What is Marketing Automation, and How Does it Work?

What are marketing automation services, and what do they do?.. Simply put, marketing automation services automate several actions across various types of campaigns. It’s increasingly difficult for marketers to keep track of and respond to their growing list of leads. Marketing automation makes it easier for them to respond to leads’ actions automatically—whether it be an email trigger, web trigger, social response or more. This makes marketing automation services ideal for inbound marketing and nurturing leads.

What is Marketing Automation, and How Does it Work?

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Let’s take a look at one of the primary marketing automation examples to get a clearer idea. Let’s say you want to make an email drip campaign. You might begin by offering a sweepstakes to generate a targeted email list for your web store. After a prospect has signed up, your marketing automation software can send a confirmation letter to generate excitement and also suggest products related to the grand prize. Based on a lead’s open rate, marketing automation might follow-up on a schedule reminding them of the time left before the sweepstakes is over—or informing them about a business you might be partnering or collaborating with for the sweepstakes. Finally, the lead is alerted to sweepstakes results and a follow-up email after that.

A lot of the follow-ups and messages in the example above can be enhanced based on lead scoring or actions like CTR’s and open rates. This means marketing automation services can make it easier for you to deliver hyper-targeted, personalized content to your leads and prospects—without having to add significantly to your workload or keep tabs on individual customers.

And marketing automation can do more than just improve email communications. It can tie into several different digital marketing strategies, making it a versatile resource for any marketer’s toolbox. Whether you’re trying to enhance your email campaigns, social media engagement, customer service practice or mobile marketing strategy, marketing automation services let you track customer activities and data across every aspect of your marketing efforts.

Things to Remember About Marketing Automaton

Marketing automation’s primary purpose is to nurture campaigns, but there’s another benefit, too: it can result in higher revenue by allowing you to capitalize more effectively on your leads. This is because marketing automation services provide a clearer view of what your leads react to, and lets you better deliver upon what is and isn’t working when it comes to reaching them.

But there’s an important thing to remember: marketing automation doesn’t mean sitting back and letting the software do all the work, nor does it mean your job security is at stake. Inbound marketing requires developing content that’s closely aligned with your customer interests and needs. It’s important, then, to continue paying close attention to what your customers seek out and are looking for. Automation doesn’t mean no-effort, so revise you marketing goals before getting started with marketing automation.

Marketing Automation Examples and Use Cases

How does marketing automation work in a practical sense beyond the email campaign example detailed above? One popular use case for marketing automation is to respond to hot leads at just the right time when they are ready to make a purchase. This is done by setting triggers across various events. Some sample events to track include page views, lead scores, initiating a conversation with a rep or chatbot and more. For example, you might use a tracking pixel on a web page to trigger a sales email on a lead once they’ve visited it.

Another great use of marketing automation is to keep previous customers engaged by continuing to target them after making a purchase. For example, a week after someone has purchased an item from your store, you might push out an email recommending related products to cross-sell the purchase. Those offering services might do something similar by alerting users to premium features that they might want after they’ve had some time to try the base features.

One easy-to-overlook use case for marketing automation is to track important events in the sales funnel or customer lifecycle. Let’s say you’ve been targeting a high-value customer, but they’ve gone inactive. Marketing automation can alert you to such an event, notifying you to push our an email or alert to reengage.

Marketing automation makes it easier for marketers to target, keep track of and engage with a high volume of leads with hyper-targeted communication. This allows you to increase your revenue by forging a closer connection with your customers across all areas of your digital marketing strategy.