What Is Marketing Automation and What To Look For in an Automation Tool To Boost Your Sales

The primary aim of any business is to boost sales. But why only some organizations succeed and others don’t? It all lies in the hands of the marketing strategy used. A successful marketing strategy and its execution ensure the success of a business.

We’ve seen more and more organizations use marketing automation tools for increasing their sales. Using marketing automation software can save you a considerable amount of time. It lets you focus on essential activities rather than spending your time on routine work. This post gives you information about the world of marketing automation tools and how it benefits your sales.

What Is Marketing Automation?

When you clearly understand what marketing automation is, you can use the tool more effectively. Let us take a look into what marketing automation is, in simple terms. Marketing automation is the use of software and internet-based services to automate your marketing process.

An organization’s marketing and sales department use automation to streamline its marketing strategy. Marketing automation harnesses software solutions and cloud-based technology to speed up your marketing cycle.

Case: Retrieving cart abandoners

Assume a customer has added an item to the cart but hasn’t moved on to the purchase part. Instead of manually checking every time this happens, an automation tool would find and flag these customers. Then, the tool could email a discount offer (for example) to help complete the purchase. Imagine kicking off any kind of cart recovery workflow without human intervention. This is the beauty of marketing automation.

You can save a lot of time and resources by automating these tasks. It also enables you to send the right content at the right time.

Common Marketing Automation Tool Must-Haves

Now that we know what marketing automation is, let’s cover the common marketing automation tool must-haves.

1. Organize and Segment Leads

In an e-commerce society, potential customers are often addressed as ‘leads.’ The marketing automation tool gathers information about all the leads in your email or optin list. This allows the software to segment them based on their details. This categorization is often based on anything from age, gender to geographic location, and interests.

This kind of segmentation allows us to create custom content for every lead. Most customers prefer personalized content rather than generic content. Thus the software tags them, categorizes them to provide them with helpful content.

For instance, the marketing automation software sends an email containing the offers for Men’s clothes to all the male customers. This makes the customers feel more seen and leads to an increase in the conversion rate.

2. Rank Your Leads

This is again one of the most important tasks and special abilities of marketing automation software. Ranking your potential customers might sound like a doable task. But think about the huge numbers. It is close to impossible even to start ranking your leads manually. The marketing automation tool completes ranking your leads based on their involvement with ease. There’s no need to use additional resources to do this task, few filters, and the software is good to go.

For example, a customer who visits the website often and asks questions about products and services is a lead. The software prioritizes this kind of visitor over the others.

After the leads cross specific scores, the sales team is ready to contact them to either close the deal or drop unqualified leads. That means saving a lot of time and effort for the sales and marketing team.

3. Personalize Content

Potential customers are visiting your website to search for what they need. So making your website content more attractive pushes the visitor to convert. If your website provides personalized content for every registered user, it is a plus.

The marketing automation software gathers valuable information such as location, browsing behavior, and other such data. Then the tool uses this data to create content that the user desires.

For example, if a customer is hoping to buy shoes from your e-commerce website, provide the links on the first page about various options. Simply put, personalized content makes the consumer feel more confident about the store.

Personalize not just websites but also email campaigns, text messages, and other such interactions. This is the start of building trust in your organization/brand. You can gain more data about their interests every time they visit your website. Thus you can gain more insight too.

4. Nurture Your Leads

After properly gaining information about your leads, it’s time to persuade them to become customers. This process is often called ‘Nurturing leads.’ Nurturing leads can be a rather long process.

A user visiting your site might not be ready to buy anything yet. They might have come there just to gain awareness about the products. Careful evaluation of the user activities lets you know if the visitor is truly a buyer. The marketing automation tool takes care of nurturing the leads by sending constant emails and text messages.

The goal is to etch the brand’s name in the customer’s mind. The successful nurturing of leads led to an increase in conversion rates. The user is always informed about the offers and discounts available through interaction of some sort.

The marketing automation software sends customized emails such that the leads are not pressured to buy. Lead nurturing takes time. The software sends emails by maintaining a constant interval so that the leads don’t get annoyed.

For example, the marketing automation software sends out emails to leads who are in the final stage of purchasing. The tool sends this email at the right time, say during the holidays, for enhanced chances of conversion.

5. Send Triggered Emails

This is a technique in nurturing the leads but worth mentioning as a separate feature. Let us say that the lead shows interest in your products by constant interaction with your website. Now the software ranks this lead as one of the top leads. The marketing automation software sends emails automatically based on the actions of these leads.

The triggering action can be anything from a social media interaction to the user’s birthday. Special occasions such as birthdays, holidays are field days for the marketing automation tool. Since the software can automatically handle all this data, you don’t have to create personalized messages for every lead.

For example, the software sends an automated mail to the lead based on the user’s current location. The email can be a notification to check out your retail store nearby. This kind of automated message allows for the customer to have a direct look at what your services are.

