The technological development has marked a new way for companies to relate to people. Time has become essential, and mechanization and streamlining of processes has become a key requirement for success.
Marketing automation was born due to the excessive workload in companies, which made it impossible to have individual relations with clients.
In other words, the database keeps growing and it is no longer easy to perform manual tasks, such as email marketing campaigns, replying on chats, drawing conclusions based on a myriad of information, etc.
Firstly, it is important to understand that the goal of this concept is to make the most of one of our most valuable resources: time.
Why? Why is time important? The concept of automation refers to the layer of technology applied to human intervention in processes. This is our main focus, to stop performing tedious and repetitive tasks in order to bring forth strategy and creativity; in the end, this is the key that allows us to grow and boost our business.
So, what is marketing automation?
We can say that it refers to the use of a software that allows us to create workflows based on pre-set conditions, that activate different areas related to marketing automatically.
The triggers of this workflow are usually related to the behavior of a client/user within your website, or they can be activated by an already set event.
In connection to the actions triggered, we can name a few of them such as: welcome email, satisfaction surveys, follow-up of a process, updating your database or whatever your software allows.
How does Marketing Automation work?
The first step for automation on any marketing campaign is creating the workflow or scenario in which we want to reduce our operational time. Each workflow starts with an entry point or trigger, which is linked to a variable that sets off multiple and countless possible actions.
For instance, you can have scenarios that have as a starting point the subscription to a new contact. Another example could be the action of a user adding a product to its e-commerce cart. In any case, this starting point will set off the rest of the actions on your workflow. Once you have selected your entry point, the rest of your workflow will develop accordingly.
This process can be linear or like a complex tree, made up by conditional instructions that branch out into two different paths and keep on multiplying with additional conditions.
A marketing automation software also allows you to add timers and/or delays for automated tasks.
For instance, if you are creating a series of purchase follow-up emails, you can program your workflow to send the first email message right after leaving the shopping cart, and a timer so that after a certain amount of days it sends an email suggesting the added product and/or similar ones.
Who benefits with marketing automation?
There are many ways of saving time and improving your marketing strategy as well as the relationship with your clients: the only limit is your imagination and the limit you use to think about the steps to reach your goals.
Any marketing specialist that wishes to improve the communication with clients can simplify the process to reach this goal with the help of automation. Furthermore, automation can also help companies to make their conversion funnel more profitable, which is generally one of the main goals of the business.
Some recommended platforms:
Datacrush
Hubspot
SendinBlue
SalesForce
SharpSpring
To sum up:
These are the main tips you have to remember about marketing automation:
- Manual and repetitive tasks should be automated by technology.
- There are many paid and/or free softwares that simplify these tasks through triggers, conditions and actions, solve and optimize processes.
- This saved time in operational tasks can be invested in thinking better and more efficient conversion strategies, or strategies to build client loyalty.
Finally, and following the idea of decreasing operational work, it is important to always focus on automating repetitive and manual processes to leave space for creativity and strategy. At Adtomic we specialize in automation. From one place, you can manage all your paid media strategy. At our platform you can create ads and campaigns and, thanks to our cross-channel optimization, your budget will be distributed automatically between Google and Meta, granting priority to the platform that presents the best results.
