Benefits of Marketing Automation

Used correctly, Marketing Automation strategies and systems are great tools for reaching the right audience and building deeper relationships with your potential and existing customers. If successful, you will also see a range of other benefits. For example: more satisfied customers, reduced churn, and increased upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

In this post, we'll delve into some of Marketing Automation's many benefits and hope to give you some inspiration on how to work with your own strategy. 

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Creating a better understanding of customers and the customer journey

In the Marketing Automation process, you are constantly collecting data about your customers and prospects. If the data collection is well thought out and qualitative, it can help you create a better customer knowledge and understanding of your customers. This can result in you learning more about the customer's entire buying journey. From first interaction with your brand to becoming a customer and beyond.

The information you develop about the customer journey your customers go through is then crucial in setting your marketing strategy.

Create new relationships and attract new customers

Using chatbots, forms, landing pages, relevant content and more, you can attract new and relevant leads.

Marketing Automation reaches its full potential when content and communication is designed according to the needs, motivations and challenges of the target audience.

One way to make the target group concrete is to develop a persona for the text. That is, a fictional person for whom you are writing the text.

Developing Persona takes the guesswork out of what might be interesting or useful to your leads and gives you a framework for developing and improving the content and marketing you use as part of your lead generation process.

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Identify and nurture leads to send to sales

Have you heard of SMarketing? In a nutshell, Sell + Market = SMarketing.

There has long been talk that sales and marketing need to work more closely together. With the help of Marketing Automation and a scoring model, only the relevant and interesting leads are passed on to sales. This way, sales can focus on only qualified leads.

In a Marketing Automation system, you work with the entire customer journey and create an overview of all the customer's pain and gain points. In this way, you create a common picture of the customer that both sales and marketing need to optimise their work.

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Keeping the overall communication across the different platforms/social media

Omnichannel campaigns are about giving customers a seamless experience. All channels work together to give the customer a unified message.

In many Marketing Automation systems you can combine channels such as Email, SMS, social media and push notifications.

It's about knowing your target audience and where they are.

A better customer experience

Today's customers are more demanding than ever and want to be in the driver's seat when it comes to their own customer experience. 

By creating nurture feeds and other automated trigger-based mailings, you can reach your customers/leads at the right time with the right message. You can also create more personalized mailings.

Creating personalised mailings requires you to collect data on your visitors and customers. This allows you to get to know your customers and thus personalise your mailings and create a better customer experience.

In the past, advertising was sent out in the post, when marketing was more seasonal. You may remember the classic travel agency catalogues that you received at the same time every year? or how about the Yellow Pages? With Marketing Automation combined with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, we can now personalise marketing and thus send out marketing based on visitor or customer behaviour.

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Give your potential customers the information they need to make the buying decision

Using a scoring model and a holistic view of the customer journey, you can predict when a customer is ready to make a purchase. That way, you can give them the right information to entice them to buy at the right time. 

But to get to the decision stage of the customer journey, the customer needs to have a good overall impression of your brand throughout the customer journey. So the information for a purchase decision starts when they first become aware of their needs. And also start looking for alternative solutions 

A simple way to get a better picture of the customer's buying journey is to divide it into 3 stages, awareness, consideration, and decision. 

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Awareness

During the awareness phase, the person realises that they have a need or a problem that needs to be solved. This is about making the customer aware of your brand, making a good first impression and creating a need in the customer.

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Consideration

In the consideration step, the customer will look for solutions, google, compare and gather information. Here you need to provide relevant content to give the customer what they are looking for, answer their questions and build trust in your brand.

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Decision

When customers have reached a decision stage, they may only have a handful of suppliers to choose from. They have gathered information on all suppliers and are in a position to weigh up the pros and cons. This is where you need to answer any questions they may have. But also explain to them why they should choose you, what is in it for the customer to choose you?

But what happens if the customer chooses another solution? If you have done a good job and made a good impression, it will pay off in the long run and the customer will remember it. You have laid the foundations for future cooperation. The key is to stay in touch and continue to help the customer with their challenges by offering relevant knowledge. I guess that's what Inbound Marketing is for!

Satisfied customers

A satisfied customer is a good customer. Taking care of your customers is key. One advantage of Marketing Automation is that you can move away from the boring newsletters and towards the personalised mailings. And they are the ones who nurture your customers and give them information according to their needs and wants. 

With a satisfied customer, you can not only achieve brand sales, but you can create your own brand ambassadors. These ambassadors can then recommend your products and services to others and in this way word of mouth marketing can be achieved.

Reduce churn

Churn is one of the points that can be reduced with the help of Marketing Automation.

Working with win back strategies is obviously a must, but it's even easier if you never lose the customer in the first place.

So how do you work to reduce churn? It's all about data, data, data. Use the data you have on your customers i.e. their digital footprints to predict when they are about to leave. Then work to re-engage them to counteract customer churn, known as hold back.