6. Monitor Channel Sources and Traffic

In this technological era, you need to have a social media presence. It is also important for you to track all potential customer activities. Tracking might sound a bit stalky, but you are only processing the data that the user has agreed to provide.

The marketing automation tool has features to track the activity of a user on various platforms. This allows for filtered and more personalized content. Personalized content is the best way to keep your leads engaged. It eventually leads to increased conversion rates and directly boosts sales.

For example, the automation tool identifies a lead who constantly visits and checks a particular product on your Instagram page. Thus the software sends coupons that are valid for that product to persuade the lead to purchase.

7. Make Your Customer Happy

One of the most important goals of marketing is customer satisfaction. This goal is about retaining customers and not about conversion rates. A customer is more likely to stay in business with you if you provide them with great service. The marketing automation software sends quick responses to customer queries. Thus the customer will know that their message is being processed.

Marketing automation software can also allow you to offer discounts to customers who always use your service. This will make the customer stay loyal to your brand/organization for a long time.

For example, a simple birthday wish along with special offers might make the customer feel happy to shop with you.

8. Run A/B or Split Tests

Apart from keeping the leads engaged, marketing automation software can analyze your marketing strategy. Analyzing the reports of your marketing strategy from time to time will let you make better decisions. The sales team can get the correct info at the right time to make any alterations needed to improve sales.

The marketing automation tool has a feature called A/B testing. This is testing out two kinds of approaches on a lead and making decisions based on the favorable response. This makes employing different marketing strategies for different customers easy. Marketing automation can be very helpful in finding the best strategy for your audience.

For example, a user opens an email with pictures regularly but doesn’t attend calls. This information lets us know that the customer prefers emails and not telephone calls.

9. Optimize Your Strategy

In manual marketing methods, it is not possible to change the marketing strategy laid out. But in the case of marketing automation software, it can be easily done. Optimizing the marketing strategy mid-way of a process is very beneficial to improving sales. But earlier, because of the extra resources involved and the manual labor required, this was never recommended.

Marketing automation makes changes to the strategy automatically based on the organization’s guidelines. This kind of process rarely involves human intervention. The software takes actions based on pre-established rules and criteria.

10. Schedule Timely Campaigns

It is not always possible for a marketing team to execute plans at the right time. Engaging in customer interaction at the wrong time might result in adverse actions. The marketing automation tool lets you figure out which time is the right time. It can even suggest what actions to take and when.

For example, if a customer is not engaging with the email campaign but visits your website regularly, the problem might be with the emails. The user may not find the information about the email satisfactory. So the marketing automation tool suggests you conduct a preference survey.

Top 3 Marketing Automation Software

1. Adzooma

Ads play an important role in maximizing your lead generation. This is why Adzooma provides free ad management software. This tool can manage Google, Microsoft, and Facebook Ads effortlessly. Furthermore, the software also offers the following features:

• Campaign management
• Collaboration tools
• Keyword tracking
• Even triggered actions
• Conversion tracking

The software is best suited for Advertising PPC Managers and advertising agencies.

2. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a popular marketing platform among small businesses. It combines the features of both marketing and CRM software to deliver a powerful solution for your sales and marketing team. The following are some impressive features of the software:

• Email marketing
• Auto-responders
• Contact database
• Drip campaigns
• A/B testing
• ROI tracking
• Popular plugins

3. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a free-to-use software used by many small businesses. Similar to the above software, it integrates the features of marketing and CRM under one platform. It helps you streamline your marketing cycle by creating automated workflows. Furthermore, it improves the collaboration between the sales and the marketing team. Let us take a look at some features of this tool:

• Audience targeting
• Call management
• Multi-campaign
• Pipeline management
• Email marketing and response control
• Workflow configuration and management

An Emerging Marketing Automation Tool – PeppyBiz

PeppyBiz is home to one of the newest and powerful marketing automation software. This marketing automation stands out in that it can easily integrate with the CRM software. You don’t need to install additional applications to integrate with third-party apps too. Every integration tool you need comes packed with this marketing automation software. The following are some of the impressive things you can do with PappyBiz software:

• Track and rate customer actions
• Send personalized and relevant emails
• Turn your website traffic into sales
• Automatically recommend products
• Nurture new signups
• Close more sales
• Foster engagement

One of the most praised aspects of PeppyBiz’s software is that it has a minimalistic and bug-free design. Likewise, it is gaining traction during recent times because of its ability to fit all business kinds seamlessly. Customer support is available 24×7 to make sure your business soars.

Conclusion

A marketing team must be able to deliver the expected results irrespective of the hardships they face. Even if the product or service provided is fantastic, it may not reach the leads without proper marketing. So it is better to be safe and to invest in automation software that handles routine tasks. This can improve the efficiency of your marketing team in almost no time, thus boosting sales!

All images provided by the author.