What Is marketing automation & why should you care?

Recently, I was on a call doing a demo and had someone asked me what the purpose of nurture campaigns and email marketing automation is. To be honest, the question seemed silly to me at first because I guess I haven’t really THOUGHT it out before. But it got me thinking… Marketing automation is fairly new still, and some people can be skeptical if it really works and what value it can really bring to a company. 

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the “beast” that automates your marketing activities and gives you insight from all your marketing platforms in one place. What does that mean? For example, you know those emails a company sends once you have made a purchase on their site? Or when you get an email from an organization after you’ve been snooping on their website the past couple of days? Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s part of what marketing automation is. Marketing automation gives you the ability to send bulk emails on a scheduled or triggered basis (like when someone downloads a product sheet on your website), connect your “Contact Us” forms throughout your so once they fill out their information, you will be able to see all the sites they have went on, sending alerts to your sales team when there’s a lot of activity from a specific lead that they should reach out to, and so much more.

Why should you care?

This is always a good question, I’m glad you asked. The reason why any person or organization should care about marketing automation is that it can take you to places that would be difficult to do so without having a huge marketing/sales team devoted to each person in your database. MA takes the pain and time-consuming efforts away that could be handled with a simple email. Let me explain… Customer experience is very important, right? Think of marketing automation as the tool for solving most customer-service related questions, as well as doing the nitty-gritty nurture work of a sales team to discover hot leads.

How Marketing Automation Can Help Your Customer-Service

Examples…

• Receive order shipment updates
• Asking for feedback for product related questions after a purchase
• Sending updates on a back-stocked item
• Sending promotions, deals, and company updates/newsletters
• And more!

How Marketing Automation Can Help Your Sales Team Productivity

Examples...

• Someone filled out form on website – send email letting them know someone will contact them ASAP
• Sending automatic, personalized emails from your salesperson to the lead to do follow-up and see if they would like to have a conversation
• Receiving alerts and updates when someone actively visiting website X amount of times a week/day/month/etc.
• Segmentation of people in the database on what product/service they are interested in based on behaviors throughout marketing platforms (website, social media, emails).
• Sending and showing content to people based on specific interests
• And more!

For any questions, feel free to contact us or learn more about Arbela's marketing as a service offering.