What Marketing Automation is and why you should use it

What is Marketing Automation? it is the automation and simplification of marketing actions and processes that have the user's conversion as their ultimate goal. Many marketing actions are repetitive - think of email marketing campaigns or the publication of the same content on multiple social media - and if done manually they risk frustrating the company's marketing strategy in the long run.

This happens because marketing processes are often carried out carelessly and without considering the target audience. With automatic marketing, the company saves time and money, but above all it segments its target better to offer the right content. A nice solution, isn't it?

If you want to automate your marketing strategy, you need an ad hoc software, first of all SalesManago. I will tell you about this powerful tool, but only after having explained to you what Marketing Automation is and what are the activities that your company should automate to obtain excellent results.

Enjoy the reading!

WHAT IS MARKETING AUTOMATION: INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE

Now you know what marketing automation is but I bet you can't wait to discover its advantages. In this paragraph I will tell you about the main benefits that an automated marketing strategy can bring to your company. Marketing automation is a very powerful tool, but if you don't handle it with care, you can run into mistakes that would make the work done useless. Don't worry: I will tell you what you should absolutely not be wrong! Are you ready? Here we go!

THE ADVANTAGES OF AUTOMATIC MARKETING

By automating many activities of the marketing team, marketing automation allows you to have more time to develop effective marketing strategies. Not only that, thanks to the marketing automation tools you can:

- see how your potential customers move in the sales funnel and automatically segment the audience: in this way you can offer the right content to the customer who should interrupt the journey in the funnel. I'll give you an example: if a user fills the cart without completing the purchase, you can offer him the contents that lead him to the conversion through a simple email or personalized messages on social networks. Once the marketing strategy has been tested, you can and apply it to future actions.
-improve ROI, i.e. invest less money on marketing strategies and earn more.

WHAT IS MARKETING AUTOMATION? UNFORTUNATELY IS NOT THE TURKISH FAIRY!

If you expect that once you set up your marketing automation tool, business will take off on your own, you are out of the way. To make an automated marketing strategy work, you must constantly monitor the progress of your campaigns and evaluate how to improve your plan based on the results you get from the analyzes. Unfortunately, marketing automation cannot create content for you: it is you who, with inbound marketing, will have to give consumers the information they need to get closer to you, to know your brand and to decide to buy your products or services.

Know that using automatic marketing tools does not mean standardizing your strategy, but personalizing it for each segment of target.

WHICH PROCESSES DOES A MARKETING AUTOMATION SYSTEM AUTOMATE?

At this point you know what marketing automation is, what its advantages are and what mistakes you should avoid in automatic marketing. We are going to analyze the processes that automates such a tool. Let's start!

LEAD GENERATION ORIENTATION

Lead generation is a fundamental phase of the sales funnel, because it is the moment in which we manage to obtain the data of the user who will most likely become a customer who will buy and, if satisfied, will be your ambassador. This is possible thanks to the creation of customized landing pages and forms to fill out that attract the prospect's attention and therefore lead him to leave his data. By automating this process, and offering quality content, you will see your leads grow and prospects will become customers and even ambassadors.

LEAD SCORING AND SEGMENTATION

Once the leads are obtained, the marketing automation system assigns a score to the latter to segment and profile users to offer them more personalized content pushing them to buy again.

PERSONALIZATION: EMAIL MARKETING AND CONTENT MARKETING

If the target is profiled and segmented, it will be much easier to think of a performing content marketing and email marketing strategy. As I already told you, the creation of personalized contents and landing pages are fundamental for customer loyalty.

LEAD NURTURING

Once you have acquired the leads, it is your job to cultivate them through content that will increase your prospect's trust in your brand and the desire to sponsor you to other potential leads. In short, don't immediately think about conversions!

INTEGRATION WITH COMPANY CRM

The integration of a marketing automation tool with the corporate CRM - that is, the customer relationship management system - ensures a better study of the characteristics of the leads or potential leads and creates a database of information on the relationships between the company and the contacts.

SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING

Or "listening to the network", that is, monitoring and analyzing people's conversations on social networks. This activity allows you to improve your marketing campaigns because you can better profile your contacts and personalize content.

WHICH MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOL TO CHOOSE?

Well! You know what marketing automation is and what repetitive operations can help you do it while you focus on more complex marketing strategies. In this paragraph I will give you some tips to choose the most suitable marketing automation software for you and your business and I will focus on SalesManago, one of the best tools out there to automate your marketing strategy.

Before installing a marketing automation software, I recommend you build your online presence with a website optimized for your brand's search engines and social profiles.

What can you give users to distinguish yourself from your competitors? What is your target and on which channels is it present? Answer these two questions, study what to communicate to the public and understand where to communicate it. Keep in mind that most tools work on the following channels:

-Web

-Email

-Social Network

-Mobile: messaging and SMS Marketing

SALESMANAGO: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT WORKS

SalesManago is the most widely used marketing automation software for e-commerce in Europe. It has currently been chosen by 10,000 companies in 40 countries. The system tracks each user - even anonymously - through the IP address and reconstructs its path within your marketing channels. With SalesManago you can follow any user who clicks on a link contained in your email in which you invite him to perform an action.

What are the positives of SalesManago? First of all it integrates perfectly with the CMS, the company CRM and with the most famous Ecommerce software, for example Magento, then it guarantees precise user profiling, gives the possibility to manage the newsletter, collects data from the site, social, email and any mobile apps. Finally it has the livechat function and makes you send sms and push notifications.

Segmentation allows you to divide the target into subgroups based on several parameters, some of which are:

the time spent on a specific page on your site;
-who leaves the chart full and without buying;
-the habits of users, for example the interest shown for a certain type of offer, the compilation of the form or the interruption of the purchase.

After processing the target data, the software creates the contact lists and inserts them in the company CRM.

SALESMANAGO: FAMOUS BRAND CASE HISTORY

-YVES ROCHER: the famous French cosmetic brand has managed to increase the email opening rate of DEM campaigns and CTR by 1200% and, just launched SalesManago, has achieved a 30% increase in conversions.

-DE LONGHI: when the historic Italian home appliance brand set up an email marketing campaign in which it invited users to sign up for cooking workshops, using attractive landing pages, the opening rate grew by 52% and conversions by 160 %.

-NEW BALANCE: the well-known sportswear brand made in the USA has achieved a 400% increase in the opening rate and CTR, thanks to the sending of personalized emails based on the gender and preferences of footwear and clothing. In addition, active customers who had not returned to the site for at least 30 days were contacted via email with exclusive offers: the opening rate and CTR increased by 200%!

-VODAFONE: The worldwide famous telephone company has achieved a 200% increase in conversions thanks to SalesManago. When the user left the website, he was shown a personalized form with the smartphone he was consulting. Going to enter their data, he got a personalized offer for the purchase of the phone. Users who left their data received a welcome email with all the offers reserved for new customers on all products in the telephony department. This further email marketing move led the company to a 54% increase in the open rate and a 27% increase in CTR.

CONCLUSIONS

In this article I explained to you what marketing automation is, I told you about its advantages and the errors that you should avoid to take advantage of this powerful tool; we saw which marketing actions and processes can be automated and finally we switched to SalesManago, one of the best marketing automation tools out there. The case histories of the famous brands of the last paragraph are proof of how marketing automation, if done well and with the right tools, can increase the earnings and awareness of companies ... even yours!