5 Things You Should Know About the Future of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a term that may seem to be everywhere at the moment, but it’s much more than just the latest online buzzword. If you’re not already using some kind of automated marketing software, you and your business could be missing out on a lot – it’s the kind of thing that can really make or break an SMB. Marketing automation is not going to take away from human marketing experts entirely (just like machines are not going to overtake the human race no matter how sophisticated machine learning gets), but it is without a doubt one of the most important tools a modern marketing manager has at their fingertips.
You have probably already heard a reasonable amount about the value of personalizing customer emails, using analytics to ensure you get the best possible return on your email marketing automation investment, and generally focusing more on your customers as individuals, rather than simply names on your database.
But do you truly understand just how much potential the future of marketing automation has?
Before going into detail on what is to come, let’s take a moment to recap the current benefits of marketing automation:
1. Integration with the entire customer journey, including the ability to tailor each customer’s experience. Finding what works for your customers as individuals is key.
2. Email marketing automation enables you to gather product feedback, use personalized and customized content to both generate and follow-up on leads, keep your customer base up to date with your latest products and developments, and much more.
3. Marketers are people too, and one of the main benefits of marketing automation is the ability to make your job easier and more efficient. A good marketing automation software is user-friendly, easy to get started with initially and, of course, can offer an excellent return on investment. Adding the human touch to your marketing is all well and good, but small-medium businesses are often constrained by financial budgets too.
Here’s What You Need to Know About the Future of Marketing Automation:
In brief, marketing automation offers a variety of ways in which your businesses can boost customer engagement, and any good marketing manager knows exactly how priceless that is.
Marketing Automation is Here to Stay
When you live in a time with so much technological innovation, it can be easy to become a little jaded. After all, when there is always another “next big thing”, it starts to become irrelevant.
However, the truth is that marketing automation is not just a pretty impressive way to describe what you’re already doing – after all, we’ve all seen so-called innovations that are really just re-inventing the wheel – it’s a more efficient, cost-effective, and rewarding of maximizing return on investment.
Now that our inboxes are constantly clogged with special offers, discounts, newsletters, and who knows what else, the future of marketing automation involves doing it very well, and standing out in an ever-growing crowd.
It’s up to you if you want to join the ranks of the likes of the business named in this MarketingSherpa article, who increased leads by over 600% through using landing page optimization, for example, or if you want to take a chance on being noticed in a packed inbox.
Critically, good marketing automation software will also help you ensure that you stay on the right side of ever-evolving data protection and privacy regulations.
The Evolution of Communication is Happening Fast
If you’re over 30 or so, you are sure to remember when communicating with your friends and family was very different. Most houses had a landline (remember when this would cut off your dial-up internet connection?!), but otherwise we had to make plans and stick to them.
Since Facebook became popular just over a decade ago, our communication habits have changed immensely, and this applies to both personal and business relationships. Just as you watch out for the blue ticks on WhatsApp and those three dots that show a reply is incoming, your small-medium business customers are no longer willing to wait for a letter to arrive when they have a query. As the saying goes, if you’re not fast, you’re last.
Real-time information is becoming more important the more we all get used to instant communication being the norm, and the good news for you as a marketer is that the future of marketing automation involves this becoming easier to use than ever before.
Open Rates Are Dead: Long Live Customer Lifetime Value
Open rates and conversion rates were the Holy Grail of email marketing and content marketing for quite some time, but it has finally been recognized that these are not the epitome of success.
A customer opening an email, for example, and making one purchase is excellent news. For that one day. A customer feeling truly engaged with and valued by your business is far more valuable in the long term. Let’s add switching focus to the customer lifetime value (LTV) to the list of things made easier by the future of marketing automation.
With Statista figures showing that e-commerce in the US is forecast to reach 735 billion over the next four years, switching your focus to the long game could really pay off.
One Channel Is No Longer Enough
Email marketing automation used to be the cutting edge of online marketing, and it remains a core part of any marketer’s toolkit. However, technology is evolving quickly and, as we mentioned earlier, so too are your customers’ expectations. The days of relying on email marketing as a standalone, or perhaps coupled with an excellent landing page, are gone – being a big hitter in your field in 2019 and beyond will require omni-channel marketing.
To add further strength to our claim that the future of marketing automation means it’s all easier than ever, it now includes the option to automate this omni-channel approach. Want to send an SMS to prompt those customers who did not respond to your email? How about reaching out via social media? It’s not a problem to the user-friendly and efficient integrative marketing automation of the present and is set to become even more intuitive and rewarding in the near future.
Data is King
This is no secret. Data analytics are at the core of any successful marketing campaign and, if you don’t make the most of the wealth of information at your fingertips, you will be left behind. You probably know that using data on when your customers are most likely to open an email or buy your products or services is something you should be doing, but who has time to manually trawl through it all?
Marketing automation software was created to make it easier to track clicks, follow-up customers who added items to their cart and then left your site, identify key demographics, and all the things that an old-school marketer had to dedicate hours to. Boosted results with minimal effort is what all businesses want, and the future of marketing automation is set to make it incredibly easy to do this.
The nature of your business and your objectives will determine which features are most suitable for you, but with a plethora of powerful and valuable tools at your disposal, the future of marketing automation looks incredibly bright for us all.
How will your business benefit from the treasure trove that is the future of marketing automation, and its:
· Greater range of optimization tools
· Integration with various other software and platforms
· Responsiveness to the behavior of your existing and prospective customers
· Wealth of data, ripe for the picking and ready to be used to your advantage
Only you can decide what is best for your business, but we can guarantee that the future of ActiveTrail marketing automation will make it easier than ever to achieve.
Read related articles:
10 Winning Email Marketing Ideas for Hotels
