16 Irresistible Reasons to Use Marketing Automation to Grow Your Business (With Statistics and Examples)
Growing your business is not a stroll in the park. Sometimes, getting new, qualified leads and nurturing them to paying customers seems like climbing Mt. Everest.
To compound the problem, new technology makes it easier for new entrants to come into your industry and make the competition tougher. U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy revealed in their October 2020 report that more than 1 million businesses opened in 2017.
What happens when you work hard to serve and please your customers, but some still leave? What should you do?
It’s time to adopt marketing automation.
In this article, you will discover all the benefits of marketing automation and how using the right marketing tech can transform your business. But before we dive in, let’s see a brief definition of this marketing solution.
What Exactly is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of technology to perform marketing activities and multi-channel campaigns with limited human input.
Marketing automation makes it possible for businesses to reach out to prospects and customers using automated messages via email, SMS, on the web, or social media.
Each message is sent based on instructions provided by members of the marketing team using pre-defined or custom-designed templates.
What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
Now, let’s see some of the benefits that automation of marketing processes can bring to your business.
1. Capture Better Leads
Without lead generation, your business won’t grow. But it is possible to generate a massive number of leads who are not ready to become customers.
Marketing automation enables you to qualify your leads so your marketing team can focus on those who are more likely to become paying customers. A study by Annuitas Group revealed that using automation to nurture prospects led to a 451% rise in qualified leads.
2. Guide and Nurture Leads
With the aid of sophisticated user tracking methods, automation tools can reveal where your prospect is in the buying cycle. This provides insight for effective follow-up.
Following up on new leads can be tricky without knowing exactly what they want from you. For instance, a study by Gleanster Research showed that 50% of qualified leads are not prepared to buy immediately.
However, with the information obtained from automation software, nurturing is easier and faster. Computers take over the work of nurturing these prospects until they are ready to buy without putting any strain on your marketers.
Data from the Annuitas Group showed that nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than those who are not nurtured.
3. Create a Personalized Route Through Your Funnel
Customers love personalized content and adverts. Research by Epsilon Marketing shows that 80% of customers are more willing to purchase products from a company that gives them a personalized experience.
A survey by Salesforce also showed that 66% of customers want brands to know and understand their unique needs.
When Dixxon Flannel Co. switched from sending email newsletter blasts to a marketing automation tool, revenue increased by $65,000 in just 2 months. Open rates rose to 30% and the click-through rate increased to 12%.
Similarly, Dell, the computer manufacturer, created new ads using automation tools. These ads were created based on the user’s web browsing history, products viewed, and those left in shopping carts. This move led to a 70% rise in click-through rates and a 300% increase in conversions.
4. Boost Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) enables you to use “big data” to make smarter decisions. It helps you extract and use a large volume of information through reports and data visualization.
Without automation, for instance, how can an e-commerce store with 40,000 subscribers analyze all the data about their shopping preferences?
Marketing automation provides the capacity to collect, analyze and utilize data from thousands of user interactions on your website
.
If you own an online store, you can use automated BI to:
* predict the behavior of your customers,
* setup effective campaigns,
* personalize content to target groups, and
* measure their effectiveness on a low budget.
5. Get a Complete View of Each Prospect or Client
Marketing automation gathers information about customers from multiple channels. It gives us numbers and information to form a clear image of our customers. Also referred to as buyer persona, this image stimulates and inspires the mind while taking marketing decisions.
With a well-defined persona, marketing will not rely on assumptions. You can determine the correct stage that your prospects are using their preferences and actions on your site or email. Subsequently, your team can send personalized marketing messages and conversion rates will rise.
Consider what happened to Skytap, an information technology solutions provider. After creating and using a precise buyer persona, they obtained these results:
* 97% increase in lead generation
* 55% increase in organic search traffic
* 210% increase in total traffic
6. Raise Marketing ROI
The results from a survey by Salesforce proves this benefit. The company surveyed over 10,000 randomly selected customers, who adopted automated customer relationship management.
Within two years, the results indicate that on average, each customer had an increase of 25% in ROI.
7. Increase Conversions
Without conversions, marketing is a waste of time and effort. But how do you boost your conversion rate without burning out trying to send more emails in a day?
Try using an email marketing automation product. A well-designed automated mailing app allows you to:
* select products for different customer segments,
* setup mail responses for different stages in the customer journey,
* schedule dates for email delivery.
A good example of a company that increased conversions through automated email marketing is The Cake Store. After sending bulk emails without achieving desired results, the company switched to a solution that allowed them to schedule mails that reminded customers to book in advance for cakes.
The customers received a message three weeks before a special date (like a birthday or wedding anniversary).
As a result, the company multiplied its conversion rate by 32 and generated over $37,000 in sales.
8. Reduce Wage Bills
Automation has one downside but it is a disguised benefit for business owners. It can help one marketer create output that will require a 20-man team to produce.
As long as the campaign is well-designed and personalized, the emails can reach thousands of prospects and customers. Also, since follow-up can be automated, there’s no need to employ so many “direct sales persons” to handle each customer’s inquiries.
