The importance of marketing automation services is frequently overlooked. They believe that the only things they can automate are email campaigns, lead creation, and distribution. Nonetheless, marketing automation software can streamline many aspects of your company.

It’s also a highly effective method of cultivating clientele. Effective marketing automation makes sure you always deliver exceptional, needs-specific customer service to leads as they come down the funnel and become devoted customers.

You’ve got the option to engage your customers with chat, email, messages, notifications, and more. In a study by the Annuitas Group, businesses that included marketing automation experienced an average of a 451% increase in qualified leads. Naturally, these results are only possible when marketing teams nurture prospects optimally with marketing automation tools.

Are you still not sure that investing in marketing automation is worthwhile? Let’s examine why it will be so important in 2024 and beyond.

Deliver the right message at the right time

Marketing automation is the perfect tool to resolve the inquiries of customers. Automate messages, emails, and notifications to help customers make their purchasing decisions. There are even solutions that let companies use live chat driven by AI and machine learning (we’re sure you’ve seen these in action yourself)! 

Automated communication helps customers with the right information, right when they need it. For instance, teams can set up live chat or chatbot to answer the most common questions about products. Live chat sends a message to your team member right when the lead sends it, and a chatbot can reply with specifics like product price, color, size, and more details based on trigger words.

For example, a healthcare provider could use marketing automation to send auto-reminders about appointments and procedures. Their customers could even be mailed a home care tips email after they are done with the appointment. They could also use B2B marketing automation to order new products or contact people to work with them.

Enterprises can stay in touch with customers and keep them engaged without lifting their fingers. Everything can be scheduled and programmed to save effort and expenses. Automated messages and emails can nurture every prospect at every step of the buyer’s journey until they become a paying customer. Even after conversion, automation tools can generate additional business with automated messages. 

Personalize for a better connection

Personalization is a big trend in a world where customers are the king. Personalized marketing efforts result in a 20% increase in sales, as shown by Instasales.

Even customers demand it. Forbes shows that 59% of consumers feel personalization to be a key factor in influencing purchasing decisions. Without a personalized approach, customers may simply leave and go for competitors.

Personalization can take up many forms in a digital marketing scenario. Messages, offers, and content – all can be optimized to meet the customers’ needs and move them further down the funnel.

Additionally, enterprises can automate personalization to put everything on autopilot. For instance, someone who is browsing a product page can be offered relevant offers on checkout. A person who looks at a toothbrush can be automatically pushed with a toothpaste recommendation. Someone who subscribes to your blog can get weekly emails that refer to them and are customized to their needs. The possibilities are endless! Marketing automation solution does the whole job by itself, after determining what is best based on individual preferences.

Consider this graph for an example of what a personalized email drip could look like for you.

Incorporate your CRM and marketing automation system

The best way to reap the most advantages is to integrate your marketing automation systems with business CRM. Access vital data from a single interface and keep track of all customer interactions.

Companies can view the entire customer journey and activities from their CRM, including data on each interaction your customers have had with your brand. As a result, nurturing becomes more efficient when organizations provide a context-based service. 

For example, Managed Maintenance Inc. integrated its CRM and marketing automation systems. Before integration, both the solutions used to work independently and didn’t bring in expected results. 

The company went ahead and integrated the systems into its marketing plan. As a result, they were able to gain full visibility into their buyers’ journeys, including all of their interactions with the company. The company used the data to focus on lead nurturing and lead scoring. 

Read Also: The Impact of AI and Machine Learning on Data-driven Marketing

Needless to say, the results had a major impact on the business. Managed Maintenance Inc. was able to increase leads by 75% and add to their revenue and profit.

Do You Need Marketing Automation?

With around 49% of companies and 55% of B2B businesses currently using marketing automation, the demand for automation software has been growing at an impressive rate over the past several years. And this should come as no surprise; as leads expect more consistent contact, more personalized content and offers, more “humanized” experiences, automation— paradoxical though it may seem— can help marketers to deliver it.

So, how do you know when your company is ready to embrace and reap the benefits of automation software? Here are some tell-tale signs.

1. You’re consumed by manual, repetitive, inefficient tasks.

Rather than focusing on new strategic initiatives, you spend your time building lists, managing leads, or creating emails and landing pages. And creating each new campaign is like reinventing the wheel. As a result, you spend entirely too much time carrying out tactical or reactive tasks.

Marketing automation programs decrease your workload, while increasing your output, by replacing repetitive work with automated rules and campaigns. Not only does this increase productivity and effectiveness, but there’s also the added benefit of improved happiness that comes from varied creative work instead of mundane repetitive tasks. And after you build an automated campaign once, you can send out thousands of personalized emails each day on autopilot.

2. You’re short-staffed or can’t scale up.

Your list of to-do’s seems never-ending, yet there is no room in the budget to scale up your team, and there are still only 24 hours in a day.

Using marketing automation software, one employee can compete with a 50-person marketing and sales department by setting up lead nurturing and marketing campaigns that are automatically triggered based on predetermined criteria.

3. Your competition is gaining on you.

Your marketing efforts are dwarfed by the campaigns coming from your competitor each week, and you just can’t seem to keep up with their level of online presence. If this sounds familiar, your competition has a not-so-secret weapon: marketing automation!

It’s easier to launch campaigns that cover multiple channels when the option to post to all accounts is one click away and lead nurturing is triggered automatically.

