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Meta-description: Marketing automation solutions are popular with a lot of businesses across the world, and it’s been proven to significantly, and positively, affect both revenue and customer conversions. But how exactly does it work?
Marketing automation is technology that simplifies and automates the management of a businesses’ marketing processes across multiple channels. It has proven to be very effective at driving revenue, with 76% of marketers seeing a positive ROI within a year, and up to 44% seeing returns within 6 months.
To add to this, according to Invespcro, companies who apply marketing automation into their processes see up to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% decrease in overhead expenses for marketing.
It’s no wonder then that a majority (91%!) of marketers believe that marketing automation is ‘very important’ to the overall success of a businesses’ online marketing activities.
But…What exactly is marketing automation? And, how does it work? More on this below:
Definition: Marketing Automation
Marketing automation takes the place of basic and/or complex marketing processes. Made possible with software platforms and tools offered by marketing automation service providers like Maropost, HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle, etc.
With marketing automation, a business can do the following:
Automate online marketing campaigns to maximize revenue and increase conversions
Engage with customers through automated messages across all channels
Create complex customer journeys to enhance customer experience
And more! Of course, different marketing automation platforms provide different types of services. But their usefulness stays the same: with marketing automation, companies can save time and resources by delegating repetitive tasks to marketing automation software and focusing on more complex issues that require direct human input.
How Does Marketing Automation work?
The basis of marketing automation starts with data collection.
The data collected can come from a multi-channel network and can include a wide variety of interactions: emails, social media statistics, web statistics, mobile statistics, and more. The more data, the better, as it will be used to create what is called a 360° view of your customers.
Note, this data can be collected by a data collection software that integrates well with your marketing automation tools or you can use a marketing automation platform, like Maropost, to collect the data for you.
Either way, the automation takes place once the data has been collected. Which brings us to the next stage of the process: building customer journeys.
Customer journeys are built from all the different interactions that your customers experience with your brand. And, by applying marketing automation to this data you can craft a ‘journey’ that will trigger automated emails, mobile notifications, text messages, and so much more, in order to provide your customers the best possible experience for them!
Again, to make this process as simple as possible, there are various marketing automation tools available out there that you can set up to perform specific tasks based on the data collected. Or, you can use a marketing automation software like Maropost to do the same, but across multiple channels. Which is what we’re going to be talking about below:
Marketing Automation Tools & Platforms | Maropost
When it comes to marketing automation solutions, there are plenty available out there in the market. The best of which are marketing automation platforms.
These platforms marry all of the tools and software required for the marketing automation process along with day-to-day support from experts in the field.
As stated by Ross Andrew Paquette, the founder and CEO of Maropost (a marketing automation platform provider best known for its customer-centric approach at innovation), the mark of a good marketing automation platform is its ability “…to find out how much a customer is worth – as well as what that customer has been doing so that (businesses) can easily figure out how to increase that customer’s lifetime value.”
For this, Maropost has developed its infrastructure to the point where, again, as described by Ross Andrew Paquette, their clients can “…log in, look up one of their customers, and see that customer’s entire journey.”
The Bottom Line: What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a tool. Plain and simple. And quite an effective one at that.
A majority of businesses already use some form of automation in their marketing processes, and that number will only continue to grow as competition gets tougher.
Fortunately, there are plenty of marketing automation solutions out there for businesses of all shapes and sizes, whether it be Maropost, who specializes in supporting B2C businesses in the mid-market space and beyond, or smaller, niche-marketing automation tools.