Many inquiries can also be handed over to AI-trained chatbots. These amazing tools can give quick responses and provide links to articles with relevant answers.
In the study on marketing automation by Nucleus Research, the results showed that marketing automation produced a 12.2% decrease in marketing overhead.
9. Respond Faster to Inquiries
Prospects are now more impatient than ever. If you delay your response to online sales inquiries, you will lose them to your competitors.
Automation allows you to respond instantly to commonly asked questions. It will also give your brand a good reputation in customer reviews.
You can use email, a chatbot, or an alert notification to respond to people browsing your online store.
A study of over 1 million sales leads by Harvard Business Review revealed that you are 7 times more likely to close a sale if you respond in one hour than if you do so in two hours.
10. Increase Sales Revenue
Automation is a valuable solution for increasing sales in both B2B and B2C marketing. In the B2C category, the sales cycle and funnel are usually shorter than in B2B. That’s why B2C products tend to bring in faster sales.
However, B2B products and services offer higher revenue and potential for longer customer retention. Unfortunately, the sales process can be long and many leads can be in the funnel at the same time.
To make things tougher, leads can come into your funnel in the middle or at the end. How do you follow up and guide each prospect till you close the sale?
You can resolve this by using automated CRM software. That’s what Opsview, a software development firm did.
The company created a campaign to market a management and tracking solution for distributed IT infrastructure. Their automation software scored and nurtured leads that brought in a 178% in sales revenue.
11. Optimize Time at Work
Without automation, your marketing will be inundated with menial tasks like publishing social media posts and sending emails to website visitors.
These tasks are important, but your team can make better use of their time by automating them. Autobots can handle a wide range of communication and personalization tasks seamlessly.
Your team can use automation software to increase productivity through
* Automated welcome programs for new subscribers
* Personalized emails to subscribers who click on products
* Automated abandoned cart mails
* Automated campaigns on multiple channels: web, mobile, social, and email.
* Receiving feedback and analytics on customer behavior
Deploying automation allows your team to work more on creative tasks and develop new ways to improve customer retention and lead acquisition.
12. Use Multi-channel Marketing to Target More Prospects
Using a single marketing channel like email may not suffice in today’s dynamic and competitive marketplace. Your marketing team needs to retarget relevant ads to subscribers on social media.
That’s what icelolly.com does. The subscribers to their travel service comparison website receive personalized ads on Facebook.
Based on their preferences for various holiday packages, they get “destination price alerts”. Combining Facebook ads with email alerts produced amazing results for icelolly.com. Open rates increased by 35%, and click-through rates went up by 201%. Conversion also rose by 45%.
13. Create Efficient Social Marketing Campaigns
Social media marketing is time-consuming. Sometimes, ads, posts, and memes may not convert as expected.
Does that mean you should abandon social channels for email and phone calls? No, a better solution is to automate the process.
Automation allows you to monitor and publish your posts from a single dashboard. For instance, Stoneacre, a popular motor dealership in the U.K. uses a robust social media platform to collate, post, and monitor showroom posts from branches all over the country.
Automating this tedious task created a £1 million increase in revenue with a 73.5% increase in social followers within a year.
14. Schedule Campaigns for Special Seasons
During the end-of-the-year promo season, your marketing department can become overstretched. You need to create and send out many personalized messages for Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, etc.
It’s now much easier to schedule these messages several weeks ahead to encourage more buyers to take advantage of seasonal discounts.
Using automation software keeps your marketing team organized and focused throughout the season. Also, if you notice that your close competitors are offering something different, you can easily modify your campaign with your automation tools.
15. Obtain Real-time Reports on Campaign Success
Automation reduces the guesswork. Virtually all the campaign automation tools now come with robust analytics.
Analytics dashboards give you real-time reports on the campaigns that are working and those that are not. You will quickly see the kinds of leads that converted and those that didn’t.
MediaCom, a market analyst consortium commissioned an automation project to improve the efficiency of their analysts. After implementation, the time required to create an integrated data set for clients dropped by 75%, when compared to the old manual process.
With the insights obtained from business intelligence reports, you can modify your campaigns to attract and convert leads with similar traits.
16. Reward Customer Loyalty
Loyalty brings in repeat sales. People may not do what you request, but they’ll do what you reward. Rewarding customers who buy from you can make them loyal to your brand.
If you use automation to reach out to customers, you can also use it to reward them for buying and spreading the word about your business.
A scalable loyalty solution will retain your customers.
MoxieLash, an e-commerce startup, built a custom loyalty software and obtained a 3x increase in repeat purchases within 12 months.
Final Thoughts
From all the benefits listed above, you can see that marketing automation promotes business growth. If you want to accelerate your business growth, and stay a step ahead of the competition, you have to use automation for your marketing activities.
Daniel O. Kolade is a freelance tech writer available for hire. For over nine years he has written thousands of content pieces for leading marketing agencies, software development companies, engineering firms, and affiliate marketers. You can reach him via email at oodaniel75@gmail.com
