Ricky Hayes / 8 Mins Read
Updated: May 30, 2023
Marketing automation is essential for ramping up on creating a memorable customer experience and maintaining that experience over time. Know the ways marketing automation can help to build customer experience
Marketing plays a pivotal role in the success of a business. Most brands strive to market their businesses uniquely and creatively, irrespective of their nature and size. For this reason, people are targeted on every possible channel by the companies to convert them into their customers.
With many businesses emerging, the marketing arena is becoming challenging to capture. Designing campaigns, launching them on multiple channels, keeping up with the customers' expectations, replying to customers' messages and queries on different media, and tracking their engagement, can become quite exhausting for marketers.
The repetitive job of marketing on multiple channels is also time-consuming. It takes a considerable chunk of time that could've been used to plan other business strategies. With the latest technology, you can make a difference in easing marketing activities while making them more effective.
Marketing automation is the answer to effective and efficient marketing.
Recommended: 5 Ways to Automate your Digital Marketing for Getting Constant Customers
Understanding Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is of great help to businesses. It helps identify the potential audience and directs them to the business's sales department, where they can be turned into customers.
Furthermore, marketing automation improves the sales funnel's efficiency; this results in increased conversions, happy customers, and, of course, increased revenue.
Lead generation is an essential step for the expansion of a business. Suppose a company automates its marketing strategies from the beginning to the point of sales. In that case, it leaves the team with ample time and information to focus on converting prospective leads into consumers.
Marketing automation gathers data from website visits, downloads, paid ads, and social media activity to give an insight into the business about the behavior of current and potential customers. It also helps the company understand its consumers’ interests and determine what stage they are in their purchasing journey. Using resourceful and rich data, a business can customize its strategies to generate the audience's desired response.
Let’s take an example; a person has visited an online store. He is viewing different items on the website. It indicates that he is on the beginning level of his buying journey. If he adds a few things to his wish lists or spends more time viewing certain products, it could signal the sales team to make their move and compel the person to complete the sale.
Marketing automation is not only to benefit the marketing department of your business. It has several other benefits in store for the different areas of your business.
Turning leads into customers is only possible when the marketing and sales teams' efforts are equally combined.
If the marketing department gathers leads, but they are not qualifying as buyers, marketing automation can resolve this issue. It can identify in which department the problem lies.
The feedback provided by the marketing automation tools can help the teams fetch the details of particular leads that can help them understand why the leads are failing to convert. Marketing automation can highlight issues such as the lead being unsuitable for the product, inadequate budget, or the lack of effective strategies to sell the product.
As marketing automation can track the consumers’ behavior and keeps a record of their buying journey, it can allow marketers to automate cross-sell or upsell to the consumers.
A business can tailor its emails and ads to target consumers and lure them into buying the products that complement their previous purchases
A business might have options for emails or landing pages that it wants to test as two separate campaigns. If it tests it manually, it can only run a few A/B tests simultaneously. On the other hand, by using marketing automation, a business can try all its options as different campaigns and track its performance at different levels.
The results obtained from the tests can help the business decide which campaign to stick to in the long term.
Manually targeting the potential audience across multichannel, i.e., on social media, emails, phone calls, or SMS, can take up much time. Due to the complexities and different ways of reaching out to your audience, there are increased chances of missing out on crucial prospects.
Marketing automation can be a time saver in such a situation. It effectively launches and streamlines all your advertising campaigns on all Omni channels. A business can personalize its emails and customize its social media campaigns based on each channel's audience.
Perhaps the most beneficial feature of marketing automation is lead scoring. Marketers and sales representatives often face the dilemma of prioritizing the parameters to qualify the leads. It gives rise to confusion and affects the coherence of both departments.
Lead scoring solves this issue in one system by considering the teams' performance indicators and their scores. The system detects and informs which leads are to be chased or dropped.
Marketers must understand their audience's behavior and reaction to emails, ads, and social media posts. Keeping a manual track of their website and email activities can be hectic and might not gather useful data.
However, marketing automation analytics provides marketers with a list of the strategies, campaigns, and activities generating a positive response from the potential audience. Using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning capabilities. A business can continue to work on the activities that are gaining customers and stop promoting those that are not generating the desired response.
Spending time on activities that automation tools can take care of is absurd. Employees' time on daily repetitive activities can be utilized constructively to develop sound policies to target more audiences.
By using marketing automation tools, businesses won’t have to worry about managing petty tasks and can divert their efforts to more important matters.
One more area of the business can benefit immensely from marketing automation. You can enhance your customers’ experience by automating your marketing efforts.
If you are wondering how? Then keep reading to learn how marketing automation tools can improve customer experience.
If your customers are not happy with your business, all your marketing activities, amazing products, advertising tactics, etc., will go in complete vain. Customers are the king of every business; therefore, their happiness is necessary if a company wishes to reign and make its mark in the highly competitive market.
