Marketing automation is a combination of tools and technologies which manage the entire marketing processes across different channels automatically. In other words, it is a combination of tools designed with an aim to automate the routine workflow of marketing. It automates the process like lead capturing, lead management and lead nurturing with timely delivery of marketing message over different channels.
Market automation makes reaching out to targeted audience easy and foolproof. It uses SMS, Email, Web and Social channels to reach and engage the customers and prospects. The entire communication flow will be automated based on the user response or by the criteria set in advance.
Marketing processes and procedures not only time-consuming but also exhausting, and demand strenuous efforts. Imagine, sitting back relaxed and getting the marketing done for you! That’s exactly the marketing automation does. It automates most of your routine marketing efforts.
What does Marketing Automation Do?
As said above, marketing automation manages marketing operations automatically. It automates a variety of processes from the lead capturing to lead nurturing. It employs multiple tools for different purposes of marketing.
Let’s examine what all marketing automation does.
Lead Capturing
Marketing automation provides for easy lead capturing with innovative tools. Landing page builder, a key tool for lead generation in the marketing automation, provides for easy creation of landing pages, different forms, ads and Email. You can select a template which best suits your marketing needs and make the changes as required with drag and drop. Your landing page is ready to run; you don’t need to write any code as well. It facilitates to design the different digital ads to run across the social media channels. You can also create an email and add a short URL to a form in the mail to generate lead. You can customize the forms with the details you want to track, effortlessly.
Lead Management
Marketing automation tool completely manages the leads at different stages. It processes the raw leads, identifies the duplicates and deletes them automatically. It caters for assigning the lead to a particular agent, reassigning the leads if needed, lead transfer and multi-share.
Lead Scoring
Marketing automation ensures the lead prioritizing with lead scores and customer scores. When your hit by many leads, it is important to measure the leads to assess the lead quality. Here where automation offers a solution. Scores can be auto-generated based on the criteria like interaction, response and the source, etc. Likewise, the intent of the customer can be gauged with the score for his response and behavior as well. These scores help to prioritize the leads and target better.
Lead Nurturing
Another important feature of marketing automation is the lead nurturing. Reaching out to the lead timely and engaging appropriately is critical to converting a lead. Drip marketing automates the entire nurturing process without any human intervention. It employs multi-channel communication to deliver the marketing message as a conversation. Drip marketing also opens opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.
ROI Tracking
When multiple campaigns are underway, it is important to know which campaign is doing good and where the most leads are coming from. Marketing automation with web analytics tool helps to track the leads, source and the campaign performance on various media including the online and offline accurately.
Why Marketing Automation is important?
Marketing automation increases the web traffic, bring more buyers, improve the marketing team’s performance, reduces the sales cycle, amplifies the overall sales and ensures greater retention.
It facilitates the personalization of communication, accurate delivery of marketing message on a variety of channels. It effectively drives the lead towards a sale by employing a combination of a multi-action campaign over multi-channel.
Automating the campaign flow based on the user response with the drip marketing works continuously without any interventions. It also recycles the cold, unresponsive leads and automatically engages them periodically to turn them active.
In a way, with the marketing automation, lead generations and the nurturing process continues in the back-end delivering you leads and sales without interruption and intervention.
