What is marketing automation?

When you work in marketing or sales, you quickly realize there are many activities and assignments that need to be done regularly and are quite repetitive. Sending order summaries is a good example. All these activities can be automated so that they don’t require direct supervision or manual work – they happen automatically. And that is what marketing automation is all about.

Marketing automation – explanation

Do you have experience with marketing automation? Shortly put, marketing automation is a technique that’s based on using specific tools and platforms that do the job for you. Frequently, these tools are more accurate and quicker, too. Nowadays, almost anything can be automated. Let’s have a look at a few examples.

Marketing automation: examples

Depending on the tool or the area of the business, marketing automation can be more or less advanced. Today, it’s still unlikely that you will be able to automate the whole area of your business, but you can surely automate most of your repetitive, mundane work. There are at least four areas of your sales and marketing activities that you can automate.

SOCIAL MEDIA 

If you want to automate social media posts, you can opt for platforms such as NapoleonCat or Sprout Social. With these platforms, you can easily manage your social media accounts, including creating and scheduling posts for publication. Of course, you can schedule a post for automated publication at a specific time, but you still have to write the post yourself.

EMAIL MARKETING

When it comes to email marketing, marketing automation is very advanced. There are tools like MailChimp or Omnisend that provide you with ready-made templates for your emails and newsletters. With these platforms, you can easily prepare emails, select the target audience, and schedule sending a given email at a specific time. Not only do such platforms help you save time and money, but they are also better from the technical point of view because your server is not loaded with thousands of emails that need to be sent.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Marketing automation comes in handy also concerning customer service. Thanks to intelligent assistants such as voicebots and chatbots, you don’t have to engage your employees in every conversation with a user or customer. If your customer just wants to know the opening hours of your store, you can use a chatbot to provide them with this information. The same applies to questions about:

• Order status
• Scheduling appointments
• Product availability
• Return policy
• Shipping and payment options

And many more. And with platforms such as Tidio, ChatFuel, and SentiOne, you don’t even have to build such a bot from scratch – you can use these platforms and their ready-made solutions. As a result, all you have to do is configure and adjust the bot to your needs (e.g., set communication scenarios). Estimations show that chatbots are now capable of conducting almost 70% of all customer conversations without human involvement.

Marketing automation scenarios

Here, platforms like iPresso and Hubspot are extremely useful. With them, you can create specific scenarios comprising activities that your customers can perform and your company’s response to them. With these scenarios, you can automate even more elements of your everyday work. Let’s use two examples to show you what marketing automation scenarios are all about.

Scenario 1: Abandoned cart

That’s a common problem in almost every e-commerce business. Customers put products in the cart, but they forget about them or leave the page without finishing the purchasing process. For you, that’s a lost sales opportunity. Obviously, you want to rescue these abandoned carts, so you decide to create a marketing automation scenario. When a given customer leaves the store without finishing the order, the system automatically sends them a reminder. Such a reminder can be sent after one hour, a day or even a week – depending on what you set. And what can such a reminder look like? That depends on your communication tools, but usually, it’s an email or a push notification.

Scenario 2: New account on your platform

Suppose you run a SaaS platform, and there is a new user who has just registered for the trial period. The system automatically sends them a welcome message with all the relevant information to help this new user during the trial period. After a week, you can send them another message, asking if they are satisfied with the trial. This way, the new user feels taken care of, and your CX goes up.

Marketing automation of content

The last element we want to mention is content automation. Today, with advanced AI and SEO tools, you can partly automate creating content, such as blog posts, newsletters, and social media posts. These tools help you make your texts fully grammatically correct (Grammarly) and SEO-friendly (SurferSEO). It goes further as you can even employ AI to write the content for you. It’s not necessarily a good idea, but it’s possible (with tools such as CopySmith and Jasper AI).

In the next blog post, we are going to show you why marketing automation is so important in your business.