Lead generation, segmentation, email marketing – marketers have a lot to do in everyday life. Targeted marketing automation helps you to speed up processes. But what exactly is behind this term? We explain to you in a very concrete way what Marketing Automation does and why it can decisively advance your company.

What is Marketing Automation?

Admittedly, the term marketing automation sounds a bit paradoxical at first. After all, marketing is something that takes a lot of effort and is completely personalized – sending e-mails, placing ads, making calls … you know things.

However, anyone who takes a closer look at the topic of marketing automation comes to a different assessment: In practice, the method can make a lot of things easier for you. It helps you prioritize everyday marketing tasks and automate unnecessary manual work. In the end, this leaves you even more time for your craft, namely marketing itself.

In most cases, marketing automation runs through a software solution. When a lead first contacts your company, the program creates a user profile in the background.

The profiles form the basis of every marketing automation. All interactions between you and the user are recorded and automatically enriched with individual data. And here comes the highlight: You can use this information to automate targeted marketing measures – for example, follow-up campaigns, welcome sequences, or customer reactivation.

The system accompanies the user automatically from the lead to the customer and from the customer to the reseller through the complete funnel. You will quickly notice that this not only leads to more conversions but also significantly more satisfied customers.

What does marketing automation bring to your company?

Marketing automation revolutionizes your company’s strategies. With data automation tools, streamline tasks, personalize customer interactions, and analyze campaign effectiveness. Drive growth, engage customers, and nurture leads with precision while optimizing resource allocation. Embrace marketing automation to enhance efficiency and achieve remarkable results in today’s dynamic business landscape.

That sounds pretty theoretical. But in everyday life, the method can save you time and budget. Ultimately, the automation of processes even leads to more leads developing to customers and thereby increasing your sales:

• Because Marketing Automation collects all interactions and data from leads independently, lead segmentation is easier. You can differentiate all users in the system according to demographic characteristics, interactions, and other characteristics – and use different marketing measures accordingly.
• If you have segmented the leads, you can have them addressed automatically. You can use the system to send automatic emails, provide further information about documents, and thus qualify the lead. Marketing Automation helps you in lead nurturing.
• The method also supports you in determining the maturity level of leads. What is the status of a lead? Is it ready for sale? A so-called lead scoring is created, which automatically assigns each user an individual score – based on their interactions and data. The higher the number of points, the more the lead is suitable for addressing sales.
• Even after the lead conversion, Marketing Automation can help develop the customer into a reseller. How about personalized, automatically sent discounts – based on the interests of the user? Or with an automated push message from the app after the user has not opened it for a long time?
• You can even make internal processes more efficient. The system creates individual tasks – for example, sales employees could automatically point out that it is worth calling a customer because they have been reading about a certain product for a long time.

Tips for good marketing automation

When using marketing automation, a risk management approach is crucial. Ensure data security, comply with regulations, and protect customer privacy. Test automation processes, monitor results, and have contingency plans in place. Prioritize risk mitigation to maximize the benefits of automation.

As you can see, marketing automation can help in many ways. In practice, however, this can quickly lead to excessive demands. The most important thing in planning marketing automation is therefore the planning itself.

All automated messages and measures must be coordinated with one another and built on one another. It does not help you if the user is dragged into a follow-up campaign after downloading a document that he has already gone through. On the contrary, that would even be counterproductive!

To help you do this, here are a few important marketing tips:

Tip 1: Identify areas

First, take a look at where you can use marketing automation at all. It is often useful to start small and then slowly increase. Most often, marketers start automating email routes and campaigns after user interaction. You can also play your social media posts automatically. Or you can focus on the automatic personalization of emails, chatbots on the website, or personal prices for online shopping.

The potential is unlimited. But you should be clear about which areas you want to automate. Only then can you start planning.

Tip 2: Define rules

Once you have identified areas, it is important to think about rules according to which the method should work. You must have the goal of providing the right content at the right time for the right target group – and all of it is fully automated.

The simplest of these rules is follow-up for campaigns: If a lead has registered for a webinar, he will later receive emails on this topic that contain additional and useful information. Another rule could be that customers who have not bought from you for a long time will automatically receive a personal discount. The rules of course depend on which areas you want to automate.

Defining these processes is important and forms the basis of marketing automation. Therefore, consider the rules together and not separately. Otherwise, you run the risk that the automation overlap. You will probably invest most of the time for this part of the planning – you will save that once the automation is set up.

Tip 3: Select and personalize content

Content is of considerable importance in marketing anyway. But once again in automation. Your content must not only fit the target group but also the rules that you have defined. A follow-up is usually supplementary content with added value. An email on customer loyalty, on the other hand, must be worded differently and should contain an incentive. And for content in the chatbot, what matters is an explanatory character.

Your advantage: Marketing Automation allows you to personalize the content. This means that a blog post, a push message, or an email does not look as if it had been sent by the robot. A personalized address or product recommendations can help here.

Tip 4: Set up and measure marketing automation

Once you have identified the areas, established rules, and formulated content, the rough plan for automation is ready. Now it’s time to find the right tool and implement it. It is still important to regularly check the activities and correct them if necessary – because, as always in marketing, data reveals everything.