How Do Marketing Automation Tools Work? Why Use Marketing Automation? Automation is defined as “the use of control systems to perform automatic sequence of operations” (Webster). Marketing automation software is a control system that automates the tasks involved with marketing activity. From creating digital assets, sending emails, to managing lead generation and lifecycle, marketing automation tools eliminate the tedious work involved with marketing processes so you can run your business more efficiently.
Marketing Automation tools are becoming quite popular among businesses of all sizes. They are used to streamline your marketing activities, managing the distribution of your marketing content is automated based on specific conditions or events happening across your business. These marketing tools can also reduce costs associated with marketing campaigns, by eliminating the need for certain staff to manually respond to customer queries. Marketing automation enhances marketing effectiveness by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable time for staff members to concentrate on higher level marketing activities.
What does marketing automation do?
In its most basic form, marketing automation is a set of tools designed to streamline and simplify some of the most time-consuming responsibilities of the modern marketing and sales roles. From automating the lead qualification process to creating a hub for digital campaign creation, automation is all about simplifying a business world that is growing far too complex, much too quickly.
Marketing automation lets you implement a digital marketing strategy without having to manually press “send” on each and every email, message, campaign, or post you create. Good automation tools help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on schedules and customer behavior. Once your campaign rolls out, you can focus on other tasks, then analyze and tweak your marketing plan as results start coming in. An automated marketing strategy can save time and resources, driving revenue and ROI while you focus on growing your business.
How does marketing automation work?
You collect customer data through many interactions: emails, website visits, app usage, on social media, and so on. This data helps create a 360-degree view of each customer.
From there, marketing automation does all the work: streamling segmentation and targeting processes to determine the right audiences, quickly and at scale. Tailoring messaging to each customer automatically based on their profile. Creating relevant and personalized messaging across email, mobile, social, web experiences, and beyond with a few simple clicks. Delivering personalized experiences for your customers, whether you have 100 or 100 million, efficiently and effectively.
What does marketing automation mean for the customer journey?
Customer journeys are the sum of individual personalized experiences with your brand. With marketing automation, you can tailor every interaction based on customer data to create ongoing, seamless journeys through every brand touchpoint.
Marketing automation creates relevant content and messaging at scale across many channels. Send email messages with dynamic content that personalizes far beyond sticking a customer’s first name in the subject line. Integrate mobile messaging with your email and social campaigns through SMS/MMS, push notifications, and group messaging. Generate digital ads that appear for the right person at the right time. Plus, recommend the right products on your website for each individual user — automatically.
With marketing automation, you can reach customers along their journey no matter where they are in the customer lifecycle — from acquisition to advocacy. Deliver timely, relevant content that reaches customers when, where, and how they prefer — converting prospects into lifelong brand advocates.
What are some marketing automation best practices?
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when designing your marketing automation strategy:
- Define and present your goals. Use real numbers to justify the investment in a marketing automation platform to your stakeholders.
- Collaborate with other teams. Your marketing automation strategy will touch several teams in your company. Get their input and buy-in before you begin.
- Create process visualizations. Use detailed diagrams of your marketing automation workflow to relay your big picture objectives to your entire organization — efficiently and effectively.
- Prepare for database segmentation. Consider your customer data. Think about who you’d like to engage, and why.
- Prepare your content strategy. Build your content library. Create interesting, engaging, and relevant messaging designed to reach all stages of the customer lifecycle.
- Plan for a slow rollout. The world’s most successful marketing automation firms stagger their launches. Test early and optimize the next block of programs to give yourself the best chance of success.
- Analyze as you go. See what’s working and what’s not. Use some of the time you get back from automation to dig into the analytics and make the changes that will grow your business.
The Best Marketing Automation Tools
Marketo
Marketo is perhaps the best known marketing automation tool, and for good reason. It’s one of the most mature tools, with a full suite of features that not only help marketers manage email campaigns, but also provide excellent tools for sales teams. Marketo also has a marketplace, called LaunchPoint, with dozens of integrations.
Whom it’s for:
Marketo is great for companies who are going to make use of the tool’s many features that go beyond basic marketing automation. It’s not the most expensive tool, but it’s certainly not the cheapest either. If you’re not going to use the advanced functionality of the system, you can get similar results with one of the less expensive tools. However, if you want to start with the basics and move into the more advanced functionality in the near future, it could be a good idea to start with a tool like Marketo so that you don’t have to switch over all your data and campaigns down the line. We also like that Marketo has a very large and active knowledge base, which is a great resource for new users.
It’s closest to:
Eloqua
Pricing starts at:
$1,195/month
Eloqua
You can think of Eloqua as the Ferrari of marketing automation. It’s fully loaded, provides an exceptional level of service, and comes with a matching price tag. One of Eloqua’s key differentiators is the amount of time they spend teaching and helping their customers get the most out of the product. Like Marketo, Eloqua also has a great marketplace with plenty of integrations with third party services.
Whom it’s for:
Don’t look at Eloqua unless you’re really going after enterprise-level software and you have the budget for it. Now, if you do, Eloqua is a great option, especially if you like having a lot of guidance from your technology vendors. You should also consider Eloqua if tight CRM integration is important to you.
It’s closest to:
Marketo
Pricing starts at:
$2,000/month
Customer.io
The main reason we love Customer.io is its flexibility. This is a tool that will really let you get what you want out of it. While it’s not all out of the box, if you’re willing to put in some developer time, you can really customize your Customer.io experience. Another great thing about this tool is its lightweight UI and fast, personal customer support. Customer.io is one of the newer players, but they’re growing very quickly and are definitely a company to watch. Unlike most of the older tools, Customer.io is built to trigger emails based on events, rather than just pageviews.
Whom it’s for:
Customer.io is great for two kinds of uses: 1. Companies that are looking to get started with marketing automation and appreciate a lightweight UI (i.e. not your typical enterprise software) and 2. Companies that are looking for some more advanced functionality that requires flexibility and customization, and are willing to devote the developer resources to implement it. We happen to fall into the second category, which is why we chose Customer.io for our marketing automation needs at Woopra.
It’s closest to:
Userfox
Pricing starts at:
$75/month (and they offer a free plan)
Let Constant Contact Deliver Powerful Emails Simply, and Easily
Constant Contact is an extremely useful email marketing automation tool that has powerful automation capabilities to take your marketing beyond just the basics.
Its autoresponder is wonderfully adaptable. You can build welcome sequences, drip campaigns, and any other sort of automated email campaign with fine-tuned customization.
That applies to everything: timing, volume, subject matter, targeting, triggering, and even the content in your emails.
Plus, Constant Contact allows you to quickly embed custom forms on your landing pages. So, you not only get names and email addresses, but any other information you want to ask for.
Thus, you can send one welcome sequence to new senior VP-level subscribers, another one for sales folks, another one for regular Joes, and on and on. And that’s just on the basis of job title. You could thin slice on anything from where they live to their favorite kind of beer.
Make it as granular and intricate as you’d like. Set long-tail, automated campaigns for each track and let Constant Contact do the hard work for you over weeks or months. All you have to do is look at the reports and keep a finger on the pulse.
You’ll need Constant Contact’s Email Plus plan to really reap the benefits of the platform’s email automation. That starts at $45/month for up to 500 contacts in your list, scaling upward at increments of $25-$30 for each additional 2,500 contacts you need to accommodate.
Conclusion
There is a ton of marketing automation tools you can choose from and make your life easier. But, with so many options out there how do you pick which one will work best for your business. I am going to break that question into different sections to help you figure which marketing automation tool is right for you.