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Marketing automation simplifies and shortens the marketing process seamlessly. As a result, communication and conversions happen a lot quicker. The modern norm is to use and process data to have an apt marketing automation strategy for your business.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation uses software to automate monotonous marketing work. Tasks like SMS marketing, email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns are automated by marketers to improve efficiency.
With marketing automation, everything is done by software or a set of tools. This goes in tandem with quick replies, quick actions, quick responses to customers’ queries, quick updates to customers in case of any changes in the services or products offered, and any other essential communication regarding the company itself.
Where marketing automation helps:
Lead nurturing and lead scoring, analyzing leads and determining the best strategies to categorize and nurture them. Marketing teams nurture leads and hand them over to the sales teams. A high conversion rate is an indicator that the nurturing process is working.
Social media marketing. You can automate tasks such as posting to multiple sites on a schedule. Social media marketing involves posting relevant content like live videos, texts, prerecorded videos, images, GIFs, and animations on all your social media engagement platforms, talking to your audience, giving an ear to their complaints, and addressing their concerns.
Tracking and analytics for website visitors, email campaigns and online promotions.
Email automation. This often overlaps with lead nurturing. Email automation is a process where you send targeted email campaigns to your customers through a pre-built and self-operating system. First, it saves time as it allows you to schedule campaigns when you intend them to go out. It also helps with prospecting.
Marketing Automation Trends
Statistics back up the major trends and styles in marketing automation.
1. Chatbots
Chatbots are the darling of marketers and business managers as they handle customer support and service. They keep clients engaged without having personnel do anything the entire process. As a result, chatbots were the leading automation trend in 2021 and are projected to grow even more.
2. Email Personalization
Email personalization is when marketers use the information provided to them by their clients and craft messages tailor-made for particular individuals. Customization is now the thing. Therefore, what is not personalized is not given attention. Emails that are not personalized are ignored by clients most times. Because people have a lot of work at hand and are busy, people read only what has directed them or a message meant to be theirs. And one of the easiest ways of letting a customer know that the news is theirs is by personalizing it.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
When a brand thinks of artificial intelligence, it often thinks of sentient robots that imitate human actions and conversations. While these are fun villains, they aren't accurate representations of how artificial intelligence is used in modern business. Artificial intelligence is often used to automate business functions and personalize experiences for users. For example, AI is usually planned for email newsletters when companies want to send messages to their entire customer base but want the emails to seem genuine and sincere. So, they use AI to pull data from the CRM and personalize the message with the customer's information.
4. Social Media Marketing
Automated social media marketing is an ever-growing practice. With tools like Buffer, managers can schedule posts to go out when they decide. This works for planning.
Marketing Automation Statistics
A. Benefits
1. 63% of companies using marketing automation outperformed competitors
According to Moosend, the current leading brands using marketing automation beat their competitors regarding sales and ROI.
2. Increased Sales productivity
77% of business owners had an increase in conversions after using marketing automation software, according to Sales Fusion. Additionally, marketing automation reduced marketing overhead by 12.2%, and The sales pipeline rate of B2B marketers using marketing automation increased by an average of 10%.
Marketers see the potential of marketing automation and are already taking advantage of the marketing automation market. Productivity, conversions, and sales rates are all positively impacted by marketing automation.
3. Increase in the number of leads
80% of the top-performing companies using marketing automation technology for the last three or more years have already experienced the benefits of automation in terms of increased revenue and customer engagements.
Additionally, Email Monday reports that 63% of companies wholly or partly outsource marketing automation, which means the more significant part of the marketing automation industry is being outsourced at the moment. Only 37% of companies rely on themselves for their automation needs, while a mere 12% decide to leave it all to a specialist.
4. Using chatbots can help save up to 30% of customer support costs.
It is predicted that businesses spend nearly $1.3 trillion every year to service customer requests. Fo the companies that have incorporated chatbots into their marketing automation claim that chatbots can help save up to 30% of customer support costs, according to Chatbots Life.
Chatbots can help out a business, and it’s good to hear that 47% of consumers are open to buying items through a chatbot. By 2021, chatbots should take over 85% of customer service requests.
5. Automated social media posts and ads can save you more than 6 hours per week
According to Instapage, The latest marketing automation stat reveals that you can save 6+ hours a week using automation in social media. Running your brand’s social media channels is already a challenge, but leaving it to the bots can free up your time for you to focus on what matters. Time is money, so you’re saving money by investing in technology.
6. Email automation is a big deal
While social media marketing might be considered most suitable for automation, email automation is more popular, according to a 2018 report from Getresponse.
The Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Excellence report from 2018 suggests that the top three most used marketing automation techniques are email automation (64%), profiling and targeting (26%), and personalization through dynamic content (23%).
7. 58% of marketers use automation software to upsell products
According to Moosend, 58% of marketers consider upselling one of the most important uses of marketing automation. Upselling involves getting your customers to make additional purchases or spend more money through strategic marketing communications.
You can use automation software to set up and send automated post-purchase emails to your customers that recommend additional products based on their personal purchase history, interests, or how they’ve interacted with your website.
B. Return On Investment
8. Increasing marketing ROI is the top priority for a marketing technology strategy to achieve
65% of marketing influencers agree that increasing marketing ROI is the top priority for a marketing technology strategy. In addition, more than half of the participants from this study by Ascend 2 agreed that your marketing ROI determines how successful an MA system is.
9. Marketers say that marketing automation is most responsible for improving revenue contribution
Increasing revenue is a long-term goal for both marketing and sales. If the strategy proves successful, that’ll improve sales and revenue. According to Lenskold, 78% of successful marketers say that marketing automation is most responsible for improving revenue.
Marketing automation can automate tasks you don’t want to focus a lot of time on. This gives you extra time to focus on sales and earn more money.
10. Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
This stat from Nucleus Research shows how automation can increase sales while reducing costs. With that, automation then gives you more time to focus on conversions. Additionally, marketing automation can manage these strategies and get rid of outsourcing. If you don’t need to outsource, your marketing overhead can decrease.
11. 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase
80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase. This stat from Venture Beat shows us that over half of the 43 automation platforms surveyed increased leads and conversions. This is because marketing automation connects marketing and sales to reach the same goal, ultimately increasing the ROI. The stats show how marketing automation will most likely be a successful investment.
12. 57% of B2B marketers used response and value metrics to measure ROI
According to Slideshare, most B2B marketers rely on response and value metrics to measure ROI. Response metrics tell you if your audience likes what they’re receiving, and value metrics tell you if you’re making money at the end of the day. If your response metrics decrease, you can use your marketing system to start A/B testing and retarget your audience. If your value metrics decline, you may need to reevaluate if your automation system targets the right business goals.