MARKETING AUTOMATION: HOW DOES IT WORK?

Marketing automation hints at software platforms and technologies designed to streamline, automate, and optimize repetitive marketing tasks and workflows. The primary thrust is to save human marketers’ time while boosting operational efficiency and driving more effective campaigns overall.

In practice, marketing automation handles tedious or time-consuming responsibilities related to managing segmented customer and prospect data, executing multi-channel digital campaigns, centralizing analytics, and generating performance reports to refine strategies. That frees up personnel to focus on big-picture direction and revenue-generating tasks instead of manually pushing one-off emails for example.

Sophisticated marketing automation centralizes all customer information and interactions then triggers customized follow-up responses based on defined criteria and schedules. It facilitates personalization powered by integrated data infrastructure connecting CRM and sales platforms, email, social media ads, landing pages, and more.

So when a prospect clicks a link in a nurture email today indicating interest in a product line, marketing automation can schedule them to receive a series of tailored content offers over the next two weeks leading up to a discount coupon. Or when a customer service record gets updated indicating dissatisfaction, the contact can automatically enroll in a re-engagement and loyalty campaign.

Marketing automation enables critical capabilities like lead scoring, lead nurturing workflows by demographic filters, funnel analysis of prospect engagement and lifetime customer value. That supports data-driven decisions and informed strategy adjustments to continually optimize activities for ROI.

The breadth, depth and integration of customer data managed through marketing automation allows executing orchestrated campaigns across multiple platforms and make sense of engagement. It proves invaluable with rising customer touchpoints, channels and amounts of actionable data. Automated tasks also apply to social media posting, personalization, campaign creation, multivariate testing, and database hygiene like removing duplicate records.

In an era where marketers deal with exploding stacks of technologies, relying on marketing automation to corral key functionality through one system provides immense efficiency and productivity gains. With improved reporting visibility as well, resources can better focus on big wins.