For many business people the proliferation of new terms is just a minefield, making it harder than ever to know what is meant by these terms and - more importantly - what is worthy of your time and attention. The IT industry is particularly guilty of this, often creating new words for old activities or - with more justification - creating terms for new activities. This article shines a little light on one of those terms: “marketing automation”.
As its name suggests, “marketing automation” relates to your promotional activities (the “marketing” part), using software to help reduce the time and effort it takes you to promote your products (“automation”).
If you think about the time you currently spend gathering together content for promoting your business to your clients (and potential clients), assembling these into carefully-crafted emails, gathering together mailing lists - and making sure you don’t include anyone who has previously said they don’t want to receive such emails from you, and deciding who should receive what, well, you probably dedicate quite an amount of time to this whole task, time that would be better spent elsewhere if only you had an alternative.
Imagine
Now, imagine a world where the same software that runs your website and manages your content and lists of subscribers also generated your newsletters and promotional emails, populating them with relevant content and sent them to your subscribers - perhaps sending different content to previous clients and potential new clients. Imagine being able to check how many of those recipients opened your emails, and how many clicked through the content to land on your website? Also imagine that, depending on the actions they take, further emails can be sent - automatically - to tell them about related products or service that you offer - all the things you would do personally if only you had the time.
You don’t have to imagine it - it exists, and this is what is known as “marketing automation”.
This article won’t give you all the answers and all the details - those will come in subsequent articles and from other resources but it will take away the mystique and leave you better informed than moments ago.
Marketing automation is also known by its acronym - MA - but few people need even more acronyms in their lives, so we’ll continue to refer to it by name.
Different systems will offer differing amounts of automation and different features, so bear that in mind, but I don’t want to complicate matters at this early stage. We’ll stick to the main points:
Integration
A key part of making marketing automation work successfully is the drawing together of different strands under one roof - i.e. where I referred above to “the same software that runs your website”. Whilst it’s possible to carry out these tasks using separate systems (for example, one for your website, a third party mailshot provider such as MailChimp, analysing results through Google Analytics) there are benefits and time savings to be had by integrating these. For example, a system that that serves the website and records enquiries and newsletter subscribers can also generate your mailing lists ensuring that anyone who opts out is not including for receiving automated emails. This aggregation of data ensures consistency, removes human error, and aids subsequent analysis.
Time saving
By using an automation system to build your marketing emails and to schedule and send them for you, you will be able to complete more campaigns faster than you can hope to at present. It will leave you to spend more time dealing with actual responses, enquiries and purchases rather than having to devote many hours to the construction and generation of marketing and promotional emails and newsletters.
Better targeting / better results
By using an automated system to build and despatch your marketing emails you can specify that, for example, past clients may receive one form of your newsletter and future clients receive another, thus better targeting who receives specific information, and resulting - should your copy be effective - in a greater response rate and - hopefully - a better return on your investment.
Now that you know more about the subject than you did twenty minutes ago, why should you consider marketing automation? A good question that needs to be asked, since any change in your working practices needs to be justified. The main benefits can be summarised in a few simple bullet points. In a nutshell, marketing automation
- Saves you time and money
- Provides you with consistency in your communications with clients
- Allows you to measure and optimise the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy
- Generates revenue and/or greater participation in your products or services
Want to know more?
Deep Blue Sky provide a range of services from pure web design to bespoke development, incorporating hosting and support, business systems, digital consultancy and successful marketing automation as outlined in this article.
If you would like to discuss a marketing automation project or any of the other services we provide please contact us online or call 01225 444674.
Write a comment.