What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.
With marketing automation, businesses can target customers with automated marketing messages across email, web, social, and text. Messages are sent automatically, according to sets of instructions called workflows. Workflows may be defined by templates, custom-built from scratch, or modified mid-campaign to achieve better results.
Marketing and sales departments use marketing automation to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities to both increase revenue and maximize efficiency. When automation is used effectively to handle repetitive tasks, employees are free to tackle higher-order problems, and human error is reduced.
Marketing automation helps with lead generation, nurturing, and scoring, as well as with measuring overall ROI on campaigns. The time- and cost-saving effects of automation increase as an organization grows in size and complexity. Good marketing automation systems are designed to scale alongside your business.
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.
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 touch point.
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.
How Can Automation Help My Business?
In simple terms automation can save you dozens of hours a month, increase customer retention, improve prospect conversions and make a massive impact on brand awareness to name just some of the benefits.
However don’t go into the this blind, take your time to understand exactly what you want to achieve with your automation. Do not get hung up on the shiny objects that the software sales people will tell you.
Macca has recently helped one of its clients choose and transition to a new CRM / Spa Management system. This was not a simple process and you can read more about this in our case study how to choose and implement a new automation solution.
How Much Does Automation Cost?
Well that’s the million dollar question, a better question would be how much time can this save me and how long would it take for it to pay for itself.
In it’s most simple form automation software can be a cheap as $15 / month but has high as many thousands of dollars a month.
Take your time and define exactly what you want from your automation. The do your research and ask for live demos and to speak to current users.
Hire an automation expert to guide you through the process and help ensure that your get the best system for your business.
Remember the PERFECT system is just a myth and like most things in life the system you choose will be a compromise.
Automation Packages
Bronze Package
$697.00
1 Automated campaign
Up to 10 emails with links (excluding content)
List cleaning prior to campaign launch
List tagging / segregation
Testing
Gold Package
$3750.00
3 automated campaigns
Up to 10 emails/campaign with links (excluding content)
List creation
List cleaning prior to campaign launch
List tagging / segregation
Testing
Platinum Package
$4997.00
5 automated campaigns
Up to 10 emails per campaign with links (excluding content)
List creation
List cleaning prior to campaign launch
List tagging / segregation
Testing