Marketing automation is a key buzzword that has been floating around the digital marketing space for a good number of years already. If you haven’t gotten started with it, maybe it’s time to at least consider marketing automation to your marketing mix.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a way to get specific marketing tasks done autonomously. It boils down to a set of triggers. If a user fulfills a parameter (trigger) an automated predetermined action is done.
A basic pattern consists as follows:
If user signs up to an email newsletter;
then email user receives automated welcome issue.
There are many tools out there to get you started on marketing automation, some of them are free. Automation takes some time to set up but in the long run it frees up the repetitive day to day tasks.
Categories of Marketing Automation:
Social
Social automation is usually done 2 ways. The most common use of this is scheduled posting. Frequent updating and posting is key for a healthy social media page, unfortunately this takes a lot of time. Scheduling for automated posting saves you the time.
Another commonly used way for social automation is through chatbots. Chatbots allow inquiries on messaging platforms without having to personally reply to each and every one. To know more about how to use chatbots for your system check out What’s Conversational Commerce And Why You Should Do It.
Email is the most commonly used marketing automation vehicle. This is usually done through lists and triggered responses. Email lists can be automated decreasing the time for it’s management. Automated welcome messages upon signing up, and auto sorting and segmentation, are some ways lists can optimized for performance.
Triggered responses can offload some common inquiries by identifying keywords in the email response of the sender. Other methods of triggered responses can be followups after a preset period of time, and thank yous after purchases.
Web Tracking
Most common use case of web tracking automation is remarketing. When a prospect visits your website this already entails some sort of intent of the user regarding your product. Automated followups based on this action are highly effective. Prompting for signups, segmenting interests are just some ways you can use automation to lead your prospect down the purchasing funnel. Mobile executions of this exist as well, app notifications and SMS executions are possible.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is the culmination of all of the past mentioned marketing automation categories. The objective of lead scoring is to identify if a user is a MQL (minimum qualified lead). Marketers can customize parameters than lead up to this decision, assigning actions that can lead up to a score.
Example:
Visit webpage = 1
Download White paper = 5
Subscribe to newsletter = 3
Getting Started
Now that you’ve gotten a basic understanding, where do you start? Best place to begin is email marketing since it delivers the best results. Check out our article on 4 ways email can make your marketing more efficient to know more.
Source:
Burnette, M. (2015, September 11). Marketing Automation 101: The Basics. Thrive Creative Labs. http://www.thrivecreativelabs.com/blog/2015-09-11-marketing-automation-101-basics
Getting Started with Marketing Automation. Mailchimp. https://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/getting-started-with-marketing-automation/html/
Hanington, J. (2013, May 16). 10 Steps to Pass Marketing Automation 101. Pardot http://www.pardot.com/marketing-automation/10-steps-to-pass-marketing-automation-101/
Getting Started with Marketing Automation. Lead Pages. https://www.leadpages.net/landing-pages/getting-started-marketing-automation
