Here’s how marketing automation can boost your online business

Going digital is the key to setting up and increasing online business. Companies, big and small alike, are increasing their digital presence and are in need of a sound and relevant digital strategy to attract customers. Marketing automation is ranked among the top digital marketing tools to help target and entice customers online. As per Nucleus Research, marketing automation has improved business productivity by 20% and is viewed as a potential marketing tool to increase revenues.

What is marketing automation?

As per Salesforce, marketing automation is the technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.

With the help of marketing automation, businesses can target and address their customers and leads with automated and curated messages across web, email, social media and text. These messages are sent to customers automatically based on sets of instructions called ‘Workflows’. Workflows are defined by certain templates and they can be built from scratch or tweaked during the campaign as per need.

Let’s observe a few ways marketing automation helps boost online business

Generatesnurtured leads

Marketing automation helps create better leads or nurtured leads. Lead nurturing is the act of developing strong and trustable relationships with potential customers by understanding their needs and behaviour patterns. Areport by DemandGensuggeststhatnurtured leads on an average produce 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads. Higher the nurtured lead number, greater the chances of incremental online business.

Efficient marketing activities

Digital has imploded the activity on the web making it not easy for marketers to target their leads and customers as often and as effectively as they should. Marketing automation helps marketers and sales team alike to automate various marketing and sales campaign so as to target customers effectively. In fact, marketing automation helps achieve higher efficiencies in the marketing process of a business resulting in higher revenue yield.

Effective sales cycle

All marketing initiatives should lead to additional sales, for without additional sales all efforts become insignificant. Marketing automation creates an effective and shorter salescycle –longer the time to convert potentials to leads, longer the sales cycle, greater the spends. Reports suggest that the average sales cycles has grown by 20% over the last five years. Marketing automation helps shorten the sales cycle while making it effective enough to generate quality leads that convert to customers.

Focus on core activities

Marketing and promotional campaigns involve quite a lot of repetitive tasks which can be time consuming and monotonous from an employee perspective. Marketing automation takes care of all repetitive tasks in a more efficient and error free manner allowing employees to focus on more important and customer facing tasks. Focusing on core activities helps companies have better use of their resources and increased productivity.

Time bound and time saving

Imagine sending a campaign mail to a 1,000 people manually, tough isn’t it? Now imagine that for 10,000 people! Thanks to marketing automation, you can skip all of that. Messages whether over mail or social media are sent to the right audience and at the right time, automatically. Marketing automation helps streamline email campaigns through data analytics and personalization that is likely to entice customers.

Marketing automation is all about triggering right actions based on pre-defined and analysis of customer behaviour.

Automates leads qualification

Marketing automation helps create a list of quality leads based on given criteria in a time-bound and efficient manner. It gets difficult to classify and qualify the right leads when the numbers run in thousands and more. Automation tools help in leads qualification helping marketers design a much more focussed and targeted approach to convert these leads to customers. 

Creates digital campaigns

One of the larger and long-term benefits of marketing automation is that it helps create a sound digital marketing campaign. It helps to capture key customer data and behaviour patterns such as – number of pages views by visitors and customers, how long they have stayed on the pages, what sort of information have they downloaded – all of this information can help marketers come up with a targeted digital strategy. The bigger advantage here is that digital campaigns are created faster and can also be tweaked based on customer behaviour data.

Driving ROI

Every business looks at a return on every investment made, and marketing automation plays a key role in driving return on investment or ROI. By virtue of the aforementioned benefits, marketing automation helps redirect resources to core and customer engagement activities that are likely to result in revenue generation. There is also the advantage of savings on time and cost which further add to the ROI.

Various marketing and customer engagement campaigns run through marketing automationhelp achieve a better return on investment for businesses and also allow for greater focus on customer retention and delight.

Marketing automation is driven by technology and algorithms that observe and predict customer footprints on the digital space. This enables marketers and businesses to re-orient and redefine their marketing and promotional campaigns leading to higher customer engagement and enticement. In this fast-moving digital age where potentials, leads and customer alike, are time constrained and exhibit lesser patience levels, marketing automation comes in very handy as a powerful digital marketing tool to boost both the online brand identity and business of a company.