Marketing Automation as a business generator

If we at Good Rebels saw Marketing Automation as a reality in 2015, today we can say that it’s a necessity, and in the future it will be imperative for every company to speed up, automatize, and measure their marketing and sales processes within the digital space.

91% of users think that marketing automation is of “vital importance” for the general marketing campaign success in every communication channel. Marketo.

In a setting where the user receives a ton of impacts through different changes, it’s fundamental that these impacts have the right messages, in the right place (where the audience can find it), and at the right time.

That’s why the most important thing is to be familiar with the customer life cycle, to know all the moments and touch points the customer has with our product or brand, how we can segment our market, and optimize our different actions.

Due to the abundance of information, we can obtain from the various stages in the sales funnel; it’s now just about mandatory to use a marketing automation tool.

If this solution is essential within a digital environment, the primary users and beneficiaries are the marketing and sales departments, but even more so are those in business intelligence.

Companies that are successful in “lead nurturing” generate 50% more leads with 33% less CPL. Forrester Research

And what are the benefits for my company?

Marketing Automation helps sales and marketing departments in five major areas:

• Generating leads or prospects
• Segmenting and qualifying customers
• Knowing the Customer Lifetime Value
• Loyalty and link with clients
• Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI)

How do we capture leads or sign-ups? How do we managed and segment these sign-ups or potential customers? How do we optimize and create value for our current clients? These matters should be the fundamental pillars that direct the work of our marketing and sales units.

We must manage all the information previously mentioned on a platform or technological solution that makes the following available to us:

1. An information archive: a place where we store all the information we have about actual and potential clients, as behaviors and interactions that let us segment and send the right messaging at the right time for each customer.
2. A content management system: a straightforward and agile system that lets us manage, create, and automate our different touchpoints with our clients and market processes through our channels online and offline.
3. A learning tool: space where we can try, measure, and optimize different marketing actions and process. It will be where we find out what our impact on sales is and we’ll understand how, where, and when they work to help us improve both our engagement and ROI.

But, what should we evaluate within our marketing automation solution?

Platform capabilities

• Email marketing: automated and personalized emails that are unique in every moment for every user.
• Forms: website-generated forms, microsites, or landing pages aimed for lead capture.
• Landing Pages: can create dynamic pages for our products and promotions with speed and ease without having to go to the IT department.
• A/B Testing: coming up with two versions of any of the elements we previously mentioned and measure which one is more effective.
• Organic positioning: Analyzing keywords and getting recommendations about positioning.
• Familiarity with the Customer Lifecycle: Manage and interact with users in every part of the conversion funnel.
• Programmed segmentation: Have an available list of user segmentation according to internal criteria.
• Site search: Extract, store, and analyze search terms used on your website.
• Automation of processes: The ability to automate all communications and interactions with the customer or lead throughout the customer journey.

Developing and launching campaigns

• Segmentation: Choosing users from our database using data on their behavior, profile, and interests.
• Nurturing: understanding the user through content and creation and how the user is interacting with it.
• Multichannel campaigns: the following of behavior on different channels and launching personalized campaigns.
• Personalization of emails, campaigns, landing pages, and web page structure and content according to consumer behaviors and attributes.

Coordination between teams and departments

• Tracking different interactions, such as the constant updating of the information we capture about users on/offline, letting us have a CRM with the most up-to-date information.
• Concrete alerts by activity and priority in agreement with the lead status and how close the lead is to conversion.

Analytics

• ROI and Engagement: control panels that let us identify different results on the various sales and campaign channels in all parts of the funnel.
• Client traceability and attribution: know all the user’s interactions, being able to identify touch points before sign-up or purchase. This way we’ll be able to establish an attribution model that can assign conversion to the person responsible.

Therefore, we’ve seen how a marketing automation system’s success does not only rest on the implementation of the tool itself but also in the constant learning marketing and sales teams carry out. This effort translates into a continuous improvement in workflows and business processes.

However, let’s not forget that not even the most powerful technology can replace the creativity of the human brain.