Work smarter, not harder. While this old adage was coined by an industrial engineer, the sentiment rings true for all spheres of business.
According to a study conducted by SharpSpring, 48% of U.S. marketing professionals expected to use automation as part of their ‘MarTech’ strategy in 2020.
Automation software is most commonly used to tackle repetitive tasks, and make the lives of marketing professionals easier. The consolidation, and automation, that these platforms provide can aid in your advertising, email marketing, and social media efforts, to name a few. Not only does automation help considerably with your team’s efficiency, but it provides a great opportunity to craft personalized messaging and delivers it to the right person, at the right time, every time. If you’re not already using marketing automation software, here are five reasons why we think you should consider it.
EFFICIENCY
Automation streamlines tedious tasks, from creating email campaigns for different customer segments to building out multiple content calendars.
74% of marketers claim that time saved is the biggest benefit of automation (Gain).
Let’s say you had to cancel a conference because of COVID and want to reschedule it as a virtual event. Thousands of people purchased tickets so figuring out who wants to keep their tickets and who wants a refund would be exhausting. With automation you could send one email to all ticket-holders and they’ll automatically be sorted into the appropriate list depending on whether they select to keep their tickets or request a refund. Each email could also be personalized to address the customer by name or other identifying factors. Whether or not people decide to attend, they can also be set up to receive discounts for future events you plan. Automating these efforts will free up a considerable amount of time for your team so that your company can focus on more important, long-term strategy that will help propel your business forward.
CUSTOMER CONNECTIONS
Mass emails aren’t always a bad thing, but why speak to your audience in generic terms when you can have a more personalized conversation with them? For example, the fact that a popular product is back in stock won’t necessarily be relevant to everyone on your email list. Automation allows you to only send the re-stock notification to people in your audience who have visited that product page in the past. People who have already shown interest in the product will be much more likely to convert to sales, and therefore present the greatest opportunity for return on time invested. More importantly, the more relevant your messaging, the more likely people are to pay attention to it when it arrives in their inbox. Saying the right thing, to the right person, at the right time becomes incredibly manageable, even with thousands of customers. The results prove this should be the goal of all marketers.
Small businesses who use automation gained 50% of their revenue from existing customers, compared with 30% among those who did not. (Pardot).
DATA
You launched a new marketing campaign and you need to know how it’s performing. Did they open that email? Did they check out our links? Did they visit the landing page? You’re not alone.
57% of marketers use response metrics (open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe rate, etc.) to measure ROI (Pepper).
Marketing automation can give you these answers and more. Additionally, the analytics a company receives from the tracking these platforms provide can be a powerful tool to assess performance on past campaigns. Depending on which buttons were clicked, how long a web page was viewed, and how many blog pages were explored, marketers are able to determine which campaigns worked and gained traction for the company, versus ones that had little engagement. Without marketing automation, you’re losing out on an abundance of data your team can use to better craft future campaigns.
DRIP CAMPAIGNS
Drip campaigns can run as smoothly as a Rube Goldberg machine (see gif above). One action triggers another action and so on… all automatically without any continued work on your part. Say someone visits your website and wants to stay connected. Starting with an email subscription form on your site, you can map out the content journey a new contact will take and, ultimately, make an offer to encourage conversion. For example, in the subscription form you can include a drop-down menu of services you offer and ask them to identify in which they are most interested. Then you can follow up with a case study about that service, maybe some press about an award your company won excelling in that service
