Whether you’re a marketer, small business, or large enterprise, marketing automation can help to optimize your marketing efforts. In addition to making your marketing activity more cost-effective, it can deliver greater results by gathering useful data thus providing key insight into your customers’ interests.
Here’s a quick rundown of why anyone operating within the marketing space should pay attention to advancements in marketing automation.
Why Is Marketing Automation Beneficial?
Employing automation within your marketing activity can provide benefits to both the consumer and your business. It creates a better experience for the customer while reducing the manual resources needed from your business.
Collecting information about customer interactions across your various business channels is the linchpin to automation. Each customer is motivated by something different which dictates their behaviors and relationship with your business. Automation can address that need by tailoring what marketing content a consumer receives to create a customized customer journey.
Marketing automation can also be used to gather insight to identify the most effective execution of your marketing – whether than be through email, blogs, or search advertising. You can then easily create reports of your results to demonstrate areas of success. This can link shifts in customer behavior to campaign activity, providing valuable insights for honing your future marketing automation strategy.
Current Trends in Marketing Automation
Advancing Email Marketing automation
Email marketing has been around nearly as long as email itself, but the volume of marketing emails sent is larger than ever. The world is set to send over 347.3 billion emails a day by 2023, with each individual receiving over 120 emails daily. To cut through this noise, your marketing emails need to stand out from your competition.
Personalization within your email marketing needs to go further than simply including the customer’s name. Leveraging a customer’s online behaviors and relationship with your business is important for maximizing engagement. For example, if they’ve returned to the same product page repeatedly, a tailored discount code could be the final motivator they need to convert. Match your marketing with a user’s specific needs to see an uplift in engagement.
You can also include A/B testing within your email marketing automation strategy. Analyzing the impact of variations leads to more optimized campaigns going forward. To start getting better results from your email marketing communication, you will need to implement an email marketing automation solution that offers the functionality needed to test and learn from your campaigns.
AI Personalization Tools
Utilizing machine learning and AI-based tools can provide you with a deeper understanding of your audience and help you develop ways of engaging them using more personalized content.
An AI-centric approach to data segmentation helps to sift through large volumes of records, making sense of the different demographics and behaviors. Integrating these learnings into your strategies and buyer journeys can drive better performance. You can also use automation to create a single customer view (SCV) for each of your consumers, allowing you to fully personalize your automated marketing on an individual basis.
For eCommerce brands, using AI and automation can further enhance your eCommerce capabilities, as it allows you to use personalized pricing strategies in instances where you want to adjust price based on supply and demand.
Pivoting Your Paid Media Messaging
Technology is intrinsically linked to life in the modern world, from the phones in our pockets to the screens where we stream content. It’s this prevalence of tech that means that consumers can now see between 400 and 10,000 ads in a single day.
Fighting through this noise to connect with your audience requires tailored paid ad messaging rather than just a blanket approach. Data-driven insights can analyze what’s trending and what’s relevant to a specific user so you adapt the sentiment of your paid media ad to align with their digital profile.
Automation can also control your bid strategies and use machine learning to deliver efficient paid content, scaling your ad bidding in line with your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) based on hundreds of signals about a session.
Privacy Provisions
Digital privacy is a topic which has seen a lot of attention in the last few years and will likely continue to for years to come. Data and cookies are the two key factors which are leveraged to personalize marketing, but data privacy concerns could stifle how effective these are.
Almost three quarters of shoppers report being more engaged with personalized content, which shows how useful putting additional effort into personalized marketing can be. However, even more consumers are worried about the privacy of their data online, with concerns over security practices being a major obstacle.
Businesses which use cookies and data will need to be more transparent in order to maintain trust with consumers. Privacy policies and privacy laws need to be a focal point of both business strategies and any marketing automation strategies you implement.
Finding intuitive ways to integrate automation into your marketing activity and strategies can help your business find further success when communicating with consumers. Getting a better understanding of who your audience is and what they want will allow you to address their needs properly, strengthening your relationships with customers and resulting in better ROI for your marketing.
