Marketing automation is the method of using software to automate all your repetitive marketing activities. This includes generating leads, launching and tracking campaigns, analyzing customer touchpoints, and much more.
Martech stack is the best solution to boost your marketing efforts which helps you in planning and executing your activities seamlessly. And, adding marketing automation while building your martech block can reap greater benefits.
But first, why do we need a marketing automation software for business
Some of the few challenges faced by businesses are generating quality leads and keeping customers engaged right from the first interaction. And with a massive influx of leads, it is difficult to manually keep a track of who is interested in your business so that the sales team can convert them easily.
With an effective marketing automation software, you can not only measure customer engagement with your business but you can also streamline and automate various marketing workflows which help in scaling up revenue. As per Forbes, 82% of marketers recognized a positive return on investment (ROI) from marketing automation and said that it makes them more efficient.
Pretty impressive right? Now you must be wondering what actions you can perform with marketing automation software. You can
In the points I have mentioned above, content is one of the best tools that can solve your automation problem. With email marketing, you can deliver informative, relevant, and engaging content that enables you to garner more customers without much effort, making way for inbound marketing.
You can also adopt A/B testing for different customers, giving you a broad perspective on what type of content your customers resonate more with. Thus, email marketing automation is a desirable solution to expand your customer base by sending emails in bulk to a larger audience.
Not just email marketing, you can use your content to target multiple customer touch points like web landing pages, emails, social media posting, etc., which helps in creating meaningful conversations on a personal level.
Please read our blog on Vtiger Email Sequences, which helps you in automating your sales and marketing follow-ups.
What is the role of CRM in marketing automation
The combination of CRM and marketing automation is a great choice to have a 360-degree view of your customer data. This enables you to understand your customers deeply, track engagement levels, close more deals, etc. It also minimizes sales and marketing silos by having access to customer data on a single platform. It reduces cross-team dependency, saves time, and boosts productivity which helps in providing enhanced customer experience.
How to get started with marketing automation in a CRM
If you have made it this far in understanding marketing automation, now let’s get started with how to implement them in your business using a CRM. A CRM helps you in recording in-depth customer information. With a centralized data system, you can perform different marketing activities that help businesses to generate more revenue. Let us look at them below:
- Get to know your target audience from customer data. Try to understand from where your customers have seen your ad, how many times they visited your website, the number of touchpoints your customers have with your business, etc.
- Map your customer journey from every source of interaction. You can use this to create relevant suggestions and deliver messages at the right time.
- Curate eye-catchy content and deliver personalized messages when they are least expected. As mentioned above, you can use emails as a core medium of communication. By using different email templates you can craft content and send them to a list of contacts who are potential buyers.
- Add a signup button or subscription to all your deliverables.
- Monitor your campaigns constantly to keep an eye on your customer actions. Watch out for new trends and fine-tune them as per customer needs.
Now, If you think marketing automation can take care of everything, then you are absolutely wrong. Automating your activities doesn’t mean you can rely on them completely. There are some common pitfalls that can happen while using marketing automation such as
- Lacking a clear vision.
- Failing to sync with sales and marketing goals.
- Failing to produce up-to-date content.
- Failing to provide valuable feedback from the reports generated.
As Stephen Hawking mentioned, “nothing is perfect. Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.” Everything that is present in the universe is flawed and so is the case with these modern technologies. And, your responsibility as an entrepreneur is to accept both and apply them carefully without causing serious damage to your business growth.
Before you leave, don’t forget to check out Vtiger’s Marketing Automation Tools and consider integrating them into your marketing operations.
