Marketing Automation: What It Does & How Does It Work?

1. Marketing Automation: What It Does & How Does It Work? Marketing is an integral and most important part of a business. No company can ever survive without generating leads for their business. In early days marketing use to be person to person, below image from Guru Movie is the best example of marketing during old days. In an image you can see Abhishek Bachchan standing in middle and people around them putting their bid to make purchase. Doing business and to gain traction of clients it requires to shout louder than others so that your client will hear you and can take action immediately. But now after couple of decade’s businesses has changed significantly. With the development of internet and various technologies, buyers make purchase online and so is businesses revolve around online medium to generate leads for their business. It is even before the search engine like Google was born, marketing was done through email channels and network of online directories. It is after Google number of platforms came into existence to generate leads online. Social platform is one such source to generate leads for business. Marketing automation is a term recently coined by marketers around the world, might be frequently heard by many of you. It is a technique by putting some automated software into use to automate our online marketing efforts. Many among you already doing similar repetitive work each day to generate leads for your business such as posting each day or alternatively in your Facebook fan page, sharing useful content in LinkedIn, sending email newsletter or nurturing your client through email. You might have to spend your considerable time doing this activity but now you can replace this entire repetitive process by switching to marketing automation and concentrate more on creative stuff. By putting marketing automation into use you can streamline, automate and measure your entire marketing efforts and increase your operational efficiency.

2. How Does Marketing automation work? Building relationship with buyers at very first stage of thought process with engagement marketing. Engagement marketing implies engaging with customers by taking care of their likes and dislikes. It involves building relationship with buyers for some definite goal. Thanks to digital tools which are now available for marketers to track performance of any campaign and present clearer picture of entire marketing efforts towards some definite goal ahead of Management. Marketing automation makes it possible by tracking customer’s behavior and interactions across channels, with this information businesses can identify who their customers are and what they want. Customers nowadays use number of platforms to search information and collect information. This is the very first stage of entire sales funnel or you can even call it a very first stage of marketing automation, here the users will look for various information to increase their awareness about the product or services. As an engagement marketing model business should try to utilize each and every platform to market their content at, which is frequently visited by their customers and try to resolve their queries in a very simple language. If at this stage client is satisfied with your solution provided he will remember you as a brand and will be happy to make purchase from you in future when need arises. During this stage email ids should be collected from users to later include them in email marketing campaign. Building relation thru Email Marketing Campaign Email marketing is something not recently coined but a proven technique adopted since last number of years by marketers to promote their product or services and build relationship with end users. But with the time passes and now with the help of number of tools one can easily schedule email in accordance with timing and relevance factor, which not only increases click through ratio but also overall effectiveness of the campaign. Such tools also allows to track the performance of the campaign. Personalization along with custom offers Recent studies have proved that high level of sales can be achieved with personalized communication and marketing automation is all about personalization. You need to know your visitors their likes, dislikes and segment them into category. ​Marketing automation collects customer information from website visit, email campaign and social media to produce more

3. targeted marketing approach. Customers can be segmented into various category on basis of information collected. Say for example recently an email campaign was run and as a content an introductory video about the product and its benefits were sent to 10,000 email subscribers. From entire email campaign around 500 email subscribers viewed that particular video, so now we can categorize them into “customers who viewed introductory video about product”, on basis of this category we can frame a new campaign targeted to those 500 subscribers instead of again sending to all 10,000 subscribers. These way we can create a personalized campaigns by making use of marketing automation. Leads should be properly nurtured Lead nurturing is again an important part of marketing automation, it involves cultivating potential customers by providing them with information they are looking for in the form of content. Such customers are at very early stage to make purchase, by providing them with valuable information brand should start building a positive relationship with client, which on later stage can be converted into lead. Still not convinced, let’s see some of statistics to prove the importance of lead nurturing. According to Forrester Research, Companies which adopt lead nurturing as a part of their online marketing strategy generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost per lead. (Forrester Research, 2014) Successfully nurtured customers make 47% larger purchase compared to non-nurtured leads. (Kapost, 2014) Detect sales readiness through lead scoring Lead Scoring is a technique which is used to rank leads on basis of its importance. Number of factors are taken into consideration while ranking any particular leads, they can range from interest shown by users to business, place in buying cycle and many similar things. Lead Scoring is not useful for each types of business, basically if you are one with minimum number of leads or your marketing department is yet not able to generate enough leads than lead scoring is not for you simultaneously if your sales team is complaining about bad leads than better you should concentrate on generating quality leads for the business. For such businesses lead scoring is a waste of time. Testing different variables with A/B testing Whether you call it testing different variables or A/B testing both sound similar to me. Many of you might be already aware of what A/B testing are meant for. With marketing automation you can similarly test different times to send an email, with different subject headings and even a

4. different content altogether. Apart from above there can be many other variables to name a few, below are some of them Call to action button, color schemes, Link placement location, site layouts, key graphical elements, checkout features. The ultimate goal to test different variables is to form a perfect mix which results into maximum outcomes.