The greatest enemy of a marketer is repetitive, tedious tasks that keep you from focusing on your most important missions. This is where marketing automation comes into play and can make a real difference.
An increasing number of companies are using this technique to save valuable working hours, improve their sales performance and strengthen their relationship with customers and prospects.
In this article, we’ll find out why marketing automation is fast becoming a top solution for your business success. Learn more about the new partnership between Eminence and the powerhouse SALESmanago, and how marketing automation can help you achieve your goals.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate certain marketing operations to communicate the right message at the right time, to the right customer in the right place. Repetitive tasks, such as emailing, social media activities, and website actions, can be automated to increase productivity and efficiency. Implementing a marketing automation solution can help you to ensure that the right actions are taken based on the behavior of your users, by simulating the most natural dialogue possible.
Marketing automation is not limited to emailing, it also allows you to classify your contacts and transmit their data automatically to your sales team.
In B2B marketing, the term “marketing automation” applies mainly to the automation of email marketing campaigns whose objective is to generate and nurture qualified leads for sales representatives throughout their buying journey.
The key advantages of marketing automation:
First of all, marketing automation is above all a considerable time saver because it allows you to automate the process that guides a lead through the conversion funnel. Your marketing teams will then have all the time to focus on other more complex missions.
It also allows you to have a better understanding of your prospects. Automation tools will help you to collect information about your prospects’ interests and behavior. Was your email or SMS opened? Thanks to automation you will know if your leads are interested in your company and your content. If they don’t open your messages, you’ll know that you need to make adjustments to your strategy and the way you address your audience.
With marketing automation, you leave nothing to chance. Your qualified lead who has received a series of content from you, whether it’s in the form of emails or SMS, will automatically be referred to the sales team at a specific and crucial moment in their buying journey. This will help you accelerate the sales cycle, effortlessly and at a lower cost.
Read also :
→ Everything You Need To Know About Email Automation
Marketing automation: How does it work?
To automate a task, you must first set up a scenario, also referred to as a workflow.
Each scenario starts with an entry point that can be the registration of a new contact, the completion of a form, the addition of a product to an online shopping cart, etc. This entry point represents the trigger condition of the scenario.
Each workflow is composed of different scenarios that are all based on the following question: does this contact meet the XY condition? If the contact meets the requirement, it will move to the corresponding part of the scenario. If not, another branch of the scenario will be activated, and the contact will receive a scenario that corresponds to his or her answer.
The conditions that will trigger different scenarios are linked to the following criteria:
- Identity: relevant information is collected in your user database, such as the date of birth of your contacts. You can then use this data to send them an email on their birthday for example.
- Behavior: depending on a certain type of online behavior or action taken by the user such as opening an email, an action taken on your website, adding a product to Wishlist, etc. For example, you can send an invitation to a private sale to customers who have purchased a certain number of your products during a specific period, so that they can benefit from this sale.
Based on the result of each condition (yes or no), you can trigger different actions with each contact, such as:
- Sending them an automatic message
- Assigning points for your lead scoring
- Adding them to a new email list
You can also plan out a sending schedule. For example, if you schedule a series of welcome emails, you can specify that your contact will receive the first email immediately, then a second one a week later, and so on.
What is the purpose of using marketing automation software?
There are many ways to use marketing automation. Here are some sample scenarios to give you an idea of what can be done by using an automation solution:
- Send your contacts a birthday promotion:
This is probably one of the easiest scenarios to set up. If you have collected your contacts’ birthdates, you can easily schedule a personalized email to be sent on their birthday.
This allows you to improve your customer relationship in the long run and possibly even generate sales for a very low investment.
- Send a personalized welcome email:
Give your new subscribers a warm welcome with a personalized welcome email. This is the best way to establish a good relationship with your users right from the start.
This message helps consolidate your value proposition but also sets expectations from the start. Use this opportunity to thank your contacts for subscribing to your blog or newsletter and promote your most popular articles and offers in the welcome email.
- Develop an email series to improve your onboarding:
If you have a lot of users who sign up on your site without doing anything afterward, a good way to get them to take action is to set up a script that will help them navigate your site and discover your offers – this is known as onboarding.
Onboarding is the process of guiding your users through the creation of their accounts, discovering the features of your site, and above all presenting who you are and what you offer. For example, a scenario may start with a welcome email containing instructions on how to complete online registration. You can also set a condition to send a second email to users who have not completed their profile setup after a few days. For those who have completed their profile, you can send a final email to tell them everything they can do on your site.
- Automatic emails to re-launch abandoned online shopping carts:
If you operate e-commerce, you can set up an automation scenario in the case of abandoned shopping carts.
Related : → E-commerce: why do you need Marketing Automation?
For example, when a visitor adds a product to their cart but then leaves your site without having finalized their purchase, you can send them an email to remind and motivate them to finalize their transaction by offering them a discount code for example. You can also take this as an opportunity to highlight your delivery times, return conditions, and make product recommendations based on those that your visitors have put in their shopping carts.
- Use lead scoring to identify your qualified contacts:
Lead scoring refers to assigning points to your contacts based on their actions and interaction with your brand, to reflect their conversion potential. For example, you can assign points to a contact who has visited a certain page on your site, opened a certain number of your emails, filled out a form, etc. From this, you can then automatically assign them to a list of qualified customers that will be shared with your salespeople, you can also send them promotions to encourage them to buy.
- Create dynamic contact lists:
Create a smart list that will automatically update and add the most active contacts to your Workflow. Indeed, one of the most interesting features that marketing automation software offers. It is the ability to assign your contacts to lists based on their behavior.
This way, you can constantly improve your emailing strategy thanks to better segmentation. By creating dynamic lists, you will be able to send more relevant content and drive better engagement.
- Lead nurturing:
Lead nurturing is the process of maintaining and strengthening a marketing relationship with prospects who are not yet ready for a sales action or for whom that action was not made because it was too early in the relationship.
If a contact downloads several marketing offers you provide, such as white papers, or signs up for your webinars, they are probably very interested in your services or products. In this case, set up workflows that will help these types of contacts to move through the conversion funnel. When it comes to a prospect, focus on emails with content that offer solutions to a specific problem to turn them into a qualified lead (MQL)
This content can be presented in the form of customer case studies, free trial offers, or product demonstrations.
Eminence partners with SALESmanago
Orange, Pizza Hut, Yves Rocher, and Starbucks are among some of the major global brands that have chosen SALESmanago as their partner in marketing automation. SALESmanago is a leading European marketing automation provider, that manages business and customer relationships.
At Eminence, we are proud to announce our partnership with SALESmanago. It is part of our ongoing commitment to offer you the most innovative digital solutions.
Thanks to this platform, our digital experts will be able to manage your customer data, offer personalized and automated digital experiences, and set up complex emailing scenarios.
SALESmanago identifies your website visitors and analyzes their online behaviors to establish a unique profile for each user. The information is then processed by machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms that will deliver predictive and personalized offers at the right time and on all your communication channels (email marketing, live chat, website, social networks, mobile applications, etc.).
With SALESmanago, you can automate all kinds of marketing processes and quickly improve the effectiveness of your emails, the conversion rate of your website, and the productivity of your sales teams.