What is marketing automation?

51% of companies currently use marketing automation, while 58% of B2B companies plan to adopt it.

Marketing automation software allows you to successfully execute your marketing strategies while you focus on more complex tasks. As an example, you can use marketing automation technology to trigger a pre-written abandoned cart email after a visitor exits your site with a full cart.

When you use marketing automation software in this way, you can tap into behavioural data to make sure that your leads and customers get the messages they need based on their current stage in the marketing funnel. In the case of a cart abandonment email, you don’t need to be there to jump in to send an email just as they exit your site.

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

There are several benefits to automating your everyday marketing processes, including:

• Save time: you no longer have to spend hours of your day manually sending emails, updating social, and racing to meet your response-time targets by instantly replying to customers on live chat. By automating the more dull and repetitive marketing tasks, you can focus on higher-level strategy – something that most marketers find a lot more rewarding.

• Meet lead and customer needs 24/7: there are only so many hours in the working day, that you can’t always be there to immediately respond to customers or nurture leads and customers as and when you need to. You can use marketing automation software to craft trigger-based messages to ensure you engage leads at the right time. For example, you can trigger an exit-intent popup that offers a personalised discount to visitors about to leave your site without buying.

• Get deeper insights into your prospects and customers: from bounce rates to open rates, marketing automation software allows you to closely track people across the entire customer journey. This gives you a detailed picture of who they are, their level of intent and stage of awareness, their site and purchase activity, and the kinds of content, channels, and campaigns they respond best to. You can use this knowledge to create more targeted and personalised marketing messages and initiatives in the future.

• Generate a higher return on investment: with data-driven insights into your customers, there’s a lot less guesswork involved in creating effective marketing campaigns that boost your revenue and ROI.

How to get started with marketing automation

Marketing automation allows you to save time ordinarily spent on repetitive marketing tasks, gain deeper insights into your customers to create more effective marketing campaigns and command a greater ROI in your marketing initiatives.

Start seeing similar results with CM.com’s Mobile Marketing Cloud for Marketing Automation. Currently, 56% of all web traffic comes from mobile phones. With the marketing automation abilities of Mobile Marketing Cloud, you can unlock and centralise data on leads and customers and create personalised, omnichannel marketing campaigns that target your customers across their favourite mobile channels.