Whether your organization currently uses marketing automation, or you are considering incorporating it, one of the most important things is to have a good understanding of how it functions and the various benefits it provides. Organizations that leverage marketing automation typically see major payoffs to this strategy when it is done effectively. Let’s take a broader look at marketing automation as well as five important benefits of using it.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation can be a bit of an intimidating topic for a novice. After all, it requires working with potentially unfamiliar technology and can be a bit time intensive on the front end. However, it isn’t necessarily as difficult to understand as one may fear and reaps significant rewards over time.
Marketing automation is a process where tasks that are frequently repeated are automated by designing workflows around them. These automated tasks are then utilized to bring in new customers and cultivate them, providing additional value to your organization.
You can read more about marketing automation or to see some examples of how it is put into place in this recent blog.
5 Key Benefits
Now that you better understand what marketing automation is, let’s take a look at five major benefits that you can see from incorporating it into your business’s efforts to further nurture and enhance relationships with your customers.
It Saves You Time
We’ve all heard the cliché time is money or that time is the most important resource you have. That’s because it’s true. Time is a precious resource. Fortunately, the rapid growth of technology allows you to save time automating frequent tasks. Now, many tools such as e-mail marketing software, online schedulers, online invoicing, and analytics can save you time.
A 2020 study found that 64% of employees reported that they had high levels of stress with workload as one of the major contributors. And we all hate those tasks that feel like busywork. After all, we generate the most enjoyment in our work from things that allow us to be creative and actively contribute to the meaningful goals of our business.
There are many technologies that can be leveraged to dramatically reduce these tedious tasks. Simple automation that sends a welcome e-mail with a promotion to customers who join a business’s mailing list can save hours of work over the course of a year. Tools like ActiveCampaign and can provide a high degree of support for your workplace, giving you more time to focus your energies on other things.
It Saves You Money
Since marketing automation save time and, as we noted earlier, time is money, it would lead you to assume that marketing automation saves money as well. Fortunately, the transitive property certainly does apply in this situation.
There are a number of ways in which marketing automation saves you money. First, it allows you to spend your energy more efficiently on things that computers cannot do. This can increase productivity dramatically while enhancing contact engagement.
Marketing automation can allow you to better optimize your marketing budget. Instead of spending money on labor costs to complete these repetitive tasks, that money can be spent on talent, broader marketing campaigns, or many other things.
Marketing automation can include integration with tools that help you collect money and in turn, segment your audiences based on their purchases, allowing you to redirect them to the next best step in the customer journey.
While investing in marketing automation software certainly has an upfront cost, the money spent more than pays for itself over time. When you start using marketing automation, you will receive a strong return on investment. In fact, 76% of organizations reported realizing a return on investment in less than a year.
It Avoids Errors in Processes
It is relatively easy to make a simple error, particularly when working on a repetitive task that you’ve done hundreds of times. These types of things tend to make us lose our focus at times. Unfortunately, making an error when dealing with customer communication can have negative consequences for your organization.
Fortunately, marketing automation helps you avoid errors by creating and implementing workflows that coordinate communications automatically. This means that customers will receive pre-planned communications at designated times triggered by specific actions.
This also ensures that the communications have been reviewed and validated ahead of time. This provides a bit of extra confidence that your communications with clients will be error-free and deliver the right message and the right time.
It Drives More Clear Communications
One of the keys of marketing is to get your point across to customers in a clear and compelling way. Marketing automation can help deliver this outcome by enhancing the clarity of your overall communications. An effective marketing automation campaign will carefully consider what messages to target different customer demographics with at what times.
Obviously, to be successful in this area, you will want to have a coherent strategy and avoid some of the common mistakes that people tend to make when structuring marketing automation. Effective use of marketing automation entails knowing your audience and carefully crafting messaging based on specific target demographics and customer needs to facilitate an effective marketing segmentation strategy.
Another important aspect of this process lies in leveraging the analytics provided by marketing automation to better inform the decisions you make about how you engage with your customers.
It Allows Your business to Run 24/7
Perhaps one of the best ways in which marketing automation promotes efficiency is that it lets your business run all the time. Even when your sleep, the marketing automation tools will continue to work your in your business, helping you meet your goals.
For customers, this helps create a more seamless experience. They receive quick responses in a time where we’ve grown to expect greater touch points and responsiveness. By designing workflows around more tasks, you will be able to let your marketing automation carry out tasks whenever an action triggers it, whether that be the middle of a work day or three in the morning.
This can be a particularly impressive benefit for small businesses. Marketing automation allows you to better connect with customers around the clock, making your smaller organization be able to leverage tools to deliver performance typically seen by larger entities.
