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What Is Marketing Automation? Email, Lead, Social, Analytics, and Reporting

Written by Markestac | October

These days competition is in its wildest form and every marketer is trying to devise a marketing campaign that can stand out from the rest. They are under constant pressure of devising more innovative ideas that can strike a chord with customers.

Apart from this, there are other challenges that they need to focus on. Developing and maintaining customer relationships can make the entire process overwhelming sometimes. This is where marketing automation can be of big help.

Marketing automation streamlines the marketing processes used to support digital marketing campaigns. This can include campaign management, audience segmentation, behavioural analysis, website monitoring, and lead scoring.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is an efficient way to streamline all repetitive tasks. It helps in reducing human error and achieving better results. With automation, the core focus can be shifted to more important tasks, such as campaign planning and goal development, brand building, KPI measurement, and more.

Automated marketing actions bring prospects to the point where they can be directly approached by the sales team to close a sale and start an ongoing relationship, and the information it gathers can drive your choice of marketing tactics.

It enables many modern-day practices, including: 

  • Segmentation
  • Lead generation
  • Relationship marketing
  • Cross-sell and upsell
  • Lead nurturing
  • Retention
  • Return on investment
  • Account-based marketing 

How can Marketing Automation be Beneficial for your Business?

When we look at businesses, there is one common thing between them and that is generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout the entire journey. Apart from this, they have massive data that they often find difficult to handle and put to efficient use.

Marketing automation services help businesses of every size. Automated marketing converts potential leads into customers by giving them efficient tailored services. It makes for more efficient marketing, letting marketing do more with whatever they have. In short, it simply solves the issue of doing repetitive tasks and saves time as well as upgrades the efficiency level of the team.

Here are some of the key benefits of marketing automation.

  • Efficiency

The foremost benefit is it saves time and increases productivity. With Marketing automation, the manual task of doing postings every day gets sorted making things easy for the team. With this the staff can also do all regular tasks like social media postings, creating an email campaign and other blog postings, etc. in the same software. It eventually enhances productivity and saves a lot of time.

  • Better Conversion Rates

With marketing automation the right offer is made to the right person, increasing the chances of making better sales. Clean customer data makes it easy to identify the right people and make a tailored campaign accordingly.

  • Precise Reporting

Analytics reporting can be a very overwhelming process, but with marketing automation, the whole problem gets solved. Automated, accurate, and streamlined reports can be generated from the software. It eventually helps in finding loopholes and solving them.

  • Personalized Marketing Strategy

Through segmentation and reporting, marketing teams can create more personalized content. Via automated marketing, the right persona can be targeted on multiple channels. 

  • Perfect Order

Marketing automation makes everything run smoothly. It sorts out transactions, aligns activities, creates doable schedules, and aligns internal teams to achieve goals.

Marketing Automation and Reporting

Marketers have a lot of data piled up and it often gets overwhelming for them to properly analyze it. To solve this issue, automation software takes the help of automated reports to clearly sort and present the data.

An automated report is a management tool used by marketers to create and share organizational reports at a specific time interval without the need to update the information each time. These updates are usually made in real time with the help of smart reporting tools. The most important tools considered are -

  • Reporting Dashboard

Using data from other reports, dashboards provide an at-a-glance vision of a company's performance.

  • Automated Email Marketing Reports

The report visually presents how many purchases were made after opening an email, conversion rates, revenue generated by each campaign, and more. 

  • Social Media

The report visualizes the content reach, KPI and many more through proper data utilization. It makes it easy to analyze how well content is performing and how prospects are engaging with it.

Types Of Marketing Automation 

Email Automation

Email automation is the ability to send time or action-triggered emails to subscribers with relevant information. It is based on specific actions customers take or don’t take. Email automation takes repetitive tasks off your to-do list and frees up time for other valuable tasks, such as handling customer enquiries.

Lead nurturing emails make customers learn more about the brand, push them to keep coming back and remind them why they chose you in the first place.  Eventually, it helps you find your audience and engage your customers.

With email marketing automation, one can get an easy insight into the wants and needs of the target audience while gaining a better understanding of the preferred demographics. It is one of the most efficient ways of communicating with customers who have a genuine interest in the brand and its products and services.

There are immense benefits involved with email marketing automation, to mention some:

  • Personalize customer's experience.
  • Grab the best out of the marketing team.
  • Amplify customer retention rate.
  • Makes marketing strategy more scalable.
  • Saves a lot of time.

By tracking responses to collect more information, offering discounts strategically and creating automated drip campaigns the whole email marketing automation can be made very effective. This entire process is done with help of many email marketing tools, to name some:

  • Sendinblue 
  • Drip
  • Mailchimp
  • Gumroad
  • GetResponse
  • ActiveCampaign
  • MailerLite
  • Emma
  • LeadSquared
  • Marketo

According to MailChimp, the average email open rate for all industries analyzed is 21.33%  and the average click rate for all industries was 2.62 %.

