A Detailed Guide to Marketing Automation

There are many methods for promoting a brand at the present time. However, marketing managers are always looking for workable methods that can make promotional efforts meaningful and efficient. To manage the lead generation process, the marketers must know the reason behind each action taken by visitors to a website.

From knowing which source is driving the visitors to a website to knowing what nurtures the marketing strategy, everything must be focused on. To make this simple, building relationships with prospects is important. Hence, most marketers are focusing on marketing automation.

In this blog, we will try to understand what marketing automation is and the features it brings in great length. So let’s begin.

What is Marketing Automation?

In simple language, marketing automation is the process of using software for automating repetitive marketing efforts. With the automation of repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks such as generating and segmenting leads, planning social media campaigns, sending emails and SMS, and qualifying leads, efficiency and personalization of user experiences can be ensured.

The goal of automating marketing services is to move your leads down the funnel and finally convert them. When used properly, the features of marketing automation lead to many positive results.

Why Marketing Automation?

Running online marketing activities without dedicated and efficient software is still possible when the size of your company is still small. However, just as a company keeps growing and attracts more leads, the marketers need more channels for engaging with customers because managing interactions becomes difficult.

Capturing, nurturing, and qualifying a wide range of leads, running effective campaigns for customer segments, and different post-purchase marketing activities required to get automated. This marketing automation keeps the customer engagement consistent and meaningful. The Zoho marketing tools do just that when it comes to automating everything.

According to Marketo,  76% of organizations implementing marketing automation generate a return on investment within the first year itself. That’s not all. It is also said that over 44% see a return within just six months. The most important function of marketing automation platforms is to automate and streamline activities carried out by the sales and marketing teams.

One can plan and execute lead generation and nurturing plans to launch a wide range of digital ad campaigns from a central hub without hitting buttons such as, “send” or “launch” on each message, email, or ad. The businesses that use marketing automation can see a wide range of benefits across all of their important everyday operations.

An important increase in the number of qualified leads that reach the sales team, a higher conversion rate, and better productivity for sales and marketing teams are good ways in which marketing automation helps a business.

Steps Needed to Start Marketing Automation

Over many years, marketing automation was considered rather difficult to understand. However, the use of marketing automation platforms such as Zoho Marketing Automation changed almost everything. This tool comes with a lot of simplicity that is combined with an actionable plan. Businesses of any size can automate their marketing.

There are mostly six prominent ways in which marketing automation can be started. They are mentioned below.

1. Setting Goals

Goal setting offers a clear direction for a marketing strategy. Some goals such as building brand engagement or increasing thought leadership are good to have but they are unlikely to bring in desired results as they are generic. 

It is recommended for the marketing strategy goals to be precise, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Each and every effort of the marketing strategy must have a goal. This will channel your energy towards getting tangible results. In fact, you will also start seeing the results of your efforts quickly.

2. Creating and Segmenting Leads

An important aspect of marketing automation is the generation of good quality leads. This is a step that makes you capture all the leads that show interest in your brand whether it is subscribing to a newsletter, engaging with social media, or signing up for webinars.

There is a wide range of promotional channels for driving traffic to your landing page. These channels make lead generation effective. When you have good quality leads in your hands, you can also segment them into groups with similar characteristics, needs, and interests who show similar purchase patterns.

When you really get to segmenting the leads, you will see that it increases your campaign open rates, customer satisfaction, and many more things. You will know what your leads are looking for and you can find it easy to engage with them suitably. For instance, you can form segments such as “Website Visitors Under the Age 25” or “Women Aged Under 18” to make the lead nurturing process efficient.

3. Website Optimization

We know the importance of a website. It is like a modern business card that tells almost everything about your business. The key to increasing your conversions is to attract visitors to your website first.

When you deploy the right set of keywords, focus on content marketing, and high-quality user experience, you can be assured that your website will be seen. Website tracking in the marketing automation platform ensures that you get the exact count of all the visitors.

Understand what the visitors on your website are focusing on. Tracking those elements on the web page and discovering more about them while also knowing why the users clicked on a call-to-action button, a specific location, the source, etc. You should also know the number of clicks, the visits, and more.

4. Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Yet another important aspect of a business approach is to send targeted marketing messages to the leads at the right time using the right channel. This is the cornerstone of the lead nurturing process.

One of the best parts of a marketing automation campaign is that you can customise your leads as per their requirement and set up automated workflow or scheduled posts. Do not forget to include things such as emails, SMS, social, push notifications, and ad campaigns. Make sure that you are easily found where your audience is.

5. Scoring and Qualifying the Leads

Different attributes can be used for scoring more leads. You can move your leads through the funnel by adding numerical points based on important information that has been submitted.

