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Dive into the world of Marketing Automation:
Practical & helpful knowledge that makes your daily life with Marketing Automation easier!
Spoilt for choice: Which Marketing Automation Tool is the right one for me?
What do you need to know about Marketing Automation Tools?
Marketing Automation is a technology to supply leads and contacts with content in a targeted, personalized, and automated way. There are different tools for exactly this purpose. Marketing Automation Tools refers to any software that enables companies to automate, simplify, and unify their marketing & sales processes.
So how does Marketing Automation work?
One elegant way to implement automation is to create workflows. You can imagine a flow, like a path with several branches: Fixed rules define which path you take. This is based on the possible activities you do (e.g. clicking on a link, filling in a form with certain values, viewing certain websites).
As a bar owner, you would like to send an invitation to a beach party. A long address list of people who regularly visit your bar should be enthusiastic about the party: How do you reach as many interested people as possible so that your party can be a complete success?
- A first step is, to send an automated e-mail with "Save the date" to your prospects a few months before the party. After 2 months the invitation will be sent to this list automatically. In the invitation e-mail, there is a registration button "I would like to subscribe to the party" which leads to a landing page. Within the next 3 days, the automation Tool will record which people have visited the landing page & have thus registered for the party. This is where the flow separates:
- The 1st group is registered: They will receive an automated reminder message the evening before the party to get in the mood for the event or to receive important information.
- The 2nd group did not visit the landing page after these 3 days - e.g. because they missed the mail, are undecided or are not interested in it. In order to reach the people who missed the e-mail or are still undecided, a reminder will be sent to them.
- The 2nd group will then be divided after 7 days: Persons who have not visited the landing page again will be assigned to a list of unannounced persons. The other interested persons will receive the same reminder message as group 1 to get in the mood.
That means: You create the contents of the e-mails & the corresponding flow - the sending of the e-mails is done automatically afterwards. The beach party can start!
But with automation, the work in marketing is not simply done. The goal of marketing automation is rather to automate repetitive tasks or to send the right message to the right people. But it's important to adapt the flows & content to the respective requirements regularly so that your marketing remains relevant & appealing to your customers.
Why use Marketing Automation Tools?
Marketing automation is like a toolbox. By using the tools in it, you can automate & optimize marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media postings or lead generation.
- You can automate any interaction with leads & contacts - e.g. you can send your e-mails without manually doing anything (Transactional emails).
- A website visitor downloads your provided PDF / white paper and is thereby rated higher in the lead scoring (content marketing, lead nurturing).
- A customer has an abandoned cart with a notebook and the corresponding notebook case. After 24 hours she receives an e-mail with a reminder (Abandoned cart).
How can you benefit from it?
You can benefit from software as a small as well as a big company. Our solutions, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, the Marketing Cloud from Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot), are designed for all sizes of companies. The initial setup may take some time - but in the long run, your company can save time, increase efficiency & work more goal-oriented. Here we are happy to support you to ensure quick and successful implementation.
Are you part of the marketing team? If so, you will benefit from the fact that repetitive tasks can be automated, qualified leads can be discovered more easily and you can build your marketing in a much more personalized way.
Are you on the sales team? With an automation tool, it is e.g. easier to build up a targeted & more personalized communication with potential customers and to manage it with existing customers. With the Sales Pipeline, you have an overview of which sales point your current contact is located at.
Or are you on the management level? Potential customers can be identified more easily and the leads can be better maintained, e.g. through lead scoring. Through automation, efficiency can be increased and resources saved. And your sales and marketing teams are finally working together efficiently.
4 different kinds
There is now a very large number of different tools that can be divided into four types. Most tools have the same base of marketing automation functions, but differ in their focus & range of functions:
1. Inbound Marketing Automation Tools focus more on content management:
- Monitoring your own social media channels: How do users perceive the company? Are there complaint comments to react to?
- The blog article offers interested readers an e-book with the appropriate topic for download. In return, you receive the e-mail address and generate new leads. Both parties benefit.
2. Lead management & Lead generation automation tools are better suited for sales teams that are responsible for generating, qualifying, and managing leads and subsequent customers:
- You build up a lead scoring & determine parameters, from when a lead is considered a qualified lead in the company. For example, a lead gets 5 points if it visits your website, 10 more points if it subscribes to the newsletter, etc.
- Set up sales notifications: Once a lead has earned enough points, do you know as a salesperson, that now is a good time to contact them.
3. Automation tools for pricing are especially interesting for e-commerce websites:
- Analysis of behaviour on the e-commerce site.
- Pricing: Prices can be lowered or increased based on criteria. For example, if a customer visits a product page several times without buying the product, the price will be reduced slightly for him.
4. Automation tools differ if the target group is B2B or B2C:
In B2B companies the decision process usually involves several steps & purchase decisions are usually made by more than one person. This results in longer buying cycles. Therefore it is important to be able to accompany the leads during the entire sales cycle.
- Depending on the lead scoring, the customer receives different content and is contacted differently by the sales team.
In B2C companies, on the other hand, a customer usually goes through fewer steps to reach a purchase decision and usually makes this decision himself.
- Based on the data, such as the stated interest or place of residence, dynamic content recommends different products to the person in the newsletter.
- If the shopping cart is canceled, the customer is sent a reminder message with the products already viewed.
How can I decide?
According to a survey by the Institute for Communication & Marketing at the Luzerner Hochschule the following 5 criteria of decreasing importance are given most attention:
- Possible integration of the tool into the company's systems
- Usability
- Costs
- Structure of the pricing model
- Functions offered
- Which departments & persons are involved in the implementation & work?
- Which tasks have to be performed in the marketing & which of them can be automated?
- Are the corporate, marketing and IT strategies aligned with each other?
- Are the marketing goals concrete & measurable, so that they can be checked afterwards?
- Where do problems often arise in marketing? Where do the highest costs arise & which tasks take the most time?
- How big is the monthly marketing budget without personnel costs?
Specific requirements:
- How many contact addresses are available in the company database?
- What kind of marketing is done? E-mail marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, etc.
- Which marketing channels are used? Which ones would you like to use in the future?
- How many people from your company are involved who need access to the tool?
- Is the target group in B2B, B2C or both?
- Do you already have a CRM system that you want to keep? Which tool do you use for your CRM?
- Do you already use a tool for your e-mail marketing or your social media marketing?
Additional questions:
- What are the extended possibilities besides the necessary functions?
E.g. How is the customer support?, Are there learning units & tutorials from the tool itself?, Is the company new to the market or has it been around for a while? - How does the integration work with already existing systems?
- What is the level of knowledge of the employees regarding marketing automation and the application of such tools? etc.
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Learn more about what marketing automation is in this blog article.
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