Tell us if this sounds familiar. You send out an email blast about a new product to all the users who visited your website and few purchases were made. You sent another email about the same product and some more purchases were made. Would you attribute sales to Email 1 or Email 2? Or both? Lost?
Pretty much the same story with marketers who use email marketing regularly. You see some results but not necessarily satisfactory results. You even get reports with CTR, bounce rates, link clicks, and more with no exact indication of what made the purchase work. Then you repeat the whole cycle of email blast again! This is a typical email marketing strategy. But how about going beyond? How about trying Marketing automation instead? Because marketing automation is more than sending emails.
What is Marketing Automation?
Take your teams’ mundane, most time-consuming tasks, most repetitive marketing tasks yet important tasks and automate it. And then enjoy better productivity, more time at hand, qualified leads, improved sales and better functioning teams. This concept of using a software to streamline marketing tasks is called Marketing Automation. Automating social media marketing tasks to advertising automation, driving conversations with customers and lead nurturing, the future of marketing automation in digital marketing is vast!
Sending out emails to your customers is part of your overall marketing strategy. This task can be achieved using an email marketing tool or through marketing automation. An email marketing tool will simply send out blast emails and track open emails, bounce rates and campaign performance. With marketing automation, you can automate your email marketing tasks and build qualified customer lists. You will use a marketing automation software to create drip emailers, auto responders, and segmented emails. Basically, you add personalization to your emails. You can track individual user behaviour and offer them personalized content to enhance their customer experience and start speaking to leads individually! Rather than sending out the same email blast to disinterested customers as well as a fully invested customer.
Why is marketing automation more than sending emails?
Because when it comes to email marketing vs marketing automation for a full-fledged, high operation business, guess who the winner turns out to be? Let’s take a look.
1. Personalization is key!
Take for example you’re an electronics brand and you have more than one category of gadgets – laptops, mobiles, and more. Under an email marketing strategy, you would simply send out a blast of new launches or discounts; where all your customers receive every communication. There is no evaluation of whether the customer is due for a mobile upgrade or is probably looking for a gaming system. Thus, neither is interested in any, you may catch the attention of few customers, but that’s it.
With marketing automation strategies, you can create relevant content for the right audience. That is because your marketing automation tool would create a customer profile. It can add points to each customer, based on spends or frequency of purchases. It can rank them based on the interests and behaviours on the web and social media, giving each lead a score. This ranking helps you understand how much a customer is invested in your business and at what level of a lead he / she truly is. And now you can send personalized emails to the individual who last bought a phone from you 3 years ago. Or create a sweet discount emailer with a kick ass subject line and copy about why he /she needs to upgrade their gaming laptop.
This kind of marketing automation strategies, using email as a tool is one-way to reach the right customer with the right deals and services. Since you have a customer profile, maybe send them a text. You could retarget that segment of customers with an interesting lead magnet ad on social media.
2. Create Systematic Marketing Campaigns!
You’re thinking, duh! We craft systematic marketing campaigns. We have customer profiles and purchase histories. But the chances are that all your data is in multiple places, with multiple teams in different excel sheets. Sales has one, customer support and social media has one too. We’re not wrong, are we? And then you’re collating all that together, segmenting them individually correlating it to last purchases, chasing down their social media handles. And then guessing that since he bought a mobile the last time, maybe we could send him a blast of the new mobiles in store. That’s a lot of work!
How about you just automate all of it. Don’t go chasing each customer detail, let the marketing automation tools create targeted campaigns for you. Your software will segment users based on their customer profiles and email them accordingly. So, customers owning a laptop with corei3 will get communications about the new Core i5 10th Gen laptops. And customers with Core i5 10th Gen laptops get communications on other accessories instead. All this without each team spending considerable time toggling between excels sheets! You only need to ensure that you’re capturing data at every checkpoint offline and online. In order to facilitate a seamless functioning of your marketing automation strategies, data needs to be efficient.
3. Do more than just email marketing with marketing automation
Marketing automation gets exciting when you see important data points creating qualified leads and analyzing customer behaviour. It gets even more exciting when sales teams are closing sales with these qualified leads. Or when customer relations spend less time making random calls and spend more time giving relevant information to customers encouraging them to make purchases. Or when emails are getting the right kind of engagement and customers are not just opening emails, but also acting on the CTA’s. Marketing automation helps increase productivity across teams. Especially, when sales cycles are long, leads need nurturing, and content programs have various personalized content to deliver.
So why should your business invest in marketing automation?
Simply put, businesses benefit more with marketing automation than sending blast emails. Let’s take a quick recap.
- Businesses generate better leads
- Sales and marketing goals align
- Both teams save more time working towards defined leads
- Integrating multiple platforms to create buyer personas
- Marketing efficiencies and efforts improve
- And yes, better lead conversions, more customer engagement, and a personalized customer experience.
While we can imagine saving tons of time, making productive teams using marketing automation strategies, it is also crucial to remember that it all comes at a cost. Not every business can afford market automation processes and not every business needs it. Unless you plan to truly work the system and use all the features, the software becomes the proverbial ‘White Elephant’. Expect to spend time, money and energy with marketing automation tools. From training internally, ensuring adoption, creating large amounts of personalized content, to yearly subscriptions, marketing automation is expensive. So, evaluate whether you are a small business that needs regular email marketing. Or do you want to scale up your operations and need experts to efficiently execute marketing automation strategies.
Summing it up, if you’ve got the budgets, large operations and a quickly expanding business, marketing automation for your businesses is perfect. It is the answer to efficient planning and processes in an ever-evolving digital world and dynamic customer behaviour. The more you and your team use marketing automation tools and its product features, you understand why marketing automation is more than sending emails.
Want to chat some more about marketing automation or need guidance on where to start? Connect with us at aniketh@mindstorm.in