The reaction of leads to the marketing campaigns, click-through rates, and how the leads are engaging with a brand shows a lot. This makes it easy for the marketing and sales team to respond appropriately while figuring out who is interested in buying your product and who is looking around generally.

6. Measuring Overall Performance

You can measure and contextualise the marketing activities that help you reach your target market. Getting a clear understanding of conversion rates, revenue growth, marketing returns, and other key performance indicators help immensely.

The marketing goals help in empowering you to improve your marketing strategies while optimising the returns. Choosing the key performance indicators helps in measuring progress quickly and accurately.

Features of Marketing Automation

Zoho Marketing automation platform helps in attracting website visitors, tuning anonymous visitors into leads, and converting leads into customers. The features that it offers bring marketing and sales operations closer. They are mentioned below.

1. Lead Management

These days, it is important to get leads to notice your brand and offer them the best experience well before the competitors can do it. Lead management helps in attracting leads, nurturing them, evaluating their sales-readiness, and handing over the best ones to the sales team.

From lead generation to understanding the online behaviour of these leads and evaluating them for sales, Zoho marketing automation helps in everything. It helps in managing the entire lead cycle. You can effectively engage, empower, and earn your customers using the marketing automation features of Zoho.

2. Lead Generation

You can get more leads by adding sign up forms and smart pop ups on the landing pages. Moreover, you can also bring leads by syncing the CRM leads or other apps. The benefit of automating marketing activities is that no opportunity for generating new leads is ever lost.

Business success depends entirely on the leads and one’s ability to get the audience excited about a brand. Leads can be attracted from many sources and with unique requirements. Your focus must be on creating a good relationship with the leads.

3. Behavioural Targeting

You must understand the online behaviour of your leads so that you can use important information for customising messages. Create profiles for all visitors on the basis of their browsing behaviour so that you can give them just what they are looking for.

There are two primary types of behavioural marketing.

• Website Behavioural Marketing: Make sure that a visitor is interacting with the website in terms of page visits and link clicks. You can start by defining a goal for the visitor, group the visitors based on their actions, and create a personalised experience.
• In-app Usage Targeting: Marketing automation allows you to see how the users are interacting with a product while getting an idea about the features that interest them the most. You can send tailor-made content for improving the user experience.

4. Multi-Channel Marketing: Marketing automation

allows you to drive brand awareness by forming a connection with the audience on the platforms they use. You can plan your marketing activities across many mediums, allocate a budget, and realise your ROI.

It is important to understand that leads are almost everywhere. Using the Zoho Marketing automation, you can easily reach out to the leads from various channels while giving them the freedom to choose how the leads wish to connect. In addition, all the lead data is stored in one place so it is easy to follow up any time and any way.

5. Engagement Marketing

Relevance is important to ensure good customer engagement. Hence, one must focus on building engagement programs that help in fostering strong customer relationships.

• Journey Builder: It is possible to see and map the user experience with the brand’s products and services. You can create a personalised journey for each lead and customer to see how they have progressed at every step.
• Autoresponders: Zoho marketing automation allows you to send an automated series to new leads or run promotional campaigns based on lead interactions with the previous emails.
• Workflows: You can create flows to get your leads into the right email series. After this, you can also engage them with useful content.

6. Analytics

Finally, Zoho marketing automation also helps you to get in-depth reports on lead growth, campaign performance, and revenue generation. You can effectively measure all the marketing goals with the power of precise analytics.

Graphs, reports, and customer journey traces enable you to use everything that a marketer needs for making smart and sound decisions. Moreover, they also allow you to visualise the performance of the marketing funnel from analysing the acquisition to studying the conversions.

Some ways in which analytics works in Zoho marketing automation are mentioned below:

• Lead Insights: The lead insights allow you to see how many leads you have gained over a period while evaluating the effectiveness of the lead generation activities.
• Lead Attribution Reports: You can also know which sources you are getting the leads from so that it becomes easy to focus on targeted promotions.
• List Reports: You can compare your mailing lists to see which list is active and which one has the most engagement with the promotions.
• Campaign Reports: Zoho marketing automation also allows you to see which campaigns have the most opens and clicks including the kind of content that works with your audience by comparing different campaigns.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a modern solution for simplifying the marketing process for a team while also giving the leads a unique user experience and constant engagement. When a brand focuses on delighting the prospects with service and meeting needs instantly, getting conversions and increasing the revenue becomes simple.

The various marketing automation tools help in capturing leads with information, reaching out to them through channels, and tracking the progress with the sales funnel. Encaptechno is experienced in working as a Zoho partner for many businesses with a record of helping them grow. Get in touch to get support in implementing marketing automation, today.