Marketing Automation is all about using software to automate many of the online marketing activities to give a well defined customer experience for the prospective customers and exiting customers. There are many marketing activities that are repetitive in nature like email marketing, social media posting, social media campaigns etc that can be automated using the marketing automation software.
Most of the marketing automation software facilitate creating and managing marketing activities based on the customer journey and help create the content according to the stage of buying.
In a nutshell Marketing Automation helps organisations send automated messages across email, web, social and text. The messages are sent based on pre defined set of instructions that are called processes / workflows that are defined by templates.
Automation of these activities helps in lead nurturing, lead scoring and lead generation and improve the quality of the leads that are handed over to Sales Teams.
Marketing Automation Common Features and Functions
1. Email Marketing
2. Landing Pages and Forms
3. Campaign Management
4. Lead Scoring
5. Website Tracking
6. Targeting and Segmation
7. Account Based Marketing
8. Dynamic Content Serving
9. Social Media
How does Marketing Automation works ?
There are three major elements that are involved in Marketing Automation for adding value.
A. Automated and Intelligent Multi Channel Communications
Most of the Marketing Automation applications have campaign management where you can send templated emails based on segmentation of the target list. An email campaign that is designed sends different email templates to different segments. And as and when a new target is added to one of these segments, the email is sent to the email id.
Now a prospect can move from one segment to another segment based on the monitored response.
Typically the automated campaign builder is a visually
B. Leveraging Cookies for website tracking
Most of the marketing automation software comes with website visit tracking with cookies. When a target audience clicked on the URL that was sent in the email and access multiple pages, marketing automation software capture this information. These visitor activities in turn can be a decision factor for sending another automated email with the intelligent campaign tool. At the same time the visitor reactions can be capture and measured by lead scoring mechanism.
C. Landing Pages and Forms
Marketing Automation software comes with an easy to use landing page builder that can also helps in adding forms to it. Most of the assets like white papers, case studies, product data sheets and infographics can be release based on some information provided by the visitor. Once a visitor fills any of the forms, he can be identified precisely and again person specific content can be sent from then onwards.
Mautic is one of the leading open Marketing Automation platform and more information is available here
Bhea is a company involved in Customer Relationship Management which includes Marketing Automation. Contact Us for having a demo of Mautic.