marketing automation tools

Marketing automation and its scope go way beyond what people may think when they come across this term. Many times people think that it is just something that reduces the workload of marketers with the automation of repetitive and challenging tasks. Although marketing automation tools do that, the real value is in how the software can increase business revenue.

Since marketing automation delivers results, it also focuses on important challenges faced by you and your team in everyday activities. Marketing automation ensures to automate repetitive marketing tasks while solving business challenges.

Understanding the actual impact of marketing campaigns on a business and making sense of each investment is something that is very important. If you wish to achieve incredible benefits and decide where your money should be invested then you should be clear about some things like how the budget is aligned with goals, the campaigns that fetch more returns, the marketing channel that converts more leads, and where should the investment be done?

With the marketing automation tools, you can enter all this data and see how each metric is calculated to measure your ROI. By getting the exact numbers, you can also strategize your decision making and deliver higher results while also saving considerable money.

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 a seamless marketing process 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?

When you try to streamline marketing tasks and workflows without dedicated and efficient software, that only works when the size of your company is still small. However, just as a company keeps growing and attracts more leads, 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 customer engagement consistent and meaningful. The Zoho marketing automation tools do just that when it comes to automating everything.

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 tools such as Zoho Marketing Automation changed almost everything. This tool comes with a lot of simplicity that is combined with an actionable plan.

Zoho Marketing automation platform helps in attracting website visitors, tuning anonymous visitors into leads, and converting leads into customers. Businesses of any size can automate their marketing and ensure that the result is a tangible.

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

1. Setting Clear 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 that marketing strategy goals 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 efficiently.

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, 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 customize 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 contextualize 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 helps immensely.

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

Marketing and Sales Silos

The goal of sales and marketing teams is almost the same and that is to make each lead into a customer. However, the actions performed by each team can be different because they have access to different data about a lead.

Think of a lead that purchases the premium plan but also receives free trial emails from the marketing team. In addition, another customer who unsubscribed from the monthly newsletter mailing list can still receive feedback emails from the sales representatives. This is where a communication gap is likely to be created because there is a lack of knowledge sharing between the sales and marketing teams which may eventually lead to a bad user experience.

The gap can be bridged when the CRM is connected with marketing automation solutions that lead to a seamless marketing process while facilitating bidirectional communication between the teams. This always ensures that the sales and marketing teams are synchronised and each team gets accurate data about the target audience so that the campaigns are run easily.

Lack of Real-Time Interaction

Every campaign you work on as a marketer must stand out amongst the large number of messages that an audience receives each day. Let’s just say that you are sending a generic email about a business and another personalized email where you want to talk to your customers about the release of a new product.

It is likely that your audience will open the email that gets a 6 times higher transaction rate. With features such as an in-depth website, mobile app analytics, retrieving locations, demography, and monitoring survey responses, the marketing automation tools make the task easy. There is a seamless and a real-time interactive experience with your audience along with tailored content that is automated.

Low-Quality Leads

The lack of attracting quality leads is something that has become increasingly common. This also leads the sales team to mark a lead as junk and the reason why that is due to the fact that contracting individuals who have not expressed any interest in the traditional lead generation strategies such as mass advertising, cold calling, email blasts, etc.

Hence, generating a good quality lead and then passing it ahead to the sales team for conversion has become more of a challenge that can be taken care of using drip marketing. With the use of marketing automation, you can ensure that you capture the prospects interested in your business when they voluntarily sign up for a product or a service with automated sign up forms, social media campaigns, event/webinar signups, etc.

When the visitors subscribe to a brand’s YouTube channel or even sign up for a newsletter using a popup while visiting a website, it only shows that they have some level of interest in you and what you wish to offer. From here, it is possible to move the leads down the conversion funnel. After the lead is classified as warm, cold, or hot, the qualified leads can be passed to the sales team.

Brand Presence Inconsistency

In the present day marketing realm, it is not enough to promote a brand in magazines, radio, TV, and ads. It is also important to have a strong web presence all over the internet so that you can make the most out of the gains that can come with marketing.

In case you have been thinking about a way to maximize the services of an online marketing agency then marketing automation is the best answer. Regardless of the kind of content that you curate including the pay-per-click ads, running social media campaigns, blogs, video sharing, or SEO, marketing automation helps.

With marketing automation, you can effectively use the drag and drop builders, schedule them to post at the right time via automation and analyze the reach with in-depth reports. This is one of the best ways to establish a comfortable and an effective brand presence. 

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 revenue becomes simple.

When used in the right sense, marketing automation can help in effectively tackling the key challenges and also reduce the workload of a B2B marketer. Zoho marketing automation offers a seamless and multichannel experience for nurturing leads and focusing on customer needs while also automating the time consuming manual tasks.

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.