It’s 2021 and the digital landscape is always changing, always evolving. Sometimes, it can seem a bit overwhelming to stay up to speed on all the trends and platforms to keep your business running successfully.
This is where marketing automation comes into play…
Marketing automation is essentially utilizing software to automate your marketing activities. Marketing automation has the power to elevate your email marketing game by providing a more personalized experience for your clients (and overall just improving your marketing team’s efficiency).
The 411
At its best, marketing automation is a combination of software and your digital strategy. It allows you to nurture your prospects with personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects into lifelong customers. With marketing automation set up, it essentially eliminates the need for you to send a one-off email every time you want to talk to your clients/prospects.
There are even awesome automation tools to create custom experiences for your contacts based on their:
- Behaviors
- Preferences
- Purchase Activity
- Email Open Rate
Here’s an example of marketing automation in full swing:
Your business has an automated email set up to send a customer an Abandoned Cart email 24 hours after they add an item to cart and do not make a purchase.
With your automation tool set up, this customer would automatically receive an email 24 hours after this touchpoint – no extra work from you. Pretty cool!
The Benefits
So, what’s in it for you with marketing automation? Salesforce says it best:
“Increased marketing ROI and overall growth.”
And what CEO or business owner is going to say no to that? Marketing automation enables you to:
- Generate better leads.
- Nurture those leads, with the help of automation to reduce the overwhelming amount of time being spent on constant communication.
- Personalize your customer’s experience with data gathered by your automation system.
- Create happy customers! With more targeted emails being sent to your prospects, they are less likely to experience that email burnout. With marketing automation, you can send targeted and customized messages to a selected group of your email list.
The Players (Our Favorites)
To take your marketing automation to the next level, you are going to want to connect it to your CRM platform. Here are 2 of marketing automation tools that we use most often and would recommend:
1. Pardot
Pardot is part of Salesforce’s software solutions, and one of our favorite options for B2B marketing automation. Pardot offers 3 main solutions:
- Marketing automation
- B2B Marketing Analytics
- Salesforce Engage
Take a look at more of the benefits that Pardot has to offer businesses:
2. HubSpot
HubSpot is a great inbound-marketing tool with its purpose of helping you close more leads. Take a look at their Growth Stack:
With HubSpot you get content creation tools, email marketing, and a marketing analytics dashboard. You can even get total Salesforce integration to really align your Sales and Marketing teams.
To Wrap it All Up
Here’s the lowdown about marketing automation – you need it. And it will make your business operations run way more efficiently and smoothly. To get the best results out of marketing automation, you should also sync it with your CRM to deliver the most personalized and targeted email campaigns.