What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy that enables companies to more effectively communicate and sell products and services to customers across multiple channels (email, social media, web, etc.) by automating and personalizing repetitive tasks.
By defining the sales process across the customer lifecycle, the software can recognize where the customer is and automatically move them through the sales process towards other goals, which may include education, sales, repeat sales, reducing churn, etc. The combination of these qualities often results in companies:
- to standardize quality and systemize business processes
- to increase the number of customers without the need to increase internal capacity (scalability)
- to eliminate errors caused by the human factor
- to reduce attributable costs per store
- faster (immediate) implementation of business processes
- to increase the return on investment in marketing
- to externalise and secure the know-how of people in the system
- the substitutability of key people in the organisation
Examples: what can be automated?
The most common applications used for marketing automation are web applications that are interconnected and can share all the necessary data. As a rule, these are applications that allow
- automated creation of websites and sales microsites
- CRM systems that store customer information across the lifecycle
- tools for automated communication across all channels (email, chat, social, campaigns)
- analytical and integration tools for evaluation and reporting
The key to marketing automation: start collecting customer data now
The basic prerequisite for marketing automation is the systematic collection of information about your customers. Specifically, this includes name and contact details, which can be gradually enriched with additional information about the customer and their relationship to your business process (lead qualification). The most common gateway for collecting new customer leads is usually a website or sales microsite.
- prepare your technological background
- start automatically collecting contacts and information on your potential and existing customers
- store information about these contacts in one place
- define your sales process and its objectives