Feedback from customers is an excellent way to know their sentiments and reviews about a business. Customers’ valuable feedback helps companies identify the flaws in their products or dealings and suggest remedial measures.
Surveys are an excellent way to generate input from consumers. It hardly takes a few minutes for your customer to fill in the survey form and provide you with their reviews and opinions.
Numerous feedback tools only require a few clicks from your customers, such as star ratings or number scales that ask how much they are satisfied with a product or how likely they will share your product in their social circle.
Moreover, some automation tools take customer feedback at different intervals of their buying journey; for instance, it can take input once the customer has received the ordered goods or viewed the various products on the website. It helps the business to implement strategies that can keep its consumers happy.
All the major businesses have a process called customer relationship management (CRM) that enables the organization to monitor their interaction with the buyers by analyzing the data derived through bulks of information.
Some businesses prefer having the complete data in one place, while others keep the customer’s data on multiple tools.
It's much easier to have the complete record of the customers in one place to access it all at once without having to switch apps. However, if the data is stored on different apps, then it must be kept in sync.
Having all the tools connected and updated, you will not have to search frantically for a customer’s data if he calls or email you.
Opt to set up a two-way sync between your tools. It will ensure that the customer’s data is updated on all devices. Your sales and customer care team can efficiently address customers’ queries by having their data updated and organized on all the tools.
Sending emails to hundreds and thousands of people can overwhelm marketers. Tracking their response and replies can get even more tiresome and exhausting.
To manage a long list of subscribers, automate customer emails. It will ensure that customers receive the email on time without fearing missing out on someone from the list.
How many sales qualify as enough sales? No number is enough when it comes to sales. If your marketing strategies are effective, they will generate more leads. It might not always be possible for your sales team to respond to the lead immediately after expressing their interest or concern about a product.
But no more losing leads! The marketing automation tool will address your lead’s concerns without wasting time. The marketing tool's auto-responding feature will acknowledge the lead after he has filled in the form.
Some advanced tools also notify the sales team members to contact the prospective lead. The faster you reach your lead, the more chance you have to make a sale. A delay in responding might end up in favor of your competitor.
An organization can never keep its prospective and current customers happy if the employees’ feedback is not taken.
An employee’s feedback is equally important as a customer’s. Employees, especially those who interact with customers, are better positioned to identify and highlight the problems that customers face. They can communicate the issues and offer a solution to enhance the customer experience.
Just as marketing automation tools can help a business create feedback forms and surveys for the customers, they can create the same for taking feedback from the company's employees.
There are many factors why a customer churns. It can either be your product, after-sale services, or little value for the price.
You can quickly identify the customers at risk of churn with the help of marketing automation tools. Their website activity, such as abandoning carts, looking for the FAQ of ‘How to cancel my order, their negative reviews, angry emails, or direct complaints, is a red flag for the organization.
Customers who are unhappy with your business and planning to switch to your competitor must be reached out quickly. You should email them or connect with them over a call to listen to their concerns and resolve them at your earliest convenience.
Most marketing automation tools can be integrated with event management platforms.
Integrating your automated tools with these platforms allows you to access the attendees' information quickly. It gives the business a resourceful insight into the customers who attended the events or webinars.
The marketers can offer the attendees more conferences, training sessions, or other informational events to keep them interested in the business.
In 2019, there were more than 5.11 billion mobile users across the globe. SMS marketing can soar the marketing campaigning of a company. The SMS opening rate is much higher than an email. It has a 98% opening rate. If a business sends a time-sensitive offer or essential announcement via text message, it will be read and responded to by the customers.
If you have your customers’ consent to send them text messages, ensure you have the automation tools to do the job. Sending out messages manually to hundreds or thousands of people is tiring and will consume much time too.
With an automated SMS marketing campaign, you can keep in touch with your customers and update them about the latest offers and products.
Marketing automation serves as a lifesaver for businesses with multiple locations by simplifying the complexities of multi-location digital advertising. From ensuring consistent branding to targeting local audiences, coordinating campaigns, and facilitating scalability, automation tools provide a comprehensive solution for managing marketing activities across various locations.
With the increasing number of emerging businesses, targeting and converting the audience into customers has become more demanding. Each company tries its best to catch the attention of its audience through its marketing campaign.
Manual work is not the question of a business that wants to outshine its way through the massive crowd of competitors. Marketing automation tools can minimize your work, spread a wider net to capture the audience and provide an excellent experience to the buyers.
The above-listed ways aren’t the only ones that can be adopted to improve the customer experience. Marketing automation has more to offer to your business.
With its immense benefits to the different areas of business, elevating consumer experience and decreasing the workload, the marketing automation system has become the favorite technology of many marketers.
Marketing automation is not pleasant; it has become a must for successful business organizations.
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Ricky Hayes is the Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Debutify - free Shopify theme, helping dropshippers build high-converting stores in minutes. He is a passionate entrepreneur running multiple businesses, marketing agencies, and mentoring programs.
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