4. You don’t know how to display your success.

Your marketing team works just as many hours as your company’s other departments, but sadly you’ve got nothing to show for it. Your executives want to see how your work is converting, but you honestly don’t know. If this sounds like a page out of your diary, then it’s time to integrate marketing automation programs into your workflow.

Marketing automation systems can track everything from the effect of SEO effort on increasing traffic to your email marketing conversion rates to the effects of social media on revenue so that when it comes time to present the final report, you’ve got data to share. In fact, many programs offer printable reports that collect numbers from all aspects of your marketing ecosystem and organize them into a single readable document.

5. You use too many marketing tools.

You sign into one system to send your emails, another to schedule social media posts, and yet another to track your sales pipeline. Using several tools that don’t integrate, are costly, require expertise, or are difficult to maintain is not worth your time.

Using a marketing automation tool will allow you to cut down on cost by integrating your tools into one platform, saving you from wasting time and effort switching between 10 tabs and repeating work.

6. You spray and pray with your marketing.

You send email blasts to everyone on your database because you don’t have the time to create targeted campaigns. If you have tons and tons of names on file, but no way to organize or sort them, then most of your sent content is probably reaching the wrong audience. Your customers aren’t all looking for the same things for the same reasons, so they shouldn’t be marketed to in the same way.

Marketing automation programs can separate your contacts into segmented lists based on gender, job title, recent interactions, and more. Lists make it extremely easy to send tailored content or offers to leads based on shared qualities so that your content hits the right mark.

Marketing automation programs also allow you to target contacts based on their position in the buyer’s journey, so that repeat customers aren’t tempted to unsubscribe after being emailed surface-level offerings for 2 weeks straight. These programs will help your strategy become more intuitive and efficient so that you can get the right point across to the right people without hours and hours of research.

There are additional advantages unique to automating your email campaigns, a major component of a nurturing strategy. Drip email campaigns not only automate the process of sending emails but also allow emails to be tailored to people at different stages of the Buyer’s Journey. Other major benefits include:

• Personalization opportunities in email content
• Long-term planning for campaigns with automated scheduling
• Low-hassle revision and continuous improvement through access to testing
• Maintenance of clean and well-segmented lists
• Boosts in traffic to the company website and even SEO
• More time and resources for the marketing team to devote elsewhere

How to Make the Most of Marketing Automation

Here we will present some useful tips to derive the best results from your marketing automation tools. Keep the following in mind:

Don’t overdo it

Nurturing is a gentle art. Don’t be too pushy as it might discourage conversion. Always create a standard nurturing plan for all leads that come through the funnel. A standardized process makes sure your sales representatives don’t miss out on anything or overdo the efforts.

Luckily, a marketing automation tool will help nurture leads without appearing salesy. There are several techniques that can help enterprises do the job successfully:

1. Use the automation platform to sort leads and create buyer personas. Develop a database of targeted content aligned with the most common buyer personas. Use the tool to release the targeted content to the right customers.
2. Take the help of multichannel lead nurturing. Use emails, blogs, ads, and anything that is suitable to your brand. Personalize the content and make it relevant to your target audience.
3. Automate lead follow-up. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when it’s time to contact a lead or send a reminder. The whole process can also be automated to save time and effort.
4. Make the most of email marketing. It’s still one of the best ways to nurture and engage customers. Automate email drips with proper personalization using marketing automation solutions.
5. Keep track of all customer interactions. This will help determine where the leads are in the funnel. Accordingly, refine communication for better results. 

Stick to the plan and follow a set nurturing strategy for the best results.

Make the experience consistent

Consistency is the key to a great nurturing and growth marketing strategy. Everything should be done to ensure your marketing messages don’t confuse your audience. We like it when everything plays out according to our expectations. The same applies to customers, and they expect consistency in any form of nurturing.

For example, a company sends emails to prospects every Friday. Experts suggest continuing to follow the plan and sending communication only on Fridays. Otherwise, customers will not know what to expect. 

Don’t send them a message on Friday the first week and shift to Wednesday on the next. Always stick to Fridays. The same applies to any effort taken for nurturing. If someone publishes 2 blogs per week, stick to the plan. Don’t make it 3 blogs or 1 blog each week. This messes up the customers’ expectations and leaves a bad taste in their mouths.

Marketing automation tools make it easy to maintain consistency. Schedule interactions beforehand and keep prospects nurtured even if you are on vacation. 

Consistency should be maintained in all aspects of nurturing. If companies choose to communicate with customers via text, they should stick to it. If they use emails, they should continue to do so. Don’t change channels in between. It might make the customer confused, and they may never even get the message.

Always be consistent, no matter what!

Make personalization count

Using a customer’s name in the email is not counted as personalization anymore. The term has grown to become a full-fledged strategy encompassing various marketing activities. Personalization needs time and research. Companies can personalize their approach only when they know something personal about their customers. 

Spend time and use data to know customers. Learn about user preferences and create buyer personas based on demographic data generated by automation platforms. Personalization is possible only when companies have a complete understanding of its customers.

Netflix is a great example of personalized marketing. The platform suggests content based on the personal preferences and past activities of the user. Now the company is using the same tactics to show personalized artwork to subscribers. 

Naturally, the efforts paid off significantly and helped Netflix earn 30% more revenue. 

Personalization needs to make customers feel brands understand and value them. Use the data from marketing automation systems to fuel personalized nurturing approaches for more conversions.