation is a powerful set of tools that help increase efficiency by integrating, automating, and analyzing marketing tasks. Marketing becomes more data-driven and less focused on what creative your latest ad should feature. Demographics give way to individual expectations and needs.
These processes have long been employed by big companies and those in the high-tech and business services industries. But in recent years, many smaller and mid-sized companies have started finding value in marketing automation as well. The platforms we’ve listed are generally easy to set up and integrate with your CRM tools. They don’t require deep technical support, nor do they only serve large marketing teams.
Take One Step at a Time
At Soliant, we’ve found it possible to step into the world of marketing automation without overhauling one’s entire business. After setting up the platform, you can begin by establishing customer profiles and segmenting your email list. you have to put in a bit of work to incorporate tools into your website.
However, this hurdle generally only takes a few days once you iron out the basic approach. Next steps involve building logical progressions through the content of your site, behaviors you watch, and email interactions. You can start with just one path and evolve from there.
Marketing automation adoption and practices will only increase as teams evolve from the broadcast model to the one-on-one dialogue model. With the tools of marketing automation, marketers in all companies can develop a comprehensive consumer-centric strategy based on personalized interaction.
Allow your customers to tell you what they need, pay attention to each individual, and set aside the bullhorn. The tools we have access to today can really change how you connect with customers.
Launch Your Strategy
Have questions about launching your marketing automation strategy? Our team can help you get started. Contact us for insights today.
Great article, thanks for posting! So far, I’ve only tried email marketing automation with GetResponse. The whole concept of marketing automation sounds very helpful, but isn’t it a bit complicated to set up all by yourself?
You don’t need to set it all up at once… you can step into it and use parts of the toolset. We implemented ours in stages (and are still doing so). Cost may be an issue: if you’re only using a marketing automation tool for mass email campaigns, there are cheaper alternatives. GetResponse is a perfectly good mass email tool. But if you begin to use profiles, tie your forms into your website, and tailor communication to your individual visitors, then marketing automation can grow with you over time.
Pingback: What does Salesforce.comΓÇÖs acquisition of Demandware mean? – FMT Network
Hey Scott, thanks for sharing the great article.