Thinking ofautomating your marketing campaigns? Note that it’s important to understand what to expect and what the key benefits are before you start comparing the differentmarketing automation tools available.
This constantly evolving technology enables you toincrease the number of qualified leads, generate conversions and generate more revenue. These marketing automation platforms are much more than support tools, they truly change the marketer’s role: tedious and repetitive tasks are eliminated from their workloads, but it goes far beyond that! These tools allow you to optimize time for both your marketing and sales teams.
For example, you can optimize your emailing campaigns, where a large number of actions can be automated: welcome emails, sending resources (such as catalogs when an order is placed), proposing promotional offers (for various occasions such as holidays, birthdays, etc.), follow-up after a shopping cart has been abandoned, proposing complementary products, and so on.
Discover 7 reasons to automate your marketing campaigns and get qualified leads.
7 reasons to automate your marketing campaigns
#1 – Save time and cut costs
As we said earlier, automating certain actions in your marketing campaigns allows you to say goodbye to repetitive, tedious tasks. Your marketing teams will then have more time to devote to much more creative tasks. Creativity also means greater productivity and efficiency for your teams!
You probably have limited resources to develop your business, both in terms of staff and budget for advertising expenditure. By setting up automated lead acquisition campaigns, you can reach the right people at the right time, according to their interests. No more flyers, emails or untargeted mail. Once you’ve automated certain tasks in your marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to send emails automatically without thinking about it, and save money in the process.
#2 – The data collected will be more reliable and better qualified
One of your marketing campaigns involves offering a white paper for download. There are many actions to take, but it’s impossible to do them all manually! Let’s take an example: a lead registers by filling in your form, and you have to send an e-mail manually every time a lead registers. Tedious, isn’t it? Don’t worry, this action can be automated by sending an e-mail containing the download link as soon as the form is filled in and sent, or by automatically downloading the white paper (see below).
Example of an action programmed via the “Download an asset” software, which enables immediate download of the white paper as soon as a lead registers.
To collect reliable, qualified data, you need to offer sufficiently interesting content (white papers, infographics, blog articles, etc.) to attract the lead’s attention. A dedicated landing page highlighting the benefits and expertise you offer is one solution! But how can you collect data from your leads efficiently? By creating a dedicated form in your marketing automation software.
If a lead registers via your form, that means he’s interested in what you have to offer. It will then represent a potential customer.
#3 – Better communication between your marketing and sales teams
Once you’ve collected your leads, you need to score and prioritize them. Do it manually? Impossible too! Marketing automation software will enable you to create lead scoring scenarios based on the lead’s behavior in relation to your actions: how many points should be awarded for opening an email? How many points should be awarded for visiting a specific web page? These points will enable your sales team to prioritize your leads and determine whether or not they are ready to be contacted.
Your marketing and sales teams will have to work together to define how many points to award and according to which actions! No more phoning campaigns where the lead isn’t ready to listen to you! The aim of automating all these tasks is to qualify the lead in order to reduce the time it takes to convert the lead into a final customer, but also to make work between your teams much more efficient.
#4 – Better targeting
Automating your marketing campaigns with marketing automation software also means making sure you’re targeting the right people. When you launch a marketing campaign, you can use the software to define an automatic segmentation of your database. When proposing a promotional offer campaign, you can create a new segment called, for example, “Promotional offer – Purchase”. With marketing automation software, you can create and set an action saying that when a lead makes a purchase, they will automatically be included in this new segment.
You can also decide when to send an e-mail or SMS and how often, and thus manage advertising pressure. For example, you can define the maximum number of e-mails or SMS messages your contacts should receive per week or month. The aim is to avoid polluting your contacts’ mailboxes.
Finally, better targeting means greater efficiency! You’ll never miss another contact, but above all, once campaigns have been configured and planned, you’ll be able to send messages, offers and reminders at the right time, without having to intervene.
#5 – Better tracking of lead behavior
Marketing automation software also enables you to track the behavior of leads on your site, so when someone registers for one of your forms you can see from which page of your site the lead arrived and what route they took to fill in the form. By studying your leads’ behavior, you can optimize your marketing campaigns.
#6 – Personalized messages and loyalty
Your customers are more than just identifiers or numbers you can associate with them! Automating your marketing campaigns can help you create diverse profiles and segment them in a highly targeted way, ensuring that the right message reaches the right person, on the right channel, at the right time. You can update the information continuously and automatically.
If you run an e-commerce site, for example, you can send a highly targeted email campaign offering your customers complementary products 10 days after they place their order, or send an email campaign with a promotional offer 30 days before their birthday, etc.
It works with your blog posts too! You can give your items a second life. For example, when a visitor reads one of your articles, you can automate the sending of an e-mail thanking them for reading it and visiting your blog, and suggesting other articles on the same theme.
#7 – Ability to test, optimize and retest
Your marketing teams can test, identify and optimize the actions that work best, then test again! They can identify the messages, visuals, formats and channels that work best with each target. This information is essential for optimizing your content.
A/B tests can also be carried out automatically on each of your marketing campaigns. In this way, you can test them in real time and determine which are the most effective. So, by testing and optimizing your marketing campaigns, you’ll improve your performance.
Automate your marketing campaigns with marketing automation software
As you can see, automating your marketing campaigns will save you time, generate qualified leads, reach your targets, better understand your leads’ behavior and send them personalized messages. The whole point of this type of software is to optimize your lead conversion time and enable your marketing and sales teams to work together more effectively. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our webmarkteing agency.