Before going into the advantages of marketing automation, let’s first examine the two basic elements of marketing automation:
Marketing Intelligence:
This refers to the use of tracking codes to monitor a prospect’s online behavior. Once the analytics are available, marketers can analyze and identify patterns that they can use to formulate behaviour-based market segments. Amazon is one of the first large enterprises to use marketing automation. According to its customers, Amazon’s knowledge of previous buying behaviour improves their overall experience by providing additional items of interest; keeping them informed of price adjustments, and more.
Business Development
Business development focuses on moving prospects from the top of the sales funnel, where they have the initial awareness of the product or service, to the bottom of the sales funnel, where they are ready to purchase. An automated lead and customer development process heavily relies on email, social media, search engine optimization, and content marketing to make it successful. Before executing these tactics, you have to identify lead qualifications and develop a lead nurturing strategy first.
The 5 Specific Ways Marketing Automation Provides Value
- Track Contacts
Marketing automation can serve as a unified platform that businesses can use to track customers’ milestones or activities, easily. It has “auto-bots” that can monitor and analyze the web activities and buying behavior of the prospects, leads, and customers.
- Maintain Consistency
Since this software allows you to schedule tasks, you can maintain the consistency of your business process. Customers will repeat their transaction with you if your service is high-quality in a consistent manner.
- Lead Nurture
Automation can simplify the entire process of lead nurturing. One way it does this is by allowing you to clip the information of different leads and prospects from various channels and directly add them into the system. You can then use this behavior information to create targeted messaging, which is exponentially more effective in getting the target to take the desired action.
- Create Reports
Some campaigns will work, and some unfortunately won’t. One of the key values of a good marketing automation system is that it provides you detailed feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. Did the prospect open this email more than that? Did this message lead to a higher conversion rate than that? Did this onboarding path lead to greater retention than that one?
A good system will provide you this information, letting you more finely tune your messaging.
- Tracking Detailed Profiles
Another benefit of marketing automation is that it allows you to create detailed profiles of your customers through web behavior, email open rates, and responses, social media interactions, etc.. Different communication channels work together to provide a comprehensive picture of your customer and their behavior. You can use this information to reach out and upsell/cross-selll, or alternatively do market research to shape the future of future services.
What functions can marketing automation do for your SaaS?
- Lead capture and generation
- Lead nurturing across the entire customer journey
- Run and measure channel, funnel, and messaging experiments to generate more leads
- Analyze the entire customer journey
- Automations by segments for better messaging and targeting of leads, trials, and customers
- Target Customers Through Multiple Channels: Marketers can use automation software to target customers through various platforms such as SMS, direct mail, email, and on-site messaging.
- Boost Customer’s Lifetime Value: CLV, or customer’s lifetime value is essential to any business. Marketing automation allows you to create personalized campaigns for both new and existing customers; thus keeping them engaged with your business for a long period of time. For instance, as a company adds features to its product, it might proactively reach out to the customer and let them know about it, possibly offering a discounted offer for current customers.
- Upsell and Cross-sell: Marketing automation helps cross-sell and upsell without any manual interference. In addition to the incremental revenue, the more products a customer has, the less likely they are to stitch, increasing retention.
- Improve Blogger Outreach: Tools for marketing automation helps you send emails to bloggers automatically and tests the engagement rate of every email.
- Suggest Content to Visitors: With the use of artificial intelligence, marketing automation can use data to trigger the right content for the customer.
Marketing automation has three key benefits:
- It automates previously manual tasks so that they can be done quicker and with less effort
- This decrease in effort/action allows for an organization to have more contact with a customer or potential customer, enhancing the user experience
- Through its use of data and analytics, marketing automation can make these messages more targeted and personalized, exponentially increasing their effectiveness
- By collecting data about customers behaviors and actions throughout the process, marketing automation can provide insights into what is working and what isn’t, allowing for a continuous improvement cycle in the system
In short, marketing automation offers a unified platform that allows communicating, planning, monitoring, and analyzing the decisions of a customer.
Related Previous Posts:
SaaS Email Drip Campaigns: Your Guide To Converting Messages
SaaS Onboarding Email Automation: Time-based vs. Action-based; Which is RIGHT for you?