80% of email marketing automation users see improved lead generation and 77% see more conversions.

Tracking email analytics and using them to draft better campaigns is critical for business. By measuring the performance of email marketing one can see how well certain campaigns are performing and if those campaigns are producing results.

Through reporting automation, the task of reporting becomes quite easy and all the data gets updated in the form of reports and automatically updated using the software. The collected data can be easily delivered to specific email addresses on a regular basis with automatic email dispatches.          

Email Reporting

(Source: campaign monitor)

Social Media Automation

It is the action of reducing the manual labour required to manage social media accounts by using automation software. It is the process of optimizing social interactions using automated tools. By automating social media postings and customer engagement, management can save time and use it for other productive purposes.

Some of the ways social media automation can be used:

  • Using Chatbots to respond to customer messages.
  • Get notifications when the conversation starts.
  • Schedule social media posts days ahead of the campaign.
  • Virtual sales assistant.

Pros of using social media automation: 

  • More efficient social media postings and creation.
  • Increased brand awareness and engagement.
  • Amplified reach and impressions.
  • Efficient data analytics in real-time.

Some analytics that can help you understand its importance:

  • In 2022, 47% of SMBs use automation software for social media management.
  • Automating social posts and ads can save more than 6 hours per week.
  • 64% of marketers believe social media management is one of their multiple job responsibilities.

Some social media automation tools that will help the brand: 

  • Hootsuite Publisher 

With features like “ best time to publish” and “customization”, it is one of the favourites of its users.

  • Facebook Business Suite

It provides tools to automate postings, stories, ads etc.

  • Sparkcentral

It uses an automated messaging distribution platform to manage customer interactions. It perfectly syncs with CRM which helps in having a complete view of the customers. 

  • Lately

A great tool for content creation. With an AI copywriting mechanism it studies brands' voices and makes custom content accordingly. The user only has to review and approve the content. 

  • Pictory

This tool provides an easy way to convert content into videos. The user has to just put the text and it will convert it into short videos.

The process of social media automation is made easier with reporting software. With the help of automated reporting software, marketers get a clear insight into how well their content is performing. Reports keep a track of SEO strategies, social media campaigns and presence, AdWords campaigns, website data, and a lot more. Tools like dash make the process of analyzing KPIs quite efficient and beneficial for business. 

(Source: dashthis)

Lead Nurturing And Marketing Automation: 

Lead nurturing has become an integral part of inbound marketing. At its core, it deals with cultivating relationships with the leads. It has become essential to ensure that leads move down the funnel from visitors to leads, buyers and lastly to promoters. It is a very long-term process and requires continued efforts.

According to Invesp: Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads and Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads

Implementing a powerful lead nurturing plan to increase customer engagement is essential for the marketing and sales team. The whole strategy can be amplified by using marketing automation.

These are the ways in which the automation software can help in improving conversion rates:

  • Contact list segmentation will help in better targeting and content distribution which eventually amplifies lead scoring.
  • Marketing automation also helps with lead scoring, the more scores the more importance is given to that specific lead. It helps in better lead nurturing.
  • Another thing is landing pages. With automation tools, editing pages becomes easy and with progressive profiling, the targeting becomes much better. 

Some analytics for deeper understanding:

  • 74% of marketers feel automation generates more efficient lead nurturing.
  • Companies have experienced around a 451% increase in qualified leads after using automation.
  • 54% of Fmarketers feel automation solves a lot of their lead nurturing obstacles.

(Source: Salesmate)

Analyzing leads and understanding their KPIs is important in the lead nurturing process. With reporting tools like dashboarding, professionals can easily understand and explore the prospects' data. Additionally, when there are more clients, these reports can be embedded and white-labelled as a client reporting dashboard and adjusted so that it fits clients’ needs. 

Why invest in marketing Automation?

There are multiple reasons why a company should invest in marketing automation. Let's go through some of the reasons that will support the statement:

Marketing teams have ample work to do and they are supposed to do it efficiently. So they need better modern-day tools that can help them work efficiently, collaborate more effectively and eventually amplify their revenue. Let me statistically explain.

  • 34% want to improve customer engagement.
  • 34% want to improve the customer experience (CX).
  • 30% want to minimize manual tasks.
  • 28% want to increase the number of leads captured.
  • 35% want to streamline marketing and sales efforts.

    Source: The State of Marketing Automation, 2021 (PDF)  

Taking marketing automation services solves these issues and makes things go smoothly. In the coming times, marketing automation will become the foundation of most companies' digital businesses. Amplifying productivity while saving time is the topmost priority of digital marketers, and marketing automation software is the solution to that problem.

Understanding and implementing automation software can be confusing for newbies. Taking the help of experts is the best option in times like these. Experts at MarkeStac, a White Label HubSpot Agency providing HubSpot services have helped many such first-time users successfully deal with marketing automation, making the entire process smooth like butter.