What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is red hot, and for good reason. It de-anonymizes website visitor behavior, helps you send the perfect email at the perfect time, and keeps your sales team talking to the right prospects.
Marketing automation refers to technology that automatically serves content to target audiences. Most automation tools do this through digital workflows focused on a specific channel. Sophisticated marketing automation will place prospects into specific workflows based on actions, helping your sales and marketing team gain a clear understanding of how your audience engages with your brand.
Marketing automation operates on a “trigger and action” framework. In essence, a prospect does something to engage with your brand, which triggers an automated response from your brand. For example, let’s say a prospect downloads a white paper from your site. This is a pretty common trigger in inbound marketing, which usually results in the prospect receiving an email or a follow-up call.
Automation methodology can get pretty sophisticated – for instance, let’s go back to the prospect who downloaded a white paper as a trigger, and receives an email as the response to that trigger. Based on how they engage with that email, your automation workflows can branch out accordingly.
If they open it and click through to your site, they’re a “hotter” lead who is more likely to benefit from decision-level sales material or promotions. If they open the email and don’t click through, they might benefit more from additional awareness and consideration level content. If you send them multiple emails that don’t get opened, it might make sense to put them into a more periodic awareness-based drip so that you remain at the top of their mind without annoying them.
What can Your Business Achieve with Marketing Automation?
The four specific goals that marketing automation addresses more effectively than any other tool on the market are:
Inbound Conversions
By keeping prospects engaged over time with personalized nurturing campaigns, you can double or triple conversions and get way more out of your inbound efforts. Marketing automation makes this easy by allowing you to set up workflows that automatically and continuously segment and nurture leads.
Email Marketing Performance
Built-in behavior tracking allows you to setup automated drip email campaigns for your leads and engage them with personalized, relevant content. You can set up a timeline for the various touch points in the customer journey and then customize content based on the lead’s activities and behaviors, nurturing the lead until he/she is ready to buy. In addition to the personalization and improved open rates, marketing automation offers the ability to see what leads are doing ‘after the click.’
Sales Team Accountability and Compatibility with Marketing
With any sales cycle, both speed and persistence are key. Sales teams are typically great at closing quick and easy sales. Where they often struggle is when a sales cycle lengthens to weeks or months, or when they have a high volume of leads to handle. Marketing automation addresses both of these challenges and allows sales reps to close more deals.
Marketing automation also gives your sales reps the insights they need so they can reach out to leads with exactly the right information at exactly the right time. Real-time behavioral tracking allows sales teams to keep track of leads’ activities and interactions, so they can contact them at the optimal moments.
Lead Distribution Effectiveness
Lead distribution is a driving factor in conversion rates, and the more optimized your strategy is, the higher your sales rates will be. If you are struggling with lead distribution efforts, marketing automation is your best bet as it gives you the ability to automatically manage and distribute leads based on lead behavior and other triggers.
Further, it helps you see how each sales rep is performing and then redirect leads to team members who are closing at higher rates or are better suited for certain types of sales.
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