Marketing Automation: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

Automation of old processes is happening across multiple industries so it’s no wonder that marketing is adopting it too. It’s a very welcome addition to many companies’ marketing departments, freeing up resources of many overworked managers and simplifying manual tasks.

But, as with any change, there are many myths and misunderstandings regarding marketing automation’s role. Today we’ll try to give everyone a better understanding of what it is and how it can improve your business operations.

Marketing automation is software that helps marketing managers be more efficient by automation previously repetitive manual tasks, such as emails, messaging, social media, and much more.

Automation is also helpful in achieving that elusive thing both companies and consumers strive for: personalisation. As more consumers become savvy to marketing, and targeting, marketers must create new ways of reaching them without things like a hard sell or generic campaigns. Consumers are much more responsive to personalised content that really speaks to them and that’s much harder to achieve and implement from a marketer’s side.

If marketing automation is starting to sound like a good move for your business, then read our list of the way businesses can expect to benefit from the implementation of automation software. There are quite a few.

Depending on the type of software you choose, and there are many, you’ll have the ability to build and easily access customer profiles. This is extremely important for personalisation as the profiles will be updated and populated with data constantly, helping to segment leads, and all you’ll have to do is access the simply presented data and build relevant campaigns.

BlueVenn’s software offers such a service, bringing together all customer data (on and offline). For marketers, it’s a way to cut out the middle man and make data accessible, even without extensive IT training.

It’s worth considering automation software if your business has an especially long or complicated sales cycle. Typically, the longer a sales cycle lasts, the more touchpoints are needed throughout in order to retain and convert a customer. Manually, this is a lengthy process that’s easy to mess up but with automation it’s part of a stream of actions that, whilst supervised, ultimately works independently.

Email marketing is here to stay but we can all agree that it could be improved if it’s to remain a successful tool. One way of doing this is through segmentation of your customer base and creation of separate campaigns.

With automation software, the idea of creating and deploying multiple email campaigns at once is no longer a scary one. It can all be done from one place, thus significantly reducing the use of resource whilst increasing relatability and targeting. By taking a more targeted approach, you’ll start to see growth in open and click through rates in no time.

Whilst there are quite a few myths floating around marketing automation, we’d like to dispel possibly the main one – automation aids spam. Many falsely believe that marketing automation is a way to incessantly spam a customer with ads, emails, messages but this couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, it’s a way to reduce needless communication, which we know doesn’t work, and increase thoughtful targeting instead.