Marketing automation has become more and more popular over the past few years, and features a number of different ways to improve your email marketing.
Email marketing is still an important part of any digital marketing strategy, and is often underrated in how influential it can be.
Email marketing allows you to reach customers on a regular basis, boost your sales, and help grow your brand online.
But nowadays, most people are flooded with email marketing messages every single day, so it’s important that your particular marketing message stands out from the crowd.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is defined as software that helps businesses to market on multiple channels online, and automate the repetitive tasks that comes with digital marketing. By automating these repetitive tasks, such as emails, social media, and other online actions, you free up time to focus on the strategical side of marketing, while marketing automation takes care of the rest.
Marketing automation can help in not only in creating superior marketing messages targeted to specific customers, but also in streamlining your process to create an efficient marketing channel.
So how exactly can marketing automation software help your email marketing campaigns?
All-In-One Platform
The beauty of marketing automation is that most platforms are all-in-one platforms, offering many different features under one roof. Segment Data
Rather than paying for just email marketing, you are getting a lot of functionality that also includes email marketing.Segment Data
Marketing automation allows you to collect and segment data on your customers, see what they are viewing on the website, engage with your customers at specific touchpoints, and interact with them when necessary. All this, plus analysis and reporting features, and more.
The fact it provides all this information on one single platform means the data is shared, and makes your email marketing easier to manage, improve, and deploy.and
Marketing automation allows you to do much more than send out generic email blasts when you want. You can automate specific messages to be emailed when a particular customer makes a certain move online, or interacts with your brand somehow. This could include messages for abandoned baskets, reminders of viewed items, and much more.
Data
The fact marketing automation includes a wealth of different functionalities means it has a lot of data for you to analyse.
Out of this data analysis, you can find actionable insights that will help boost your digital marketing, and your email marketing activities.
You will be able to see when and how recipients interact with your brand. Usually, email clients will only see when people interact with an email. But marketing automation allows you to see any interactions with the website or company, whether it’s an email, a purchase, a filled-out form, or a logged phone call. All in one place.
Personalisation and Segmentation
While email marketing platforms offer personalisation, marketing automation can take personalisation to the next level.
Email messaging can be personalised based on the automations, using data such as web page visit, or purchase history.
Of course, all the classic personalisation features such as names and specific subject lines can help with your marketing activities. But it’s the automation of this that will really make a difference.
Alongside this, segmentation of particular users based on automated processes or specific actions can help you target your marketing messages based on particular criteria, and automate this process.
Track Buying Cycle
As marketing automation software collects all this data, and allows you to see what individual customers have been up to, you can track the entire buying cycle for specific customers, as well as analyse how to improve your marketing.
This means you can email potential or existing customers at exactly the right time in the buying process, based on past behaviours.
By tracking the buying cycle from the initial contact through to the sale, you can see how your messaging impacts customer behaviour, and how you can improve this.
Track ROI
As you can track the buying cycle and how your email marketing impacts customer behaviour, this allows you to track the ROI of each of your marketing campaigns.
Determining the impact of email marketing can be seen via the actions customers take.
For instance, email clients will simply say if someone opened and clicked an email. However, with marketing automation, you can see when they came onto the site and bought something. A particular customer may not click anything within an email, but be reminded to go and purchase something later. Marketing automation will track this, and you can see your email marketing is working. However, this wouldn’t be as possible with a more simple email client.
By improving and streamlining your campaigns, you can improve your overall email marketing strategy, and improve your bottom line results.
Determining the best performing campaigns means you can focus your efforts on these campaigns, and act on those campaigns which aren’t performing as well.
Productivity
At the end of the day, automating any process aims to increase your productivity. Automation makes marketing a lot more efficient, and this applies to email marketing in particular.
Manually emailing customers takes time, especially if you want to stay in touch on a regular basis, and personalise those messages.
With marketing automation, you can automate regular messages, and implement multi-stage email nurturing campaigns that will automatically run by itself after you have set it up.
If you’d like to get started with marketing automation, get in touch with the team here at Xanthos, who would be happy to see how we can help you grow online.
